TL; DR

Sir Martin Sorrell’s “PR is dead” line isn’t a death certificate—it’s a reminder that too many leaders still confuse PR with publicity. Yes, the factory-line version of PR (news releases, wire blasts, dusty media lists, and impressions) deserves to be retired. But modern PR isn’t “flooding the internet with stuff.” It’s earning belief: building credibility that can’t be faked and trust that compounds across stakeholders.

That misunderstanding persists because publicity is loud and easy to count, while credibility work is quiet, upstream, and hard to screenshot—and because we’ve trained executives to judge PR by output metrics that make it look replaceable. 

In 2026, PR also educates LLMs, engages humans, and drives revenue by reducing friction in the buyer journey. The fix is to lead with the business problem, describe PR in executive language, and measure credibility—not clips.

Key Insights

• The “PR is dead” take isn’t really about PR—it’s about publicity-as-a-process finally losing its grip.
• Modern PR isn’t content volume. It’s the discipline of earning belief: credibility, trust, and proof that compounds across stakeholders.
• The misunderstanding persists because publicity is loud and visible, while credibility work happens upstream—strategy, narrative alignment, proof-building, relationship infrastructure.
• We’ve unintentionally trained executives to undervalue PR by reporting outputs instead of outcomes, making PR look like a replaceable distribution channel.
• In 2026, PR has a dual mandate to educate the LLMs, engage the humans, and drive revenue by reducing friction in the buyer journey.
• The fix is precision, not sensitivity: lead with the business problem, not “more coverage,” and define PR in executive language (trust acceleration, risk reduction, demand enablement).
• Build a credibility scorecard (message pull-through, proof velocity, discovery lift, pipeline assist, risk reduction) so leadership can’t shrug the work off.

Publicity Is Dead. PR Is Not.

Oh, Thor (as my kid would say)! Was there a big hubbub during the holidays that most of the industry missed! Truth be told, had Paul Holmes not written about it, I probably would have missed it, too, in the midst of my pina colada drinking at the beach.

Are you ready for it (as Taylor Swift would say)? 

During a debate on BBC Radio 4, Sir Martin Sorrell, the former founder of WPP, declared, “There’s no such thing as PR anymore.”

Sarah Waddington, the CEO of PRCA, was also a guest, and she (rightfully so) gave it right back to him.

But here’s the thing: when someone at that level says PR is dead, it’s not a hot take—it’s a tell.

It tells us PR still has a branding problem. It tells us that too many leaders still confuse PR with publicity…or worse, with news releases + the newswire. And it tells us that even inside the biggest advertising conglomerates on earth—the ones that literally own PR agencies—there’s still a stunning misunderstanding of what this discipline actually does.

Sorrell didn’t argue that trust is dead. Or that reputation doesn’t matter. Or that stakeholder relationships aren’t business-critical.

He argued (in various ways) that PR has been swallowed by “comms” and “content,” and that what’s left is basically flooding the internet with stuff. And sure—if your definition of PR is “we ship announcements and hope journalists like us,” then yes, that version is on life support.

But that’s not PR. 

Modern PR is the discipline of earning attention that cannot be bought, building credibility that cannot be faked, and creating trust that compounds across customers, employees, regulators, communities, creators, and journalists.

If anything is dead right now, it’s the idea that you can “content” your way into belief. And that’s why the real story here isn’t that Sir Martin Sorrell declared PR dead.

It’s that so many people could potentially hear him and think, “Wait…is he right?”

What Sorrell Actually Killed (Spoiler: It Wasn’t PR)

Let’s start by giving Sorrell one thing: he’s not entirely wrong—he’s just aiming at the wrong target.

There is a version of “PR” that deserves to be put out of its misery. You know the one. It’s the version that treats public relations like a factory line:

• Write a news release no one asked for
• Push it across a wire
• Blast a pitch to a list that hasn’t been cleaned since the Obama administration
• Celebrate “hits”
• Report impressions with a straight face
• Repeat until budget cuts

If that’s your definition of PR, then yes—of course it’s “dead.” Not because the world no longer needs PR, but because the world no longer rewards spam with a logo.

