Deepfakes, Disinformation and Decisions: Crisis Communication Live

Join us from 16:00 on 29 April at The Work Café Leeds for an immersive workshop that equips in-house comms/digital marketing professionals with the frameworks, protocols, and actionable strategies to respond effectively when deepfakes or AI-generated content target their organisation or leadership team.

Deepfakes aren’t new, but their prevalence in mainstream society is. Moving from theoretical threat to operational reality, the world we’re living in has meant that deepfakes are taking on a new dimension.

For comms and digital marketing practitioners, these times call for new levels of awareness, critical thinking and most importantly, practical actions.

Whether you’re wondering how you’d respond to fake videos of CEOs, fabricated audio of executives making inflammatory statements, or manipulated images spreading across social channels that can destabilise an organisation in hours, this session can help.

For communication and digital marketing teams, the challenge is twofold: protecting employees from external disinformation, and ensuring owned channels remain trusted sources of truth when external narratives are compromised.

• How deepfakes are created and distributed (and why they're getting harder to detect)
• Recent case studies: organisations targeted by deepfake campaigns and the internal fallout
• The difference between external reputation damage and internal trust erosion — and why comms must address both

• The critical first 2 hours: what to communicate, to who, and through which channels
• Crafting the initial holding statement to employees when a deepfake emerges
• When to acknowledge vs. when to stay silent (and how legal, PR, and IR must coordinate.)

Jo started her career as a financial journalist reporting for FT Business and the Yorkshire Post before moving to in-house PR at HBOS where she acted as an early warning system for the board on emerging reputational risks. After a stint in Government and as head of communications for HML she founded a PR agency that was retained to provide crisis communication support by the largest provider of NHS dentistry in the UK. As well as specialising in reputation management Jo has created and delivered crisis management exercises global blue-chip clients. Those exercises highlighted a need for specialist cyber crisis capability, which led to her completing the Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate in 2024.

With 20 years of PR and reputation management experience, Emma has provided live incident support, strategic counsel for C-suite leaders of £multi-million companies and led teams that have delivered proactive multi-channel communications campaigns. Her roles have spanned social media and influencer as well as traditional media relations, internal communications, and public affairs. Working across industries as diverse as healthcare, tech, beauty, logistics, education, ecommerce and shipping, Emma has managed issues and crises affecting operations, technology and, most importantly, people. As well as building and leading teams in communications agencies and specialist consultancies, Emma spent several years in-house leading on reputation management for one of the UK’s largest delivery companies at a time of significant growth and public scrutiny.

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