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Generative AI is everywhere now. You see it in content, campaigns, customer experiences, and even internal workflows. It promises speed, scale, and efficiency, but there’s a harder question sitting underneath all that progress; Do your audiences actually trust it?

Trust in the Age of AI: What Consumers Really Think About AI Generated Content

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

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Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics? [Beginner’s Guide 2023]
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

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We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.

Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.

Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

Something fundamental has shifted in how people find information and decide who to trust. When someone turns to an AI tool with a question these days, they don't get a page of links to sift through, they get an answer. And that answer is built from sources the model has already decided are credible, consistent, and worth listening to. If your brand isn't part of that picture, you've lost influence before the conversation even begins.

PR now has a direct hand in shaping what LLMs consider credible expertise. Media coverage, expert commentary, well-structured articles, repeated narratives across channels, all of this feeds the information environment that AI models draw from. When you start treating PR as a long-term investment in authority rather than a quick play for press coverage, you set your brand up to actually be found in an AI-driven world.

This isn't just a new tactic to bolt onto your existing strategy. It's a structural change in how thought leadership works, and it demands a thoughtful, deliberate response.

Understanding thought leadership in the age of AI

How LLMs are reshaping thought leadership

The symbiotic relationship between LLMs and PR

How to leverage PR for effective LLM thought leadership

The future of thought leadership: Human-AI collaboration

How to leverage Meltwater to maintain LLM thought leadership

Being a "thought leader" means you shape how people in your industry understand a topic, so that when someone asks a question about your category, your perspective is already part of how they think about the answer. You're defining trends instead of reacting to them. 

For a long time, that kind of influence came through keynote stages, op-ed columns, white papers, and well-cultivated media relationships. Getting your CEO quoted in the right publications and speaking at the right events was how authority was built. Search engines helped amplify that reach, but human editors and journalists still controlled the gates.

Now, AI systems have joined those gatekeepers. When someone asks a chatbot about the latest in cybersecurity, fintech, climate tech, or healthcare innovation, the model pulls from a wide range of sources, looks for patterns, and favors voices that show up consistently. It recognises the entities it's been trained to trust.

Your authority needs to live inside that ecosystem.

The evolving landscape of information dissemination

Information used to move in a fairly straight line; a journalist wrote a story, an outlet published it, a reader found it, search engines organised all that content, and social media made it spread faster. Simple enough.

Today, it's more layered. AI models ingest enormous volumes of text, map connections between people, companies, concepts, and claims, and then surface synthesised answers rather than individual articles. The unit of influence isn't just a headline anymore, it's a pattern across content, built up over time.

To shape that pattern, you need consistency, depth, and clarity across every channel you operate in. A single well-placed quote won't build authority, but a sustained narrative across media, owned content, and industry commentary will.

You're no longer just competing for attention, you're competing to be included in what AI systems understand about your field.

LLMs can generate content at a pace that has fundamentally changed the supply side of thought leadership. Your competitors can put together polished articles, reports, and social posts in minutes, because the barrier to producing written content has essentially collapsed.

That doesn't mean quality doesn't matter anymore, if anything, it matters more, as AI tools flood the internet with surface-level takes and generic commentary. Models are learning to tell the difference between thin content and genuine expertise by picking up on depth, specificity, and the quality of sources cited.

Instead of vague think-pieces about "the future of AI," you need focused perspectives grounded in real data, concrete examples, and named expertise. Insights that show you've actually thought about a problem will stand out in a sea of generated noise.

Ideation changes too. You can absolutely use LLMs to explore angles, test headlines, and sketch out complex arguments, but the final piece needs your experience, your judgment, and your voice. That's what creates genuine originality, and originality is exactly what builds lasting authority signals.

LLMs can dramatically speed up research, summarising trends, surfacing related concepts, and highlighting recurring themes across an industry. You can get a read on market conversations faster than ever, spot gaps in media coverage, and see which narratives already have owners and which ones are up for grabs.

Speed is a real competitive advantage. When you combine AI-powered research with strong editorial judgment, you can get informed commentary out the door while your competitors are still trying to make sense of a new development.