But that’s not PR. That’s publicity-as-a-process. And honestly? Publicity has always been the least interesting thing PR can do. It’s just the most visible, which is how we got here.

The real problem isn’t that PR is dead. The problem is that the loudest examples of PR have trained executives to believe PR is a distribution tactic.

And it’s not. You know it’s not. I know it’s not. Now we have to convince the powers that be that it’s not. 

PR vs. Publicity

PR is not “flooding the internet with stuff.” PR is earning belief in a world where attention is cheap, and trust is not.

That distinction matters because executives don’t cut what they understand. They cut what they think is redundant.

If PR gets categorized as:

• “content” (marketing already does that)…
• “media” (we can just buy that)…
• or “social” (the interns have it covered)…

…it becomes easy to dismiss. Not because it doesn’t work, but because the work is being described like a commodity.

So let’s be painfully clear: 

• Publicity is a tactic. PR is the credibility function.
• Publicity is exposure. PR is earned belief.
• Publicity is “here’s what we want to say.”  PR is “here’s what our stakeholders need to believe—and the proof that makes it believable.”
• Publicity chases coverage. PR builds the conditions where coverage (and community, and creator validation, and customer advocacy) actually means something.

And in 2026, PR has a second job description that the old-school definition never accounted for: PR educates the LLMs, engages the humans, and drives revenue.

Because modern PR doesn’t just shape what a reporter thinks—it shapes what the market knows. It creates corroborated, consistent, credible signals across owned, earned, shared, and paid that help:

• AI systems understand who you are (and whether you’re trustworthy)
• Humans decide whether you’re worth their attention
• Buyers move from “I’ve heard of you” to “I choose you.”

What Modern PR Actually Produces

Modern PR produces commercially useful credibility—the kind that makes sales easier, recruiting faster, crises smaller, and marketing more efficient.

It shows up as things leaders care about (even if they don’t call it PR):

• Faster sales cycles because the buyer already trusts you before the demo
• Higher conversion rates because your proof is everywhere buyers look (and now, where AI looks)
• Lower customer acquisition cost because you’re not paying to convince cold audiences from scratch
• Stronger retention because customers feel confident they made the right choice
• Reduced risk because you’ve built relationships and clarity before something goes sideways

But the reason the “PR is dead” takes hold isn’t because PR stopped working. It’s because the industry has spent decades selling the most measurable parts of the job instead of the most valuable.

We trained leadership to expect hits, media impressions, advertising equivalencies, share of voice, number of articles, sentiment, and reach. Those numbers are easy to put in a report.

But easy-to-report isn’t the same thing as important-to-the-business. So when a leader looks at a dashboard full of outputs, it’s not shocking that they conclude, “This is just content distribution.”

Of course they do. That’s what we told them it was.

A Quick Gut Check

If your PR program can be replaced by a wire service, a templated pitch, and a content calendar, then you don’t have a PR program. You have a publicity machine. And publicity machines are exactly what Sorrell is reacting to.

But PR today is bigger than earned media—and that’s the point. What’s changed isn’t that PR disappeared. It’s that PR moved upstream and outward.

Upstream into strategy, message architecture. reputation protection, and stakeholder intelligence. 

Outward into creators and communities, employee advocacy, partner ecosystems, and AI discovery systems that summarize the “truth” of your brand from whatever signals they can corroborate.

If you’re only measuring the last-mile outputs, you’re missing the actual value—and you’re giving skeptics a clean opening to declare the whole discipline obsolete.

Which is exactly why this debate matters. Because if the people who allocate budgets still think PR equals news releases, then PR doesn’t have a relevance problem. It has a definition problem.

And that brings us to the bigger question: Why does this misunderstanding persist—and what do we do about it?

Why This Misunderstanding Persists—and What We Do About It

If this were just Sir Martin Sorrell being Sir Martin Sorrell, we could all roll our eyes, post a snarky quote card, and move on.

But the reason this debate lit up is because his definition of PR isn’t an outlier. It’s a 

pattern—one that shows up in boardrooms, budget meetings, and agency evaluations every day.

So why does the misunderstanding persist—even inside organizations that own PR agencies?

1) Because “publicity” is the part of PR leaders can see

Credibility is quiet. Publicity is loud. Publicity produces visible artifacts: releases, stories, clips, headlines, and links. It’s easy to point at. Easy to screenshot. Easy to claim. Easy to count.

The most valuable parts of PR don’t work like that. The best PR work happens before anyone publishes anything:

• Clarifying the narrative so leadership doesn’t contradict itself
• Mapping stakeholders so you don’t get blindsided
• Building proof so you don’t have to overpromise
• Creating relationships so you don’t “introduce yourself” during a crisis

When PR is doing its job, the absence of disaster often looks like…nothing happened. That is a terrible way to earn a budget.

2) Because we over-indexed on metrics that make PR look replaceable

This one stings, but it’s true: we’ve spent years using measurements that accidentally prove Sorrell’s point.

If the primary proof of PR’s value is impressions, reach, share of voice, “earned media value, or volume of placements, then PR looks like a distribution channel. And distribution channels can be bought, automated, or outsourced.

We taught executives to evaluate PR like advertising: more is better, louder is better, faster is better.

But credibility doesn’t work that way. Trust isn’t a volume business.

3) Because PR kept changing its name instead of changing its narrative

When a discipline is constantly rebranding itself—comms, content, influence, reputation, storytelling—it becomes harder to understand what it actually owns.

PR didn’t disappear. It expanded. But we haven’t done a great job drawing the boundary line between PR as a strategic business function, and PR as the “people who post and pitch.”

So when someone says, “PR is just content now,” they’re not describing reality—they’re describing the story we allowed to become true in too many organizations.

4) Because the holding company model encourages confusion

This is the part we don’t love to say out loud: big networks don’t always sell “credibility.”

They sell services.

When every discipline is a line item—and every line item needs to be productized—PR gets packaged into deliverables the market can recognize quickly: releases, media lists, coverage, thought leadership, influencer outreach.

Those things aren’t wrong. They’re just incomplete.

When PR is sold as a menu of outputs, it gets treated like a commodity. And commodities get squeezed.

5) Because AI changed the battlefield

Here’s where I think the entire argument falls apart.

In 2026, PR isn’t just shaping what people think. It’s shaping what machines learn.

LLMs don’t “feel” your brand. They synthesize it. They look for patterns across credible sources, repeatable claims, corroboration, and consistency.

Which means PR now has to:

• Educate the LLMs with structured, corroborated signals across the PESO ecosystem
• Engage the humans with narratives and proof that create belief
• Drive revenue by reducing friction in the buyer journey (trust shows up as speed, conversion, and retention)

If leadership still thinks PR is releases and coverage, they’re missing that PR is now building the credibility layer that determines whether you show up as “one of the two answers”—or as a brand the machine shrugs at.

What Do We Do About It?

Here’s the fix, and it’s not “be less sensitive.” It’s “be more precise.”

1) Lead with the business problem.

Instead of: “We need more coverage.” Lead with: “We need buyers to trust X, understand Y, and believe Z—so sales stops wasting time explaining the basics.”

2) Rename the work in executive language

PR teams should be describing their role as:

• credibility building
• trust acceleration
• stakeholder risk reduction
• market narrative control
• demand enablement

Not because we’re trying to sound fancy—because that’s what the work actually is.

3) Build a “credibility scorecard” leaders can’t ignore

Keep it simple and repeatable. Track:

• message pull-through (are the right ideas showing up in the right places?)
• proof velocity (how fast can we generate third-party validation?)
• discovery lift (branded search, direct traffic, quality referrals; AI visibility where measurable)
• pipeline assist (enablement usage, deal acceleration, win-rate influence)
• risk reduction (issues caught early, misinformation corrected, stakeholder trust protected)

4) Make the PESO Model® Your 2026 Operating System

PESO is your operating system. PR is the credibility function that ensures the system doesn’t become “more content” and instead becomes more believable.

That’s what makes the work measurable. That’s what makes it durable. That’s what makes it defensible.

And if the next time someone says “PR is dead,” our response is still “No, it isn’t,” we’ll be right—and we’ll still lose the budget.

The better response is: “Publicity is dead. Credibility is not. And credibility is what PR builds—across humans and machines—so revenue has something solid to stand on.”

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