PR isn't dead. It just keeps getting mistaken for marketing
The industry should probably read Sir Martin Sorrell's premature obituary for PR as a warning shot. Keep selling channels, and the channels will eat you.
When Sir Martin Sorrell infamously told BBC Radio 4 that "there's no such thing as PR anymore", the industry rallied fast to respond. About how reputation matters and that trust beats reach. The rebuttals were fair, and mostly correct. But they missed the more useful argument buried inside his line.
Sorrell didn't just get PR wrong. He got it wrong in the specific way companies have been getting it wrong for 30 years: by collapsing the discipline into its channels. Press releases. Media placements. Or now, in his telling, flooding TikTok and Google with content. If that's the whole job, of course it looks redundant. That version of PR should be redundant.
