Narrative Intelligence for Media & Public Opinion: How Brands Decode Competing Storylines

How comparing media narratives with public narratives gives brands a competitive advantage

In today’s saturated media environment, every issue moves through multiple storytelling layers: the headlines, the public reaction, and the cultural undercurrents that shape both. Understanding the gap between what the media says and what the public believes is becoming one of the most valuable capabilities in strategic communications.

This was the focus of Pulsar’s recent webinar "Narrative Intelligence: Media vs Public Narratives", hosted by Pulsar co-founder Francesco D’Orazio with guest Michael Brito, Global Head of Data & Intelligence at Zeno Group. The discussion unpacked how narrative intelligence moves beyond traditional social listening, offering a deeper, more strategic view of public opinion.

Today, it’s not enough to track volume. Brands need to understand the storylines shaping that volume — and whether those stories differ across media and the public. Because when they diverge, it tells you something important about culture, risk, and opportunity.

From mentions to meaning: why narrative intelligence matters

For years, social listening has focused on metrics like:

• number of mentions
• sentiment scores
• share of voice
• trending topics

Useful — but limited. As Brito noted, these outputs often remain "very tactical," describing activity but not meaning. Narrative intelligence shifts the lens. Instead of analysing what people say in isolation, it identifies:

• the narratives guiding those conversations
• how those narratives form, connect and evolve
• which audiences are driving which storylines
• what beliefs sit beneath each cluster

This is the difference between counting noise and understanding signal. Brito summed it up: "Narrative intelligence takes the work we’re already doing and makes it more strategic — so we can walk into a boardroom and explain not just that something happened, but the story forming behind it."

Media vs Public Narratives: what the gap reveals

A central theme was the importance of placing media narratives and public narratives side by side.
Because they rarely map neatly.

Why the divergence matters

• Media narratives often reflect editorial priorities, geopolitical framing, legacy news cycles, or institutional agendas.
• Public narratives reflect lived experience, cultural identity, platform-specific language, and peer-to-peer influence.

As Francesco puts it: "the media has an agenda, the public has a different agenda — and the narratives don’t always correlate." Sometimes the media drives a story the public ignores. Sometimes the opposite happens. And sometimes they contradict each other entirely. 

Examples of narrative gaps

Michael shared that using Pulsar Narratives AI frequently reveals:

• Media-only narratives (e.g., financial framing, political analysis)
• Public-only narratives (e.g., memes, lived experience, subculture concerns)

These gaps can signal:

• Reputational risk
  (e.g., an emerging public backlash the press hasn’t picked up yet)
• Opportunity
  (e.g., a public narrative gaining momentum that your brand could authentically lead)
• Misalignment
  (e.g., comms teams responding to media discourse that audiences don’t see as relevant)

When media and public narratives diverge, insight teams gain a clearer diagnostic view of where attention actually sits — and which storylines matter most.

Mapping narrative clusters: how beliefs interconnect

Narratives tend to cluster, rather than appear in isolation. Francesco illustrated this with an example: an emerging public narrative about the UK in decline, which connects to related stories about rising crime, stagnant wages, house prices and Britain’s global relevance. Narrative intelligence reveals how these threads reinforce each other - forming a network of beliefs.

Why clusters matter for strategic comms

They allow teams to:

• identify root beliefs shaping conversation
• find the entry point where a brand can add value
• anticipate how one narrative may accelerate another
• track the trajectory of narratives over time

Francesco tells us that "it gives us a graph of the belief system behind a narrative — and helps organisations decide where to intervene." Narrative momentum becomes an early indicator of which stories require attention now, and which can be monitored passively.

AI makes qualitative insight possible at scale

The shift from traditional social listening to narrative intelligence is largely powered by AI. Modern NLP and clustering models can process qualitative data at a scale that human analysts never could.

Narratives AI ingests billions of posts and articles, clusters them into coherent narratives, tracks their evolution and compares their behaviour across media and public spheres.

This removes the friction that used to keep analysis shallow - the industry had become too comfortable with basic outputs such as wordclouds. AI raises expectations, making deeper, more strategic insight accessible in seconds, not weeks.

How organisations apply narrative intelligence today

The webinar surfaced several use cases:

This expands the strategist's remit: from reporting metrics to advising on cultural direction.

Key takeaways: narrative intelligence is the next evolution of social listening

The key takeaway from the session is clear: narrative intelligence is the next evolution of social listening. It doesn’t replace listening; it expands it, offering the strategic depth that traditional metrics alone can’t provide. Where social listening monitors activity, narrative intelligence explains why that activity matters. Where listening tracks sentiment, narrative intelligence interprets the storylines shaping those sentiments. And where listening offers a snapshot of the present, narrative intelligence helps forecast what comes next. Brands that understand the stories underpinning their category gain the ability to anticipate shifts rather than react to them, crafting communication strategies that resonate across both media and public opinion.

Looking ahead to 2026, narrative intelligence will shift from an emerging discipline to an organisational necessity, driven by the rise of narrative alignment as a strategic KPI. Brands will begin measuring how closely they align with public narratives, where they diverge from media narratives, and where their messaging either builds or erodes narrative equity. This form of alignment will sit alongside sentiment as a core indicator of brand health. At the same time, media and public narrative forecasting will start to replace traditional trend reporting, with teams using trajectory modelling to anticipate which storylines are likely to break into the mainstream, understand where public opinion is heading, and prepare messaging ahead of narrative shifts. This will reshape how organisations plan communications, campaigns and long-term reputation strategy. Crisis preparedness will also become increasingly narrative-led, with organisations tracking emerging story clusters, acceleration rates and the speed at which fringe beliefs travel into mass awareness. As these practices become standard, narrative early-warning systems will form a central part of how comms and PR teams operate in 2026 and beyond.

Interested in learning more?

Watch our webinar Narrative Intelligence: Media vs Public Narratives with Michael Brito below.

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