At the same time, LLMs are changing how your audience does research too, instead of scanning ten articles, they ask one question and get a synthesised answer. If your insights show up repeatedly in the trusted sources that feed that answer, your perspective is far more likely to be part of what comes back.

Research doesn't end at publishing anymore, but extends into how your ideas travel through AI systems long after you hit send.

LLMs make it possible to tailor messaging to specific industries, job titles, and pain points at a scale that wasn't previously realistic. You can take one core insight and adapt it into multiple versions that actually speak to different audiences, without starting from scratch each time.

When used with discipline, this makes thought leadership sharper. You keep a consistent narrative at the centre while adjusting framing and examples to match whoever you're speaking to, a kind of relevance that builds trust quickly.

But it also raises expectations, since audiences are getting used to content that feels like it was written for them, generic messaging now feels noticeably lazy. If you want to lead, you need to demonstrate that you understand the context your reader is operating in and the specific problems they're trying to solve.

LLMs make personalisation easier, but they don't make positioning any less important.

PR teams are now working in an environment where consistent signals across multiple platforms genuinely matter. To show up in AI-driven search, you need bylined articles, interviews, data-driven reports, executive commentary, and owned content, all reinforcing the same themes. That's a lot to produce.

LLMs help by streamlining drafting and repurposing. A research report becomes an op-ed, which becomes a series of social posts, which becomes briefing notes for spokespeople. You maintain coherence across all of it while dramatically expanding your reach.

But scale without strategy just creates noise. PR needs to define a clear authority territory first, then align every piece of content with that focus. A GEO strategy for PR will help with this.

When your messaging clusters tightly around specific topics, AI systems can start to recognise and associate your brand with those themes. The more consistent you are, the stronger those signals become.

Because LLMs are fundamentally about pattern recognition, they're also useful tools for refining your messaging. You can analyse how your brand is described across media, compare your positioning against competitors, and test different framings to see which ones land closest to your goals.

That kind of analysis makes PR sharper. Instead of going on instinct alone, you're grounding messaging decisions in real data. You identify the language that actually reinforces your expertise, and you cut the vague phrases that just dilute it.

When your messaging stays consistent across interviews, articles, and reports, AI systems develop a clearer picture of who you are and what you stand for. That clarity makes it more likely your brand surfaces in synthesised responses about your category.

PR doesn't stop when a piece of coverage lands. It extends into amplification, across social platforms, newsletters, podcasts, and industry forums. Every appearance reinforces your narrative and creates another signal for AI systems to pick up on.

LLMs also help you understand how audiences actually respond. You can analyse sentiment, identify the questions that keep coming up, and spot shifts in how conversations are moving. That feedback loop lets you adjust your thought leadership strategy in something close to real time.

Engagement builds familiarity. Familiarity builds authority. When your perspective keeps showing up in credible contexts, you become part of the knowledge base that both humans and AI systems draw from.

Visibility is earned through repetition and substance.

Understand the new PR reality: LLMs are the new gatekeepers

Define a narrow, ownable expertise territory

Prioritize structured authority content (not just quotes)

Build authority signals across the ecosystem

Think beyond media, think knowledge graph

Journalists and editors still matter enormously, but LLMs now sit alongside them as a new kind of gatekeeper, one that's mostly invisible. When someone asks an AI tool for expert insight on a topic, the model makes a call about which voices to surface.

That means you need to treat AI systems as part of your distribution strategy. Build authority in the places models trust: reputable publications, structured long-form articles, widely cited research. Make sure your brand consistently appears in connection with specific themes, not just occasionally.

PR teams that ignore this shift don't get a warning, they just notice that their competitor keeps appearing in AI-generated answers and they don't. It's a quiet loss, which makes it easy to miss until real damage has been done.

Broad claims don't stick in AI systems. If your positioning is "leader in innovation" or "expert in digital transformation," you're blending into a crowded, undifferentiated field. You need a specific, defensible area of expertise, something narrow enough to own.

Every interview, article, and report reinforces the same position. Over time, your brand becomes strongly associated with that topic across the digital landscape, and those associations are exactly what LLMs pick up on.

