Halfway through the Brand Potential Academy, and I think week three might already be my favourite one yet. No spoilers, but eight pages of notes don't lie. This time it was all about PR and social media, guided by two speakers who made the evening feel less like a workshop and more like being let in on industry secrets usual viewers aren't supposed to know.
The first part of the evening belonged to Victoire Klaassen, PR Account Director, who brought something unexpected to the table right from the start: a background in hospitality. At first, I raised an eyebrow, but then she connected the dots: PR is indeed a lot about hospitality, building relationships, and making people feel seen and valued.
Next, PR versus Marketing. A distinction I had technically learned before: read about it, nodded along in lectures, and confidently used both terms in essays. But that clear, sharp line between the two? I knew they were different. I just couldn't tell you exactly how. This session fixed that for me, finally.
Also, one of her most refreshing points was this: public relations is not the same as media relations. So many people tend to reduce PR to press releases and magazine features, but it stretches so much further than that, covering crisis communication, lifestyle campaigns, brand building, and everything in between. And speaking of breadth, she also reminded us that audiences are rarely as homogeneous as brands like to believe. If you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one. Focused, smaller-scale target audiences are where the real impact happens. Paired with that was a quote I immediately wrote down: "What gets messaged gets measured" PR might feel less quantifiable than other disciplines, but measurement is not only possible, it is necessary. Brand Potential even has their own predictive models for social listening, tracking what people say about brands across the internet, alongside an algorithm that calculates how much their PR efforts save clients in equivalent advertising costs. Spoiler: it's usually a lot more than what the client spent.
We also dove into PR activations, events, influencer trips, research drops, merch, which is genuinely one of my favourite corners of the industry. Hearing real examples from someone who clearly lives and breathes this stuff was very inspiring!
Then came dinner, and honestly it deserves its own paragraph. There is something uniquely valuable about sitting across from someone who is living your dream job, eating noodles, and just... talking. We went from discussing famous PR strategies to debating the new Bridgerton season (yey!) and the best area to live in Amsterdam in about five minutes flat. But somewhere between those I got to ask some questions that mattered to me a lot: how did you get here, and what steps genuinely made the difference? Such conversations are worth more than any textbook chapter, and I think that kind of informal access is one of the biggest hidden gifts of this Academy!
The second half of the evening shifted to social media with Naji Bazzi, Strategy Director and Head of Performance Marketing. We mapped out the landscape of platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, X, etc, each with its own culture, audience, and unspoken rules. But then came the part that made my heart sink a little: when agencies talk about social media strategy and budgets, they are mostly talking about paid advertising. I wanted to argue for organic content and creative videos, but Naji made a fair point: paid is predictable. You can track it, optimize it, and understand exactly what went wrong. There is comfort and certainty in numbers.
We also touched on (effective and cheap) AI-generated UGC and virtual influencers: I assumed brands were still hesitant and sceptical about it, but apparently far more are using it than we presume. In fact, the examples shown were startlingly realistic.
And then there is TikTok, which somehow remains the most misunderstood platform in the room. The wrong assumption by many companies that it is purely chaotic Gen Z content is, frankly, a massive missed opportunity, and creative agencies are apparently still fighting that battle in 2026, actively convincing clients to open an account and explaining why it matters. Wild, right?
By the end of the session, I had eight pages of notes. That's not an exaggeration: I checked. Every week I leave with new ideas, new questions, and new motivation to keep learning. This is exactly why I applied to the Brand Potential Academy: to get firsthand insight from people working with brands like Coca-Cola, Estée Lauder, Volvo, and The Ordinary, not something filtered through a case study, but knowledge lived and shared directly.
On a more personal note, these sessions are slowly helping me figure out not just what I want to do, but the specific kind of role I want to be in after graduation. I think PR activations and brand strategy are calling my name louder than anything else right now, and being able to hear from people already doing exactly that makes it feel less like a dream and more like a direction.
Three weeks to go and the pitch is getting closer! Somehow I feel both more prepared and more aware of how much I still have to learn, which I think is exactly where you want to be!
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Written by Liza Mukhina.
