Starting an agency from scratch is no easy feat, but month-old agency VOCAL believes it has another challenge to contend with. It’s on a mission to making sure the new business actually exists in the eyes of AI.
The newly launched agency, founded by former Weber Shandwick leaders, held its first event in Sydney’s CBD on Thursday morning, addressing the growing importance of building a digital footprint that can be discovered, understood and cited by large language models (LLMs).
The event comes just weeks after the agency launched following Omnicom’s decision to end IPG’s affiliate arrangements with Weber Shandwick and Jack Morton Australia.
B&T reported last month that the arrangement, established in 2021, had come to an end, with Weber Shandwick Australia CEO Helen Graney subsequently announcing the launch of VOCAL. Jack Morton was acquired by private equity earlier this year.
Now, VOCAL is positioning itself as an “earned-first agency built for the AI era” – and its founders are finding out first-hand just how difficult it can be for a brand to be discovered when it has effectively had to start again.
Speaking at a recent breakfast event, co-founder Ange Malkin told attendees that the team had tested how easily the new business could be found across some of the biggest AI platforms.
“We asked ChatGPT, Gemini, all the big guys to recommend a PR company in Sydney and we were absolutely nowhere to be seen,” she said.
Malkin acknowledged that while VOCAL is “only four weeks old”, appearing in AI-driven discovery “matters enormously for a new business making its mark on the industry”.
“In the pre-AI era, a potential client that would be looking for our services might ask Google, or it might look to the marketing press to see some great work that’s been done in industry, or maybe they’d ask a friend or a peer, and that’s where all of our relationships and the work that we’ve been doing for many years would come into play,” she said. “But there is a new gatekeeper to information, and that is AI, and it’s something that we’re all acutely aware of.”
For Malkin, the agency’s fresh start also highlights one of the less obvious consequences of leaving a large holding company ecosystem behind.
“Being part of a holding company does bring a lot of the benefits of a long reputation, a really significant digital footprint, a lot of people dotted around the globe who speak and can speak on behalf of our work and the business, and so that obviously is a huge factor when it comes to AI visibility,” she said. “Being that we’re VOCAL at four weeks old, we’re starting again, and we really recognize that you can’t buy your way into AI.”
Rather than viewing the break from the holding company structure solely as a challenge, Malkin said the timing presented an opportunity to rethink the traditional agency model.
“We also feel very grateful that when a seismic shift happens at a holding company level, that also coincides with what we think is a seismic shift in the communications landscape,” she said.
“That we have this really unique opportunity to maybe not just stick a new brand on the door, but look at the traditional agency model.”
Malkin said the agency now had an opportunity to “break the traditional agency model and start again”.
“[We get to] build something that’s better suited to what our clients need in the AI landscape,” she said. “So we’re really thrilled.”
“That’s where VOCAL has come from. Really, we call ourselves an earn-first agency that’s built for the AI era, and we’re laser-focused on not just creating brands that people trust and that journalists quote, but also that AI is referencing and citing. So that’s our ambition.”
‘The goal is to be cited, not just seen’
Joining Malkin on stage was VOCAL head of strategy Addie Freyne, who outlined how the agency believes brands can build the kind of authority that increasingly matters in an AI-driven discovery environment.
“The goal is to be cited, not just seen,” Freyne said. “To be cited doesn’t just mean in LLMs or AI. Earned authority, or brands that earn authority will be the ones that are more likely to be found, trusted, and ultimately recommended.”
“They’ll be the ones that lead their categories because they want to be the ones that everyone references, and both humans and AI reference as their go-to sources.”
Freyne argued that authority cannot simply be manufactured by a brand itself.
“When it comes to authority, that has to be granted by others. Others have to believe you. Others have to believe what you’re saying and trust what you’ve got, what you’re putting out there,” she said.
She identified four drivers of earned authority: visibility, relevance, trust and advocacy.
“First is visibility: can you actually be discovered? Can you be found? Can people see you?” she said. “The second is relevance: Are you turning up in the conversations that matter to your customers, to your audiences, and to the industries that you’re trying to influence?”
The third is trust, she said, including whether there is evidence to support what a brand says, while advocacy considers whether other people are talking about and recommending the brand.
For VOCAL, that final element – third-party credibility – is particularly important.
Freyne pointed to research showing the impact of third-party mentions compared with brand-owned or paid activity.
“When they took out branded content and they took out the content that was promoted by their influencers and their—you know—they had paid to participate, they actually had 145 per cent more third-party mentions than … the next best organization in their industry,” she said.
“That is what was influencing people’s decisions, is influencing AIs. That third-party credibility was so much more important than just pure play, share a voice.”
The agency’s approach therefore involves looking beyond traditional measures of brand visibility and examining the questions audiences are actually asking.
“We look at the relevance. What are the topics that your audiences are interesting? Who’s turning up in the right queries? … What are your audiences actually asking in search, not just what they’re engaging with on social,” Freyne said.
How KOALA is playing the AI visibility game
Freyne pointed to Australian furniture brand KOALA as an example of a business putting some of those principles into practice.
The direct-to-consumer brand, best known for its mattress-in-a-box offering and modular furniture, has created a dedicated LLM-readable pricing page on its website, according to Freyne.
“They’ve got on their website, a dedicated LLM readable pricing page, so that they make sure that they are showing up sharp in the results, and there’s no misinformation,” she said.
The approach also extends to the language the brand uses.
“They’re using the language of the people,” Freyne said, such as “shit hot” in campaigns.
She said KOALA was also making its proof points easier to find and source, while working with advocates that could provide third-party credibility.
“Their campaigns and their social are going further than ever … their campaigns are outperforming the budgets. They are turning up better. They are doing better because they are building this earned authority by doing all of these things,” she said.
Importantly, Freyne said the approach was not about attempting to optimise every possible touchpoint for AI.
“It doesn’t mean they’re doing absolutely everything, but they’re picking what is going to drive forward, and they’re delivering that.”
And for VOCAL, that thinking is now being applied to its own business – with the agency attempting to solve the very problem it is increasingly advising brands to consider.
Four weeks into its existence, VOCAL may have found itself “absolutely nowhere to be seen” when its founders first asked AI platforms to recommend a Sydney PR agency. But now it’s number one goal is to change that.
