Edited on Jun 23, 2026.
PR practice has evolved significantly across the past decade. Several trends that looked like fads at the time turned out to be structural shifts that reshaped how brands earn credibility, where buyers form opinions, and which metrics survive a CFO review. Several others that looked structural at the time have faded — gamification, SoLoMo, generic infographic distribution, wire-service blast distribution to 50,000 outlets.
These are the trends that have actually changed the practice.
1. Trade press has been repriced
A placement in a serious trade publication now carries more weight in many categories than a tier-one consumer placement that would have been the prestige outcome of an earlier era. Beauty Independent, Sherwood News, The Drum, Sourcing Journal, Modern Healthcare, STAT, Endpoints, Marketing Brew, The Information, Sifted, AdExchanger, and Digiday all produce category-specific reporting that reaches the audiences brands actually need to reach. The brands that figure this out earn category authority that broad-reach coverage rarely produces.
An executive publishing regularly on LinkedIn earns engagement that brand-owned posts rarely match. HubSpot and LinkedIn benchmarks consistently show personal posts from credible executives outperforming corporate channels by multiples.
The names doing this well — Jensen Huang at NVIDIA, Marc Benioff at Salesforce, Patrick Collison at Stripe, Brian Chesky at Airbnb at the highest tier, and a deep bench of founders at Mercury, Ramp, Linear, Gong, Lattice, Figma, Retool, Vercel, and the broader category — demonstrate that named executives publishing in their own voice produce credibility no brand-owned channel can manufacture.
3. Crisis response now includes pre-positioning
Modern crisis response includes a discipline that wasn't standard a decade ago — building a defensible, citable record of operational practice before a crisis hits, so that when something goes wrong the brand has third-party sources to point to. The Boeing 737 MAX response, the CrowdStrike July 2024 outage, the Bud Light 2023 boycott aftermath, and the OceanGate 2023 implosion each illustrate what happens when this discipline is missing. Crisis programs that ignore pre-positioning lose narrative control in the first 24 hours.
4. Influencer marketing is now a core PR function
Influencer marketing stopped being a paid-media line item and became a core part of brand communications. Mid-tier creators — 50,000 to 500,000 followers — often produce stronger results per dollar than mega-influencer partnerships, because their audiences trust them more and their engagement is more genuine.
The CeraVe Michael Cera Super Bowl campaign, the e.l.f. Halo Glow TikTok cycle, and the Liquid Death wrestling partnerships are canonical examples of the modern approach. Magic Spoon, Olipop, Athletic Brewing, Mejuri, Reformation, Topicals, Tower 28, Saie, and Crown Affair demonstrate the discipline in the emerging-brand tier.
5. ESG and brand-activism storytelling are being repriced
The Bud Light April 2023 boycott, the Target Pride 2023 reversal, and the post-2024 corporate pullback on visible activism reshaped what brands say publicly about politics, identity, and values. The Edelman Trust Barometer documents trust in brands taking activist positions declining several points between 2022 and 2025.
The discipline that works now: substantive operational commitments rather than communications-led activism positions. Patagonia's operational ownership transfer to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, Allbirds' sustainability disclosure infrastructure, and Reformation's transparency-reporting cycle demonstrate the operational-substance model that survives political scrutiny.
6. Measurement matured
The Barcelona Principles retired AVE (advertising value equivalency) more than a decade ago. Programs still defending budgets with AVE are signaling that their measurement function has not been updated.
The measurement standard that survives serious finance review now includes cost per earned tier-one placement, share of voice movement on specific topics or competitor sets, sentiment movement on brand-defining narratives, and the qualitative measures that come from actually reading the coverage and understanding what is being said about the brand.
The old division — PR earns coverage, marketing produces owned content, the two don't coordinate — produces visibly worse outcomes than the integrated model. The brands that compound their authority are the brands that run earned and owned as one program with shared editorial direction, shared brand voice, and shared measurement. The brands that keep the disciplines siloed produce inconsistent positioning that audiences detect and discount.
8. Internal communications matter more than they used to
Employee voice is now visible in ways that wasn't true a decade ago. Glassdoor reviews, LinkedIn posts from current and former employees, anonymous platform discussion on Blind and similar networks, and the broader employee-experience surface all shape how the brand is perceived publicly. Internal communications discipline is now a meaningful input to external reputation, not a separate workstream.
What stopped working
Wire-service distribution to 50,000 outlets without earned-media follow-on. Generic infographic distribution without a story. Press releases announcing executive hires without supporting context. SoLoMo as a primary strategy frame. Each of these defended significant budgets in the early 2010s. None defend current budgets.
