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Unpopular Opinion: PR is the future of Marketing

Susan Nefzger • February 17, 2025

Unpopular Opinion: Public Relations is the Future of Marketing



Unpopular Opinion: Public Relations is the Future of Marketing


 By Rand FishkinFebruary 16, 2025



Public relations is a dying trade. Mainstream media has less influence than ever. Pitching for coverage is a thankless, fruitless task. Yeah, well, I think PR is poised for a massive comeback. Here’s why:

  1. Traditional media may have less influence, but diverse, distributed sources of influence have never, NEVER held more sway over opinions and buying behavior. The 2.5 hours on social media everyday, the 49 minutes on YouTube, the faily 6.5 total hours online, the 22% of Americans who subscribe to email news sources, the 565 million ConvertKit, 50 million Beehiiv, 35 million Substack, and 850K Medium subscribers, the 23% of Americans who listen to 10+ hours of podcasts a week, the 600 million people who use Google Discover every day… and all of these sources of influence are reachable via, you guessed it, public relations.
  2. Want to be atop Reddit? Google News? Apple News? Techmeme? Hacker News? Metafilter? Those Google Discover feeds? Well, you’d better be doing PR, because the visibility algorithms that govern all those places, and the people who create for them are, you guessed it, basing a huge amount of what they create, submit, and click on behind-the-scenes PR efforts.
  3. How about the AI tools and LLMs of the world? Yup, them too. Language models are governed by the “trusted sources,” they crawl, index, and use to build up their text corpora. Three guesses what influences change in those models. Yup, it’s PR-Influenced Content. The ability to influence how people write about, talk about, and publish about you on the web directly impact how AI tools respond to questions about your brand, your field, and whether they include you when prompters ask about the problems you solve.

This week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard is the one to show to your boss, team, client, or c-suite next time they ask why you’re recommending more budget go to influencing and pitching the sources of media—ALL sources of media—that reach your target audience, and the algorithmic indices that index ’em.

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