A short quote in a media piece is useful, but it rarely provides enough depth to signal real expertise; AI systems need more to work with. That means long-form bylined articles, research reports, and detailed interviews, content that shows how you think, not just what you say. Models can extract themes, arguments, and patterns from this kind of material far more effectively than from isolated soundbites.

When you invest in substantial content, you create authority signals that hold up over time, giving both human readers and AI systems something meaningful to engage with.

In an AI-driven world, your insights need to be retrievable, they have to appear in formats that are accessible, crawlable, and clearly structured. Descriptive subheadings, consistent terminology, and plain language all help models understand and accurately index what you're saying.

Avoid vague metaphors or overly clever phrasing that obscures your actual point. When your content states clearly what you believe and why, it becomes much easier to surface in relevant contexts. This isn't about gaming algorithms, it's about expressing expertise in a way that both humans and machines can actually work with.

Authority doesn't live in a single channel, it emerges from showing up consistently across many. Media coverage, podcast appearances, conference speaking, research citations, owned content, all of it contributes to your digital footprint.

When these signals align around the same themes, they reinforce each other, so AI systems detect consistency and start to identify your brand as a reliable source on specific topics. Each placement supports the larger narrative rather than chasing an isolated win.

PR's job is to orchestrate that ecosystem deliberately. Consistency builds momentum, and momentum is hard for competitors to replicate quickly.

Data drives credibility. Original research, surveys, benchmarks, and proprietary insights give journalists and analysts something concrete to reference, and they give AI systems structured material to draw from. When others cite your findings, each reference strengthens your authority network and embeds your brand more deeply in conversations about your category.

Design research with clarity and accessibility front of mind. Present findings in straightforward language. Provide context. Spell out the implications. That approach maximises comprehension for both human readers and the models indexing your work.

One-off commentary fades. Recurring narratives endure. When you return to a central theme over time, adding to it, developing it, connecting it to new developments, you shape how that theme evolves in public discourse.

An editorial calendar built around a core narrative turns every news cycle into an opportunity to reinforce your perspective. AI systems detect patterns across time, and when your voice consistently appears in relation to a particular topic, you strengthen the association between your brand and that expertise.

AI models don't just process individual articles, they map structured relationships between entities. They connect brands to topics, executives to industries, and concepts to trends. This web of associations forms a knowledge graph that informs the answers models generate.

Your PR strategy should factor in how your brand appears in that graph. Are your executives clearly linked to specific areas of expertise? Does your company show up consistently alongside defined themes and topics?

You can influence those connections through consistent messaging, well-structured bios, and clear descriptions in both media coverage and owned content. When your digital footprint reflects a coherent identity, AI systems can map it accurately, and that accuracy is what gets you included in the answers that matter.

You can't manage what you don't measure. As AI-driven search becomes a bigger part of how people find information, you need to actually assess whether your brand is appearing in AI-generated answers about your category.

Meltwater's GenAI Lens gives PR teams powerful insight into how their brands perform in AI, and which sources LLMs use to gather information.

This takes some experimentation. Ask relevant questions in AI tools, analyse the responses, track changes over time, and compare your visibility against competitors. It won't give you a perfect dashboard overnight, but it will tell you things your traditional media monitoring can't.

When you start treating LLM visibility as a metric alongside media impressions and share of voice, you move PR from a reactive function to a proactive strategy. Visibility stops being something that happens to you and starts being something you deliberately build.

The ease of AI-generated content is a genuine double-edged sword. Yes, you can produce polished material faster than ever. But if you lean too heavily on AI drafts without injecting your own thinking, your thought leadership will start to feel indistinguishable from everyone else's.

Learn how the LLM revolution is reshaping thought leadership and what PR teams must do to build authority in AI-driven search.

The LLM Revolution: Redefining Thought Leadership with PR

The start of the Year of the Horse was a critical moment for luxury brands. 2026’s Lunar New Year (LNY) coincides with promising outlooks for the Chinese luxury market. In the sea of campaigns tied to the event, it takes community-minded strategies to grab audience attention.

