“There isn’t any such factor as PR anymore,” Sir Martin Sorrell concluded final week throughout a debate with Sarah Waddington, CEO of the UK’s Public Relations and Communications Affiliation. 

Within the digital age, Sorrell argued, storytelling requires “flooding the web with content material” quite than conventional earned media approaches. PR, he prompt, has been subsumed by the enormous digital content material machine and is now functionally extinct.

The declare makes zero sense. 

As a number of PR professionals have been fast to level out, the irony of declaring PR lifeless whereas showing on a flagship radio program to form a story is itself a masterclass in public relations. 

Sorrell understands this completely effectively. He has spent fifty years crafting provocative headlines to generate consideration. And right here he was, doing precisely that.

However Sir Martin is hardly alone in his morbid obsession. Advertising is exclusive amongst disciplines for its funereal fascination with predicting the upcoming demise of each facet of its personal operation.

Scott Galloway famously and ridiculously declared that “the period of brand name is over” at Cannes, arguing that customers now not want model recognition as a result of they’ve, er, manufacturers like TripAdvisor and Reddit. Gary Vaynerchuk has spent his profession conducting final rites for tv promoting, claiming that “the TV firms are all lifeless” and that it’s “solely a matter of time” earlier than they disappear. 

He was trumped by Raja Rajamannar, the chief advertising and marketing and communications officer at Mastercard and president of the World Federation of Advertisers, who introduced at Cannes that the entire of promoting “as we all know it” was lifeless. 

Then Invoice Lee went additional, writing within the Harvard Enterprise Evaluation that the entire of conventional advertising and marketing together with promoting, public relations, branding and company communications was now completed.

It’s a bloodbath.

We’ve been making these identical errors for many years. In 1950, trade observers declared radio completed. David Sarnoff, the person who’d constructed RCA on radio, was already predicting its demise and pouring assets into tv. 

Seventy-five years later, radio promoting in America generates roughly $18 billion yearly. The format advanced, shifting to music, information, and discuss. Podcasting emerged as radio’s digital descendant. The medium tailored quite than expired.

In 1982, Jack Valenti, president of the Movement Image Affiliation of America, advised Congress that the VCR was “to the American movie producer and the American public because the Boston Strangler is to the girl house alone.” 

House video went on to grow to be the mainstay of studio revenues for 20 years.

We noticed adjustment and evolution. Change, however not extinction.