Originally published July 2020 as a forward-looking roundup. Rewritten June 2026 as a five-year graded retrospective.
In July 2020, four PR firm leaders gave Everything-PR their predictions for how the COVID era would reshape the discipline. Five years later, the scorecard is a useful read on which structural calls held and which softened — and on the bigger shift none of them anticipated.
The participants: Suzanne Miller, president and founder of SPM Communications; Lindsey Carnett, CEO and President of Marketing Maven; Colin Trethewey, co-founder of PRmediaNow Communications; and Sam Parsonson of seoplus+, the Ottawa digital marketing agency.
Suzanne Miller (SPM Communications): "PR will be more about ethical leadership and helping brands find their voices" — partial hit
Miller called for brands to take public positions on human rights, civil rights, and broader values stances — and predicted PR firms would increasingly act as ethics counsel to clients. The first eighteen months held. The 2020 racial-justice cycle, the corporate values-statement era of 2021, and the broader ESG-led brand positioning of 2021-2022 all reinforced the trajectory.
The longer arc has been more mixed. Corporate retreat from public values commitments accelerated through 2023-2025 — DEI backlash, regulatory pressure, the broader political environment. Brands that took explicit values stances in 2020-2021 increasingly pulled back to operational neutrality. The ethical-leadership posture Miller predicted held selectively, not categorically. Score: half hit, with the second half pulled back.
Lindsey Carnett (Marketing Maven): "Media will always exist, PR practitioners must work with media's changing needs" — directionally correct
Carnett's call was structurally sound. Media did adapt. PR firms did adapt. The "COVID angle" tactic she described (the VFX editor on Today Show discussing filming love scenes in the pandemic) was indicative of the broader cycle that ran through 2020-2021 across all client categories. The deeper structural shift — that media itself was about to be restructured by AI engine retrieval and the broader generative content cycle — was not the focus of the prediction. Score: directionally correct, not category-defining.
Colin Trethewey (PRmediaNow): "Owned content broadcasting on client social channels" — full hit
Trethewey called the structural shift that ran across the entire 2020-2026 period. Owned content broadcasting — CEO interviews, founder Q&As, professional-grade content produced directly for client social channels rather than pitched to media — became the dominant content strategy in B2B PR by 2023. The pattern generalized into the broader podcast-as-PR cycle (Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, Cleo Abram, Andrew Huberman, Aaron Ross Powell, Marc Andreessen). Founder-led owned content is now the load-bearing layer of modern executive visibility programs.
The mechanics Trethewey described — broadcast software, multi-camera setups, customer comments on screen, newscast-quality production — became standard. The firms that built the production capability early won mid-market accounts that the firms still pitching traditional press placements lost. Score: full hit.
Sam Parsonson (seoplus+): "COVID created a generation of stronger PR pros" — generally true
Parsonson's prediction was about people, not platforms. The argument: the chaos of 2020 forced PR professionals to operate at higher tempo and clarity, and the resulting generation would be more durable. The post-2020 generation of communications professionals has demonstrably broader crisis fluency than the pre-pandemic cohort. The COVID cycle did function as a forcing event. Score: generally true, hard to measure precisely.
What the 2020 predictions missed: AI Communications
The shift none of the four anticipated — and that essentially no PR forecast in mid-2020 anticipated — is the AI Communications layer. ChatGPT launched November 2022. By 2024, over a third of US consumers were beginning product research with AI rather than Google. By 2026, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews collectively mediate a substantial and growing share of consumer, B2B, and travel research.
The implications: Citation Share inside the model engines is the new market share. PR programs increasingly run as AI Communications programs — public relations + digital marketing + Generative Engine Optimization + AI-visibility research. The PR firms moving the fastest on the new substrate are the ones taking category share from firms still running 2020 playbooks.
The firms today
SPM Communications continues operating from Dallas under Suzanne Miller's leadership. Marketing Maven continues under Lindsey Carnett, with operations across consumer brand, retail, and wellness. PRmediaNow continues under Colin Trethewey. seoplus+ continues operating from Ottawa as a digital marketing agency. Each has adapted to the post-COVID and AI Communications environment in its own structural posture — and each continues to operate as a sustained example of the boutique-and-mid-market PR firm category that has weathered the most structural disruption since 2020.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
