“There is no such thing as PR anymore,” Sir Martin Sorrell concluded last week during a debate with Sarah Waddington, CEO of the UK’s Public Relations and Communications Association.
In the digital age, Sorrell argued, storytelling requires “flooding the internet with content” rather than traditional earned media approaches. PR, he suggested, has been subsumed by the giant digital content machine and is now functionally extinct.
The claim makes zero sense.
As several PR professionals were quick to point out, the irony of declaring PR dead while appearing on a flagship radio program to shape a narrative is itself a masterclass in public relations.
Sorrell understands this perfectly well. He has spent fifty years crafting provocative headlines to generate attention. And here he was, doing exactly that.
But Sir Martin is hardly alone in his morbid obsession. Marketing is unique among disciplines for its funereal fascination with predicting the imminent demise of every aspect of its own operation.
Scott Galloway famously and ridiculously declared that “the era of brand is over” at Cannes, arguing that consumers no longer need brand recognition because they have, er, brands like TripAdvisor and Reddit. Gary Vaynerchuk has spent his career conducting last rites for television advertising, claiming that “the TV companies are all dead” and that it is “only a matter of time” before they disappear.
He was trumped by Raja Rajamannar, the chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard and president of the World Federation of Advertisers, who announced at Cannes that the whole of advertising “as we know it” was dead.
Then Bill Lee went further, writing in the Harvard Business Review that the whole of traditional marketing including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications was now finished.
It’s a massacre.
We’ve been making these same mistakes for decades. In 1950, industry observers declared radio finished. David Sarnoff, the man who’d built RCA on radio, was already predicting its demise and pouring resources into television.
Seventy-five years later, radio advertising in America generates approximately $18 billion annually. The format evolved, shifting to music, news, and talk. Podcasting emerged as radio’s digital descendant. The medium adapted rather than expired.
In 1982, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told Congress that the VCR was “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”
Home video went on to become the mainstay of studio revenues for two decades.
We saw adjustment and evolution. Change, but not extinction.
Email marketing is pronounced deceased every time a new communication platform emerges, yet it delivers the highest ROI of any digital channel.
Nothing in marketing ever truly dies. It evolves, contracts, expands into new forms, and makes room for whatever arrives next. Our ecosystem adjusts rather than annihilates its incumbents.
As we hurtle towards an exhausting end to 2025, it is tempting to view this moment as an ending too. But of course, we carry on. The sun will rise on New Year’s Day with the usual mix of optimism and hangover.
PR professionals will still be shaping narratives. SEO specialists will still be optimizing. Brand managers will still be branding. Television advertising will still be reaching mass audiences. Email marketers will still be delivering ROI.
There is something wonderful in that persistence.
While marketing undertakers sharpen their headlines and advertising eulogists prepare their conference presentations, the rest of us simply get on with it. We adapt. We evolve. We continue. We ignore.
So, as 2026 approaches, let’s accept that everything from PR to SEO to brands to advertising will still be with us into the New Year and beyond. Let’s make a disciplinary New Year’s resolution to lay off the fascination with marketing death.
Happy New Year. See you on the other side.
Mark Ritson will teach the ADWEEK MiniMBA in Marketing in April 2026, a ten-week MBA level program for senior managers who never received (or have completely forgotten) proper marketing training. Sign up here.
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