What can advertising re-learn from PR?

In my view advertising and PR used to look pretty similar to one another; leaders, consiglieri, smart, buyable, packaged, believable, organised, necessary. There was a lot of very useful overlap between the two. However, in its explosive quest for progress and profit, advertising somehow lost sight of the thing it is by definition supposed to do – create human connections.

Instead it taught itself to connect people with things and it taught people that relationships with brands were a nice to have rather than a business necessity.

Implications are wider than advertising; in the boardroom, marketing is under represented with only 22% of CMOs reporting directly to their CEO according to Korn Ferry, with a drop from 68% to 58% of CMOs on Fortune 500 boards between 2024-25, according to Forrester. At one level, the entire brand value system seems like the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater.

Currently, however, having accidentally commoditised its own product that is by definition, supposed to be personal and intimate, advertising is currently deciding what it wants to do and what it wants to be next.

One thing’s for certain, it needs to find new ways of correcting this imbalance between ‘what I am selling’ and ‘what you would like from me’. Advertising needs to find new ways to reconnect with people and new ways of correcting the current course of relationships and to somehow consummate a new relationship with a consumer who is ready to fall in love again, prepared to suspend disbelief and willing to be a part of the action rather than a casual observer.

And the agents of advertising are not alone. Google and Meta are also having to recalibrate, get back and reconcile to the very thing that advertising demands - authenticity and believability. Unlike the agents of advertising of course, they are using their pervasive technology to do so.

So we all got a bit lost in the latest stampede to the horizon. But all is not lost. There is plenty left in the world to act as ingredients in the success of the agentic era of advertising. Human things, skills, craft and ways of doing things that might have taken a back seat, can now be re-purposed, re-focused and plugged back in to play a new role.

I am not upset or annoyed by anything advertising is or does. Its itinerance and its restlessness has been around since man stood upright. Its why I came to it in the first place.

The earliest known ‘advertisement’ was over 5,000 years ago, on Egyptian papyrus from Thebes, looking for a runaway slave and a weaving shop; 4,000 years ago Mesopotamian tablets pushed oil, wine and cloth, and even hosted complaints such as the Tablet of Ea-nāṣir’s rant about substandard copper.

Advertising is resilient, but the last 25 years have changed it faster than anything since radio and TV: the ‘dot.com’ era (1994–2002) of banner ads and AdWords; the ‘digital’ era (2003–2015) of Facebook, LinkedIn, SEO/PPC, mobile, programmatic and ‘big data’; then the ‘AI’ era (from around 2016, exploding with ChatGPT in 2022), now giving way to an agentic era of autonomous campaigns, zero-click ecosystems, hyper‑personalisation and almost zero human involvement.

That is where advertising and the world it serves diverge, because advertising is about human involvement. The fundamentals are simple – be as tempting as possible to the person most likely to buy – but the human bit, the allure, is missing.

Agentic delivery risks stripping out exactly what makes brands irresistible. Yet what advertising has left behind over the past 25 years is still available, and PR has kept much of it alive.

As agencies redefine themselves and race to master new technology, the real opportunity is to borrow from PR’s playbook on engagement, relationships and credibility, and, in doing so, to become trusted business advisors again rather than just very efficient machines.

The 2025 "Agency scope" report notes 68% of agencies facing flat revenues, 42% citing "differentiation woes". Pitches resemble lotteries; the dopamine hit of the win often turning quickly to scope creep in a bid to get closer to a new client. What's missing?

Can the pervasive whiff of sibling rivalry between advertising and PR give way to some kind of collaborative learning experience with advertising learning to whisper where it might once have shouted. Advise where it might have started to tell. Coming together would be equally good for PR who would find new skills and needs for their creativity, and new audiences to share it with.

PR firms such as Edelman have acquired creatives, creating hybrids. Stagwell's 2025 "PR-first" model where PR strategises and advertising executes has successfully boosted client and revenue retention by 27% according to their own numbers.

So there seems to be a fairly clear case for collaboration. The 2026 ANA report shows marketing clients wanting the best of everything, with integrated communications surging to 19%. Admittedly this can come from under one roof but it could equally mean independent skills practitioners coming together in the Hollywood model. PR lends purpose; advertising adds creativity. Or will they grow into each other before that can happen?

What advertising might have lost (or lost sight of) over the past 25 years, the PR industry still owns; a sense of clarity, purpose, tangibility, buyabiity. PR is smart, well dressed and organised. PR shows up.

There is a reason for it, a beginning, a middle and an end. It involves people and their feelings; relationships, opinions, choices....in fact everywhere that advertising is now missing, in the stampede to the agentic era.

Imagine if your agency felt similar to that; with all the relationships to build back, there’s probably room for all.

This article was written by David Mayo, managing partner, NADA Creative Intelligence.