To learn more, we used Explore+ to examine Lunar New Year-related mentions of 10 major luxury fashion houses — Dior, Tod’s, Prada, Bvlgari, Bottega Veneta, Miu Miu, Celine, Valentino, D&G, and Fendi — across social, online media, and broadcast sources in English and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional). 

From January 1 through March 3, Lunar New Year campaigns from these brands generated 3.4 million mentions and 24 million engagement actions. For context, the Winter Olympics generated 3.84 million mentions, placing LNY luxury campaigns on a comparable conversational scale to one of the world’s largest global sporting events.

The data shows that while celebrity star power drove campaign visibility for multiple brands, participatory social moments helped Prada stand out from the herd.

Celebrities and Milan Fashion Week Drove Visibility

Celebrity brand ambassadors anchored luxury LNY campaigns on Sina Weibo (96% of mentions) and Douyin (50% of engagement), drawing the eyes (and clicks) of devoted fans. Though global luxury brands have gotten more sophisticated in designing their LNY collections and campaigns, big names and familiar faces overshadowed creative details and concepts.

For example, Dior dominated conversation volume, generating 70% share of voice (SOV). About 29% of those mentions centered on its brand ambassador, Chinese actor Deng Wei.

Meanwhile, 38% of Valentino’s total engagement related to its LNY campaign came from a single Sina Weibo post from actor and singer Tan Jianci, also known as JC-T. The Valentino Beauty ambassador’s post promoting the limited-edition Lucky Blue makeup collection clearly resonated with his fanbase. It proved to be a more active point of audience engagement with the brand over other campaign elements like media features and in-person events. 

This Sina Weibo post from Tan Jianci generated over a third of Lunar New Year-related engagement for Valentino.  

Finally, Tod’s global brand ambassador Xiao Zhan drove 96% of both mentions and engagement for the Italian luxury brand. In particular, the actor and singer’s prominent seating at the Tod’s runway show for Milan Fashion Week created a surge of cross-market attention, effectively linking the brand’s Asia-focused Year of the Horse campaign to one of European fashion’s biggest stages.

Overall, Milan Fashion Week drove 86% of mentions and 60% of engagement for Tod’s, which wasn’t the only brand to seize the crossover opportunity in Milan Fashion Week’s LNY overlap. Many brands’ posts documenting their activations in Italy referenced LNY limited editions or incorporated the #马年 (Year of the Horse) hashtag. As a result, Milan became a key talking point in LNY luxury campaign conversations.

For Prada, Milan accounted for 67% of total LNY campaign mentions and 49.5% of related engagement. This was largely driven by Su Xinhao and Zuo Hang, members of the Chinese boy band T.O.P. 登陸少年組合, walking in the brand’s official runway show. 

One Hashtag Helped Prada Generate Outsized Engagement

While numerous brands used high-production creative assets to spark LNY conversation, a hashtag and custom Douyin filter helped Prada distinguish itself online. Despite only having 8% SOV, the brand captured 51% of the engagement. This was largely thanks to the #马年一起Prada啪哒 hashtag (roughly meaning “Prada! Together in the Year of the Horse") which generated over 90% of the brand’s likes, comments, shares, and reposts.

This Douyin post featuring Ma Long using Prada’s fire horse prism filter generated over 713,000 engagement actions from January 28 to March 3.

Highly engaged Douyin posts from figures like table tennis champion Ma Long and boy band TOP登陸少年組合 using a custom Prada Year of the Horse filter encouraged UGC. By creating a moment that fans could actively participate in, the brand realigned its campaign with the holiday’s foundations in community and togetherness. 

The combination of star power with audience involvement paid off big in terms of advertising value equivalent, or AVE, the estimated monetary value of earned media exposure). During LNY celebrations from February 17 to March 3, Prada generated $8.4 million in AVE despite only having 8% SOV. By comparison, Tod’s, which had 50% SOV, generated about half of Prada’s AVE at $4.3 million.

The takeaway here is that conversation volume is only one aspect of determining a campaign’s success. Brands need to consider engagement efficiency, i.e. how effectively a brand converts SOV into share of engagement, to truly understand whether or not campaign content is resonating with target audiences. 

