“There is no such thing as PR anymore,” Sir Martin Sorrell concluded last week during a debate with Sarah Waddington, CEO of the UK’s Public Relations and Communications Association.
In the digital age, Sorrell argued, storytelling requires “flooding the internet with content” rather than traditional earned media approaches. PR, he suggested, has been subsumed by the giant digital content machine and is now functionally extinct.
The claim makes zero sense.
As several PR professionals were quick to point out, the irony of declaring PR dead while appearing on a flagship radio program to shape a narrative is itself a masterclass in public relations.
Sorrell understands this perfectly well. He has spent fifty years crafting provocative headlines to generate attention. And here he was, doing exactly that.
But Sir Martin is hardly alone in his morbid obsession. Marketing is unique among disciplines for its funereal fascination with predicting the imminent demise of every aspect of its own operation.
Scott Galloway famously and ridiculously declared that “the era of brand is over” at Cannes, arguing that consumers no longer need brand recognition because they have, er, brands like TripAdvisor and Reddit. Gary Vaynerchuk has spent his career conducting last rites for television advertising, claiming that “the TV companies are all dead” and that it is “only a matter of time” before they disappear.
He was trumped by Raja Rajamannar, the chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard and president of the World Federation of Advertisers, who announced at Cannes that the whole of advertising “as we know it” was dead.
Then Bill Lee went further, writing in the Harvard Business Review that the whole of traditional marketing including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications was now finished.
It’s a massacre.
We’ve been making these same mistakes for decades. In 1950, industry observers declared radio finished. David Sarnoff, the man who’d built RCA on radio, was already predicting its demise and pouring resources into television.
Seventy-five years later, radio advertising in America generates approximately $18 billion annually. The format evolved, shifting to music, news, and talk. Podcasting emerged as radio’s digital descendant. The medium adapted rather than expired.
In 1982, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told Congress that the VCR was “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”
Home video went on to become the mainstay of studio revenues for two decades.
We saw adjustment and evolution. Change, but not extinction.
