Public relations practice has fundamentally shifted from storytelling to what Omawumi Ogbe, managing partner at GLG Communications, describes as story proving, requiring practitioners to adopt radical transparency as the primary defense against digital skepticism and misinformation.

Ogbe, made this known at the Nigeria Digital PR Summit webinar themed “Digital PR 2026: Preparing Communicators for the Future”. She said trust has become hard currency in an environment where AI-generated content and fake news proliferate at unprecedented speed.

“Right now, trust is a hard currency because to combat misinformation, we must now move as PR leaders from storytelling to story proving. We definitely now need to be very transparent, radical transparency. Transparency is really the antidote to skepticism, especially with all this fake news.”

She emphasized that the credibility of the messenger now outweighs the quality of the message itself, requiring communicators to leverage third-party validation from experts, academics and trusted institutions.

“It matters who the messenger is more than the message right now. You need high credibility sources, experts, non-biased voices, academics, technical experts, legal institutions. These are the people that will vouch for your narratives. Your years of experience, expertise, how many years you’ve been doing this, your credibility, your studies. We don’t need to be vague. There’s no need to be vague right now,” Ogbe explained.

She warned communicators about the dangers of careless social media engagement, particularly in an era where AI-manipulated content has become increasingly difficult to distinguish from authentic material.

“You can no longer afford to just repost, especially as a leader where you have something at stake. Sometimes these things look so real you don’t even know what is AI. You don’t know what is real. Before you comment and give your two cents, you need to be sure that it is real and that this person said it. You could be a journalist, for example, and you are commenting and writing think pieces to something that is fake. So it’s very important. Do not wait for a crisis to define your truth. You need to define it daily with everything that you do, your emails, your posts and all of those things,” she said.

Addressing the role of PR practitioners as emerging thought leaders, Ogbe acknowledged the tension between remaining behind the scenes and building personal brands as subject matter experts.

“I hear you on the behind-the-scenes thing. It’s something we’ve always been in, just in the shadows. When we do all of this work, they give the thanks to the marketing team, to HR, and PR is almost like a thankless job. But we have to create a balance. You can build your personal brand, but ensure that whilst you’re communicating for your clients, you don’t want to bring everything to yourself. You need to create a nice balance such that the client sees themselves, but nobody’s taking away from you.”

She stressed the importance of cultural contextualization and localized communication strategies in an increasingly globalized world. “We need to really think about cultural contextualization. Yes, COVID destroyed whatever border we had left, but we need to look back inwards and communicate from a local point of view because there’s something about the nicheness of it. We need to be able to put all of these contexts together. The nuances, the language, the structure, understanding context.”

Ogbe identified a fundamental shift in influencer culture that favors expertise over follower counts, reflecting broader audience demand for credibility and truth.

“We’re really shifting from the old superficial celebrity endorsement towards subject matter influencers. These are the voices that are shaping policy, public opinion through expertise, not just follower counts, because people need truth. These are some of the things that we need to consider and really look at,” she said, emphasizing that this shift represents both a challenge and an opportunity for communications professionals willing to position themselves as authoritative voices in their domains.