For luxury brands planning future campaigns around cultural celebrations, three lessons stand out from LNY 2026:

Celebrity alignment can make or break a campaign. One highly resonant brand ambassador can outperform broad chatter.

Use calendar overlaps as multiplier effects. Coinciding cultural events don’t have to compete against each other. Use them as opportunities to target your audience’s overlapping interests, extending your campaigns’ reach and relevance in the process. 

Engagement efficiency beats SOV. Prada’s campaign proves that converting attention into interaction is what ultimately drives media value. Simple tools like hashtags and custom filters can go a long way in encouraging audience engagement.

In the Year of the Horse and beyond, luxury brands that can turn cultural moments into shared experiences will be the ones that stand out. Pairing the right faces with the right formats, all backed with data-driven insights, will be key to transforming seasonal impact into success in the long term. 

Frequently Asked Questions: Luxury Brand Performance During Lunar New Year 2026

What was the overall scale of luxury brand conversation during Lunar New Year 2026?

According to Meltwater, luxury brand campaigns for the Year of the Horse generated 3.4 million mentions and 24 million engagements between January 1 and March 3, 2026. To put this in perspective, this volume is comparable to the Winter Olympics, which generated 3.84 million mentions, illustrating the massive cultural and commercial scale of the holiday for the fashion industry.

Which social media platforms were most effective for luxury brands during Lunar New Year 2026?

Meltwater’s analysis reveals a clear split between visibility and interaction: Sina Weibo dominated conversation volume with 96% of mentions, while Douyin drove 50% of total engagement. This indicates that while Weibo is essential for broad reach, Douyin is the primary platform for active consumer participation.

How did celebrity ambassadors influence Lunar New Year 2026 campaign results?

Meltwater identifies celebrity talent as the primary amplification lever for these campaigns. For example, Xiao Zhan accounted for 96% of both mentions and engagement for Tod’s, while a single post from Tan Jianci drove 38% of Valentino’s total engagement. Similarly, Dior’s partnership with Deng Wei accounted for approximately 29% of its total mentions.

How did Milan Fashion Week impact Lunar New Year 2026 marketing?

Meltwater analysis highlights that Milan Fashion Week acted as a global visibility multiplier because it overlapped with the core holiday celebration window. For Tod’s, Milan-related activity drove 86% of its mentions and 60% of its engagement, while Prada leveraged the event to showcase next-generation idols like Su Xinhao and Zuo Hang, accounting for 67% of its LNY-related mentions.

What role did User-Generated Content (UGC) play in Prada’s Lunar New Year 2026 success?

Meltwater analysis credits Prada’s outsized engagement to its focus on community participation rather than just "hero" content. The #马年一起Prada啪哒 hashtag alone accounted for over 90% of the brand’s total engagement, while the “Red Horse Welcomes Spring” interactive filters encouraged users to transform from passive viewers into active content creators.

Which brand generated the highest media value during Lunar New Year 2026 celebrations?

Meltwater found that Prada generated the highest Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) at $8.4 million, nearly double the $4.3 million generated by Tod’s. The analysis suggests this was due to Prada's high engagement efficiency and its strategic investment in Gen Z-driven cultural capital.

How Luxury Brands Leveraged Celebrities and UGC for Lunar New Year 2026 Success

You already know the pressure; a brief lands in your inbox on Monday morning, the pitch is due by Thursday, the client expects category expertise, cultural awareness, competitive intelligence, a bold point of view, and measurable outcomes. You need to show you understand their market better than they do, even if you have never worked in that space before.

For PR agencies, new business pitches demand hyper-personalized proposals backed by real insight. It is no longer enough to say you will “drive awareness” or “increase share of voice.” Prospects want proof. They want data. They want to see that you understand their narrative landscape, their competitors’ positioning, and the real conversations shaping their industry.

At the same time, pitching is expensive. Industry estimates routinely put agency pitch costs in the tens of thousands of dollars once you factor in senior executive time, research, creative, and design. And win rates remain unpredictable. Lose a pitch, and you lose not only revenue but weeks of effort that could have been spent serving existing clients.

The agencies that win consistently offer more than impressive creativity, they are better informed. They show up with sharper insights, stronger narratives, and a level of strategic depth that builds confidence in the room.

The question is not whether you need better intelligence. The question is how you get it fast enough to matter.

Meltwater's State of PR 2026 report found that 90% of PR professionals say AI is already embedded into their comms workflows to some extent.

The problem: Why pitching is too slow for agencies today

A step-by-step pitch playbook agencies can copy

Pitch development often feels like controlled chaos, and even high-performing teams run into the same bottlenecks again and again.

You start with media landscape research, someone builds a Boolean search, another person pulls recent coverage. Screenshots get pasted into slides, links get lost in Slack threads, and by the time the deck is built, half the information is outdated.

Then comes competitor analysis. You try to map share of voice, key messages, and positioning themes. But pulling that together across news, social, and owned channels takes time. You toggle between tools. You export CSVs. You clean data manually.

Brand sentiment analysis is next. You need to understand how the prospect is perceived, whether sentiment is trending up or down, if there are recurring concerns, and how journalists are framing the brand. Without structured analytics, you rely on anecdotal scanning.

Trending narratives are harder still. Which conversations are gaining traction in the category. Which journalists are shaping the story. Which topics are about to peak. Identifying this manually requires hours of reading and interpretation.

Finally, you have to turn raw data into a compelling storyline. Numbers alone do not win pitches, insight does. You need to translate coverage volume into a narrative about opportunity, connecting sentiment to positioning gaps, and highlighting strategic whitespace in a way that feels obvious once you say it.

All of this happens under pressure. Files live in different places. Team members work asynchronously. Review cycles multiply. Slides get rewritten at the last minute.

The result is that agencies spend too much time gathering information and not enough time thinking about what it means. The deck becomes descriptive instead of strategic. Insights feel surface-level. Differentiation suffers.

When pitching is slow, thinking becomes reactive, and that rarely wins competitive business.

Mira is Meltwater’s AI-powered teammate built for PR, communications, and marketing professionals. It is designed to collapse multi-step research and reporting workflows into a single, conversational experience powered by Meltwater’s global media and social dataset.

For agencies, Mira transforms pitch preparation from manual data gathering into instant, structured intelligence. 

Instead of building complex searches and exporting dashboards, you ask a question and receive contextual insights grounded in real-time media signals.

When a new brief arrives, the first question is simple: What is really happening around this brand right now?

With Mira, you can analyze a prospect’s recent media coverage in seconds. Instead of building Boolean searches and filtering results manually, you prompt Mira to summarize brand coverage over the past six months. You see key themes, sentiment shifts, spokesperson visibility, and message penetration in a structured format.

Mira surfaces reputation strengths and vulnerabilities immediately. Maybe the brand is praised for innovation but criticized for transparency. Maybe product launches get strong trade coverage but limited mainstream pickup. Maybe executive thought leadership is underrepresented.

It also identifies narrative gaps. What topics dominate competitor coverage but barely mention your prospect. Where is the brand absent from key industry conversations.

The pitch impact is clear. You walk into the room with insights the client does not have. You show them their media narrative, not as a collection of clippings, but as a strategic pattern. That changes the dynamic. You are no longer a vendor. You are an advisor.

The Meltwater Blog

The LLM Revolution: Redefining Thought Leadership with PR

How Luxury Brands Leveraged Celebrities and UGC for Lunar New Year 2026 Success

How Agencies Pitch Faster - Mira Productivity Use Case

Top Upfluence Alternatives for Influencer Marketing in 2026

5 Types of Instagram Influencers You’ve Definitely Seen Before

Prove AI Impact with LLM Monitoring: A Guide for Marketing Teams

Top CreatorIQ Alternatives for Influencer Marketing Teams

The Definitive 2026 Guide to GRIN Alternatives for Marketers

How Ice Hockey Won Big at the 2026 Winter Games

How To Connect Social Listening with Generative Engine Optimization

Top Traackr Alternatives for Influencer Marketing 2026

How to Pay Influencers: Tips for Navigating the World of Influencer Marketing