You know your business. You know the numbers, the strategy and the market. You have presented to boards, spoken at conferences, managed difficult meetings and probably spent more hours on video calls than you care to remember. So if somebody suggests media training, it is reasonable to wonder whether you actually need it. After all, you can speak. You know your subject. How difficult can an interview really be?
Then comes the question you were not expecting.
Perhaps you are there to discuss an acquisition and the journalist asks about your organisation’s exposure to sanctions. You are launching a new investment in the Gulf and the conversation turns towards Iran, Gaza or regional security. You are announcing growth in Europe and suddenly find yourself answering questions about Ukraine, defence spending, migration, energy security or a politically contentious supplier. Perhaps the subject is closer to home: redundancies, artificial intelligence replacing jobs, an executive’s old social media post, an environmental commitment somebody believes you have failed to meet, or a piece of footage circulating online that appears to show one of your senior people saying something they insist they never said.
None of these questions needs to be unreasonable. In 2026, the commercial world and the geopolitical world are increasingly difficult to separate. The continuing war in Ukraine affects European security, sanctions, investment and supply chains. Events in the Middle East can move energy markets, disrupt transport routes and create strong reactions among employees, customers and communities thousands of miles away. Political relationships change, public sentiment moves quickly and companies operating internationally increasingly find themselves being asked not only what they sell or what they do, but what they think about the world around them.
The problem is not that your executive does not know enough. The problem is that knowing the answer and giving a useful answer are not the same skill.
The Interview Is No Longer Just the Interview
Traditional media training was often imagined as preparation for a fairly recognisable encounter: a spokesperson sits opposite a journalist, lights come on, questions are asked and eventually somebody says thank you and the interview ends. That environment still exists, but it is now only one part of a much larger communications landscape. A conference panel can become media content. A podcast can generate dozens of short clips. An internal town hall can escape the organisation. A question from the audience at an industry event can be filmed from three different angles and online before the speaker has left the stage. A television interview that lasts eight minutes may ultimately be consumed by most people as a twelve-second extract without the question that preceded it.
That changes the job of the person speaking. They are no longer communicating solely with the journalist in front of them, or even with the programme’s immediate audience. They may also be speaking to employees, investors, regulators, governments, customers, campaign groups and communities in completely different markets, all encountering fragments of the conversation through different channels and with different levels of context.
This matters particularly for executives operating internationally. Dubai is a useful example because a senior leader based there may routinely conduct business across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America while managing a workforce made up of dozens of nationalities. A perfectly ordinary answer delivered from one cultural perspective can carry a different implication somewhere else. Humour may not travel. Political shorthand may not travel. A phrase considered neutral in London may sound loaded in another market, while an answer intended to reassure investors may produce a completely different reaction among employees.
Media training therefore is not about manufacturing robotic spokespeople who memorise three approved lines and repeat them regardless of the question. In fact, audiences are increasingly good at recognising precisely that behaviour. It is about understanding what is happening in the conversation while it is happening: who the real audience is, what the journalist is trying to establish, where the risks sit, what the organisation actually needs to communicate and how to remain clear and credible when those things suddenly pull in different directions.
The modern information environment makes that harder still. Artificial intelligence can now generate convincing text, photographs, cloned voices and video with extraordinary ease. Misleading information can be created deliberately, but equally damaging material can emerge from simple misunderstanding: an edited clip, an incorrect caption or a fragment of an interview detached from the sentence that made sense of it. Once that material begins circulating, the spokesperson may find themselves being asked to respond not only to events but to somebody else’s interpretation of them.
There is another trap here. Executives who are highly competent in their own environment often assume that competence will transfer naturally into an interview. Sometimes it does. Sometimes confidence becomes the problem. A boardroom allows explanation, qualification and supporting documents. A journalist can interrupt. A presentation lets the speaker determine the structure. An interview gives somebody else control of the questions. An executive accustomed to answering colleagues may explain far too much, introduce unnecessary information, repeat an inflammatory phrase contained in the question or answer the literal question so comprehensively that they lose sight of what they actually wanted the audience to understand.
None of that means avoiding difficult questions. Quite the opposite. Audiences notice evasion, and a spokesperson who obviously refuses to engage can create more suspicion than the original issue deserved. Good media training teaches people how to answer honestly while retaining an aim: recognising the question, dealing with it and then moving the conversation towards the information that actually matters. It is a subtle difference between answering a journalist and surrendering the interview to them.
What Happens When the Question Changes?
This is where preparation becomes much more valuable than polish. Before an interview, the obvious questions are rarely the ones that cause trouble. Most senior leaders can explain the new product, the investment announcement, the annual results or the project they have spent months working on. The questions worth preparing for are the adjacent ones. What else is happening around the organisation? What might a journalist reasonably connect to this story? What criticism already exists? Which previous statements could resurface? Which political or social issue could suddenly become relevant because of where the organisation operates, who owns it, who supplies it or what its leadership has previously said?
Imagine an organisation announcing a substantial investment into a European market. The communications team prepares figures on employment, growth and economic impact, and the spokesperson knows them perfectly. Then the interviewer asks whether the company’s Middle Eastern partnerships create a reputational problem, whether sanctions could affect the project, what the organisation thinks about a current conflict, or whether its use of AI will eventually reduce the very employment numbers it has just announced. The conversation has moved, but the spokesperson still needs to know where they are trying to take it.
This is not about teaching executives clever ways to escape questions. Some questions require a straightforward answer, including difficult ones. It is about preventing the question from becoming the strategy. A trained spokesperson understands the organisation’s objective before the interview starts, has thought about the audiences beyond the interviewer, understands which subjects are likely to emerge and knows how to communicate a meaningful answer without speculation, defensiveness or unnecessary detours.
That preparation also creates permission to say, genuinely, that you do not know. One of the most dangerous habits in an interview is the desire to fill silence. A senior person is asked something slightly outside their knowledge, feels that somebody of their position ought to have an answer and begins constructing one in real time. What starts as an attempt to be helpful becomes a statement that can subsequently be quoted as corporate policy. Knowing where your knowledge ends, and how to deal confidently with that moment, is considerably more useful than bluffing your way towards certainty.
There is a similar issue with hostile questions. A journalist may deliberately frame a question strongly because that is their job, or because they are testing the spokesperson’s position. Repeating the premise can inadvertently validate it. Becoming visibly irritated can turn an otherwise forgettable exchange into the only clip anybody sees. Refusing to engage can suggest that the organisation has something to hide. The correct response depends on the circumstances, which is precisely why effective media training cannot simply hand somebody a collection of stock phrases. People need to practise thinking while under pressure.
And practice matters. Reading guidance on interviews is useful in much the same way that reading about swimming is useful. At some point, somebody has to get wet. Being questioned on camera, watching the interview back and seeing the habits you did not realise you had can be uncomfortable, but it is extraordinarily revealing. The nervous smile that appears during a serious answer, the tendency to look away when challenged, the five-minute response that should have lasted thirty seconds, the repeated filler phrase, the defensive posture, the habit of answering the interviewer rather than communicating with the audience: these things are difficult to identify from theory alone.
At Evoke, this is why media training covers far more than presentation. The work starts with understanding the elements of news and how journalists approach a story, then moves through interview preparation, different interview formats, audience analysis, difficult question types, sound bites, physical presentation and the practical techniques required to define and maintain a clear objective. But equally important is understanding the narrative behind the interview: what the organisation needs to communicate, which messages must land, and how those messages should be framed and contextualised for different audiences. Participants are coached not simply to answer questions well, but to recognise the strategic purpose of the interview, maintain message discipline and use techniques such as bridging, reframing and redirection to return naturally to priority messages. That means practising those messages against myriad questions, angles and scenarios until the speaker can navigate an unexpected line of questioning without losing the wider narrative or sounding evasive or rehearsed. Knowing your subject remains essential, but so does knowing what the interview is for, what you need the audience to understand, and how to make sure they leave with
So, Do Your Senior People Actually Need Media Training?
Perhaps not. If your executives are comfortable being challenged without becoming defensive, can recognise the question behind the question, know how to remain concise without sounding rehearsed, can communicate when some facts are still unknown and understand how their words may travel beyond the original audience, there may be little for us to add. If they can move confidently between a friendly podcast, a live broadcast, a hostile journalist, an investor interview and an unexpected question at a public event while maintaining both credibility and the organisation’s objective, they are already doing something remarkably well.
But that is a higher bar than simply being articulate.
The real test is often whether you know how they will perform before the difficult moment arrives. Many organisations discover the answer in public. A senior executive who is outstanding in meetings goes into an interview without sufficient preparation because everybody assumes they will be fine. The first few questions are comfortable, confidence rises and then something changes. The interviewer introduces a subject nobody anticipated, challenges an assumption or asks the same uncomfortable question in a different way. Suddenly the organisation’s reputation is being represented by one person’s ability to think clearly for the next twenty seconds.
That is a peculiar amount of organisational risk to leave to chance.
It is also why media training should not be reserved for the week before a major television appearance. The people most likely to represent an organisation publicly should already understand how interviews work, just as senior leaders are expected to understand financial, legal or operational responsibilities before a problem arises. They should know how to prepare, how to identify the real audience, how to work with journalists rather than fear them and how to recognise when a seemingly simple question carries implications beyond the obvious answer.
The requirement is becoming more important rather than less. Media itself has become decentralised. A chief executive may have fewer traditional television interviews than their predecessor did twenty years ago but appear in vastly more situations capable of becoming public media. Conferences, webinars, podcasts, LinkedIn videos, employee events, investor calls, panels and social content have blurred the old distinction between being “on the record” and simply being visible. The safest assumption for a senior leader is increasingly that anything said in front of an audience may eventually reach an audience they did not expect.
For organisations working internationally, the stakes become higher again. The geopolitical environment surrounding Europe and the Middle East means apparently commercial conversations can acquire political dimensions very quickly. Audiences are more fragmented, cultural interpretation matters, artificial intelligence has complicated what can be trusted and a statement can cross languages and borders almost instantly. None of this means executives should become frightened of speaking. Quite the opposite. Organisations need credible human voices more than ever, particularly when uncertainty is high and audiences are suspicious of polished corporate language.
The goal of good media training is therefore not to make people safer by making them say less. It is to make them better able to say something useful when it matters.
Evoke’s Media Training is built around that reality, combining interview preparation, message discipline, audience understanding and practical on-camera experience with the strategic thinking required to communicate under pressure. It is not about teaching somebody to perform as a spokesperson. It is about making sure that when the question they were not expecting eventually arrives, the person answering it is still capable of representing the organisation you intended them to represent.
Because the difficult question is rarely the problem.
Finding out, live and in public, that nobody was ready for it, is.
