The job titles tell the story. Five years ago, "Director of Public Relations" was a common senior title at large brands. Today it is rarer than "Director of Communications," "VP of Corporate Affairs," "Chief Brand Officer," or any of a dozen variants that share one feature: they do not include the words "public relations."
The shift is not branding cosmetics. It reflects a real expansion of the function and a real contraction of what the word "PR" is now understood to mean.
What the word lost
"Public relations" got narrower over the last fifteen years. Adjacent disciplines — content marketing, social media, influencer relations, corporate affairs, employee communications, executive thought leadership, crisis management, ESG communications — emerged and consolidated. Each was once part of what a PR department did. Each developed its own specialist practice.
What was left under the "PR" label was a smaller subset: media relations, primarily. And media relations — pitching journalists, securing earned coverage — is real work but it is no longer the bulk of what the broader function does.
The result is that a senior leader who runs the full communications function does not want a title that suggests they only do media relations. The function broadened. The word stayed narrow.
What the holding companies are doing
The major agency holding companies have been retiring the "PR" label at the operating-company level for years. Edelman calls itself "the world's largest communications firm." Weber Shandwick describes its work as "communications" rather than PR. Burson — the merged Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolfe entity — also leads with communications. The traditional PRovoke Media rankings and O'Dwyer's rankings still use "PR firm" as the category label, but the firms inside the rankings increasingly do not.
Below the holding-company level, the pattern is similar. Agencies that once had "Public Relations" in their formal name have quietly dropped it. The branding migrates to the function — communications, brand strategy, integrated marketing — that the agency wants the market to associate with its work.
What clients are buying
The procurement side has shifted in parallel. RFPs that ten years ago specified "PR services" now specify "integrated communications," "earned and owned channel strategy," "reputation management," or "AI-era brand visibility." The scopes inside those RFPs include media relations, but media relations is rarely the centerpiece. Increasingly, the centerpiece is some combination of measurable business outcome work — pipeline influence for B2B, share-of-voice for consumer, executive positioning for individuals — that integrates traditional earned media with digital, owned content, and (now) AI surfaces.
Pricing models have followed. Pure media-relations retainers are smaller than they were a decade ago. Integrated retainers, project-based work for specific outcomes, and hybrid models that combine retained capacity with project surge are growing.
The data behind the shift
USC Annenberg's Global Communication Report has tracked the broadening function for years. The most recent editions document a clear trajectory: practitioners spend a smaller share of time on traditional media relations and a larger share on owned content, social and digital, internal communications, and emerging areas like AI visibility and ESG storytelling.
Survey data from the Page Society on Chief Communications Officers tells the same story from the senior end. The CCO role increasingly includes responsibility for areas that would not have been part of the job description a decade ago — corporate reputation, employee experience, AI strategy alignment, government affairs coordination.
What this means in practice
A few practical implications.
Hiring should match function, not title. A communications department recruiting senior talent should think carefully about what scope they actually want, and write the job description accordingly. The title says less about the role than the responsibilities do.
Agency selection benefits from category-agnostic evaluation. If the work scope spans earned media, owned content, social, and AI visibility, the relevant evaluation criteria are about the agency's integrated capabilities, not whether they call themselves a "PR firm" or a "communications agency." The brand label is becoming less discriminating.
Trade press still uses "PR." Industry coverage in publications like PRWeek, PRovoke Media, O'Dwyer's, and others continues to use the older terminology. That is fine for industry conversation. It is not necessarily what brands should use externally.
The work is more interesting. This is the underdiscussed effect. The expanded function is harder, requires more cross-disciplinary skill, and produces more business impact when done well. The senior people doing it have a better job than the senior people doing media relations alone had ten years ago.
What stays the same
Earned media still matters. Journalist relationships still matter. The discipline of pitching, story development, and credibility building has not changed in any fundamental way. What has changed is that those activities are now one stream within a broader function rather than the function itself.
"PR" as a word will probably remain in the industry vocabulary indefinitely. As a description of what the senior communications function actually does, it has been quietly retired by most of the people doing the work.
