Why marketing must bring PR back from valley of the shadow of death
By Olusesan Ogunyooye
In 2014 on a flight from Detroit to Washington, DC, I was confronted with a stark reality about the PR profession.
I had practised PR briefly in Nigeria before winning a Fulbright Scholarship that afforded me the privilege of taking courses on Communication Sciences at Michigan State University, MSU.
After an agonizing chat trying to explain my occupation to a seat mate on the flight, I had to blog about my experience captured in “The Other Day at Detroit Airport: What Do PR Pros Really Do?”. I concluded in that blog post, ‘PR really needs PR’.
In 2015, Adekunle Ayeni, the Founder of Black House Media (BHM), wrote what I consider one of the most piercing articles about the future of PR. Without mincing Ayeni proclaimed the death of PR.
In a thrilling tone of finality, Ayeni’s arguments were sharp and clear: public relations had lost its mojo to advertising and in-house communication teams – and the final nail on its coffin, he notes, is that PR has no seat at the management table beyond the ‘errand boy’ ‘manage-the-press’ responsibilities.
In his autopsy, the BHM founder pointed at the changing media landscape driven by internet penetration, increase in mobile adoption, growth in social media useage, and the birth of influencers caused the inglorious death of PR.
A few weeks ago, I was brainstorming with a member of my team on the go-to-market for a new product.
We were racking our brains on the usual nightmare of every marketing professional – huge brand expectations, highly fragmented media channels, increasingly sceptical audience and limited marketing budget.
As we tried to balance these extremes, it became clear that a good PR strategy must be in our toolbox.
The Changing Media Landscape is A New Lease on Life for PR
In an ironic twist of fate, as I reflect on this a decade after my blog post and Ayeni’s article, the same factors that smoked life out out of PR are those injecting it back with life.
One of those factors is messaging. PR lost out on leading the narrative to advertising, influencers and the brands. But today, 10 years later, consumers’ trust in advertising (marketing’s favorites) is eroding as scepticism towards brand messaging continues to grow.
Consumers are now opening their wallets to buy their way out of ad environments.
The use of ad blockers is on the horizon, with data indicating that between 8 – 26 per cent of Nigerians block ads from their devices.
On the media end, the ubiquity of brand-owned social media and mobile and connected devices have inundated the audience with content.
Deepfakes, concerns about consumer data security, and fake news are fueling wholesale distrust in digital media channels – where marketing has been mindlessly investing lately.
Social media ads, sponsored content, and influencer marketing are consequently losing their magic.
Traditional media are evolving too but are seriously challenged by fragmentation and democratization of reportage.
Marketing today is faced with an intriguing paradox of over-communication yet declining engagement and brand attribution.
Consumers’s Search for Trust is the New Exlir for PR
The past decades have seen consumers hand their precious data to a hyper-digitized marketing environment.
On the other hand, we all know someone or have seen someone plagued by the increasing trends of #WhatIOrderVsWhatIGot.
All these have summed up to a huge trust deficit. But on the flip side of the deficit is a consumer longing to be whole again; to be treated fairly and respectfully by brands.
As I brainstormed with my colleague about our G2M for our new product, I told him about my PR theory for our G2M.
He paused. He’s worked with me for some time and knows I shared Ayeni’s sentiment about PR.
I saw that on his face, so I asked, “Do you know DeepSeek?” he answered yes. “What do you know about DeepSeek?”, I furthered; he shared his thoughts. “What are your thoughts about Dangote Refinery and the quality conversation?” I pressed.
He gave his perspectives. I asked, “Have you seen a DeepSeek ad yet?” he answered in the negative. If you are like my colleague and me, you have an opinion on some of the topics above.
You have probably used or using these tools. Whichever side of the divide you belong to, PR did.
If you take OpenAI as an example, the company has dominated global conversations since its launch, not through an aggressive advertising strategy but through strategic thought leadership and carefully orchestrated media relations.
It wasn’t until this year’s Super Bowl that OpenAI aired its first-ever TV commercial. Similarly, DeepSeek – the OpenAI challenger, also gained traction purely through expert opinions, and community discussions that is fuelling a global media machine— all of these are the hallmarks of good PR.
Back home, the Dangote Refinery project once shrouded in doubts and criticisms is now being heralded as a game-changer.
Thanks to strategic reputation management, stakeholder engagement, and carefully positioned narratives.
Rethinking PR: What Professionals and Brands Must Do Differently
Raja Rajamannar, the global CMO of Mastercard, argued in his Book Quantum Marketing that ‘Marketing as we know it is dead’.
He noted that there are very few organizations, where the good, old 4Ps are still considered the preserve of the marketing functions.
He posited that driving business performance, building a brand to differentiate, leveraging platforms, and managing the company’s reputation are the new roles of marketing.
By Raja’s position, although we can say PR is making the well-deserved comeback, professionals must approach it differently by going beyond the simplistic (most-of-the-time) chest-beating media relations, working more with data – but more importantly, caring about the data owners and integrate PR well as a bonafide member of the marketing functions.
In hindsight, PR was never genuinely dead—it was just in the valley of the shadow of death. With changing consumer behaviour, declining trust in traditional advertising, and the power of strategic reputation management, PR has the right conditions to sneeze back to life. However, marketing must inject it with new blood and nurture it differently.
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