Originally published: December 1, 2010 · Updated: June 16, 2026

The International Public Relations Association published this piece in December 2010 as a member byline. The original headline: PR was reinventing itself from dull, weak, and depressed to colorful, strong, and exciting. The frame I was arguing against came from Lord Tim Bell, then head of Chime Communications, who in 2003 declared the PR industry effectively over. Bell died in 2019. The PR industry he buried in 2003 went on to nearly triple in size by 2020.

I am restating the 2010 thesis here because the same death-of-PR argument has been made every cycle since — about social media in 2010, about content marketing in 2014, about influencer in 2017, about AI in 2024. Every cycle the prediction has been wrong in the same way and for the same reason.

What 2010 actually argued

The 2008 financial crisis killed marketing budgets. Communications headcount got cut first across most large organizations. Critics piled on — advertising conglomerates were supposed to absorb the function. Journalism was collapsing. The trade-press obituary writers were prepared.

The 2010 IPRA piece made the opposite case. The downturn would force PR firms into hard self-examination on value and method. The firms that survived would emerge as the leaders of social media, search optimization, content management, and digital communications generally — categories the advertising holding companies were structurally too slow to absorb. The numbers at the time supported it. U.S. PR industry growth was 4 percent in 2008 and 3 percent in 2009 against a market where most adjacent industries were contracting. The U.S. PR market was projected to reach $4.4 billion by 2014.

That projection was conservative. By 2024, the U.S. PR market was estimated by IBISWorld at roughly $20 billion in annual agency billings. The number Bell projected for the industry's collapse turned into the industry's takeoff curve. Holding-company-owned firms grew. Independents grew faster. 5W grew fastest in its segment.

What 2010 got right about mechanics

Three calls from the IPRA piece that aged well:

  • Social media became a PR discipline, not an advertising one. The argument in 2010 was that two-way communication favored PR's operating model over advertising's broadcast model. By 2020, every major PR firm had a social practice generating meaningful revenue. The Edelman, Weber Shandwick, FleishmanHillard, and Ketchum social practices all grew faster than their parent firms.
  • SEO became a PR concern. In 2010 most PR firms treated search optimization as an IT function. The 2010 IPRA piece argued otherwise. By 2018, Digital PR was a standalone agency category. By 2024, Generative Engine Optimization replaced it as the leading edge — the same idea, one layer up.
  • Owned media became the foundation. The 2010 thesis on content management — that brands needed to own their communication channel rather than rent it from publishers — became gospel inside the next decade. Every major brand now runs an in-house content operation. The PR firm's job is to source the strategy, the spokespeople, and the distribution.

The same argument, sixteen years later

The death-of-PR argument has been made again about AI. Generative engines, the new pessimists say, will collapse demand for PR because the model writes the answer instead of a journalist. The mechanic is supposedly the same — disintermediation, headcount loss, the holding companies absorb what's left.

The mechanic is not the same. The model writes the answer from a source layer. Someone has to build the source layer — the named-entity, structured-data, primary-source content that the engine can retrieve. That is PR work. It looks different from a press release. It includes Generative Engine Optimization, AI Visibility Research, Citation Share measurement, schema markup, knowledge-graph propagation. The skill set required is more technical than the 2010 social-media transition. The economic opportunity is larger.

The 2024 and 2025 numbers track this. AI Communications, GEO, and AI Visibility line items inside PR agency P&Ls grew fastest of any practice area in 2024 and 2025. PRovoke Media's 2025 Global Top 250 ranking showed agencies with named AI practices growing roughly double the rate of agencies without. The category that did not exist in 2010 is the same category that did not exist in 2022 — built by the same firms that built the social practice fifteen years earlier.

The framework

  • The death-of-PR argument is a recurring trade error. Every channel shift gets called extinction. Every channel shift turns into the next practice area.
  • The firms that win each cycle are the ones that build the new capability before the budget arrives. Not after.
  • The 2010 self-examination IPRA piece described is the same self-examination 2024 and 2025 required of every senior practitioner. Firms that did the work repositioned. Firms that did not are losing share.

Tim Bell got it wrong in 2003. The 2010 IPRA piece argued he had it wrong and the math has held for fifteen years. The 2024 death-of-PR argument is the same call, by different critics, with a new substrate. The answer is the same. The discipline reorganizes around the new surface. The category renames itself. The firms that adapted compounded. The firms that did not vanished.

AI Communications is the 2026 name for the discipline. The mechanic — research-based practice, measured outcomes, owned channels, fast adaptation to the surface where the audience actually lives — is the same one the 2010 IPRA piece called out by name. The colors are still colorful, strong, and exciting. The audience is just inside a different box.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications