Marketing Loves Declaring the End of Things That Still Work

“There isn’t a such factor as PR anymore,” Sir Martin Sorrell concluded final week throughout a debate with Sarah Waddington, CEO of the UK’s Public Relations and Communications Affiliation. Within the digital age, Sorrell argued, storytelling requires “flooding the web with content material” quite than conventional earned media approaches. PR, he instructed, has been subsumed by the large digital content material machine and is now functionally extinct.The declare makes zero sense. As a number of PR professionals had been fast to level out, the irony of declaring PR lifeless whereas showing on a flagship radio program to form a story is itself a masterclass in public relations. Sorrell understands this completely effectively. He has spent fifty years crafting provocative headlines to generate consideration. And right here he was, doing precisely that.However Sir Martin is hardly alone in his morbid obsession. Advertising is exclusive amongst disciplines for its funereal fascination with predicting the approaching demise of each facet of its personal operation.Scott Galloway famously and ridiculously declared that “the period of brand name is over” at Cannes, arguing that buyers not want model recognition as a result of they’ve, er, manufacturers like TripAdvisor and Reddit. Gary Vaynerchuk has spent his profession conducting final rites for tv promoting, claiming that “the TV firms are all lifeless” and that it’s “solely a matter of time” earlier than they disappear. He was trumped by Raja Rajamannar, the chief advertising and communications officer at Mastercard and president of the World Federation of Advertisers, who introduced at Cannes that the entire of promoting “as we all know it” was lifeless. Then Invoice Lee went additional, writing within the Harvard Enterprise Evaluate that the entire of conventional advertising together with promoting, public relations, branding and company communications was now completed.It’s a bloodbath.We’ve been making these similar errors for many years. In 1950, trade observers declared radio completed. David Sarnoff, the person who’d constructed RCA on radio, was already predicting its demise and pouring assets into tv. Seventy-five years later, radio promoting in America generates roughly $18 billion yearly. The format developed, shifting to music, information, and speak. Podcasting emerged as radio’s digital descendant. The medium tailored quite than expired.In 1982, Jack Valenti, president of the Movement Image Affiliation of America, instructed Congress that the VCR was “to the American movie producer and the American public because the Boston Strangler is to the lady house alone.” House video went on to grow to be the mainstay of studio revenues for twenty years.We noticed adjustment and evolution. Change, however not extinction. E mail advertising is pronounced deceased each time a brand new communication platform emerges, but it delivers the best ROI of any digital channel. Nothing in advertising ever really dies. It evolves, contracts, expands into new kinds, and makes room for no matter arrives subsequent. Our ecosystem adjusts quite than annihilates its incumbents.As we hurtle in the direction of an exhausting finish to 2025, it’s tempting to view this second as an ending too. However in fact, we stock on. The solar will rise on New 12 months’s Day with the same old mixture of optimism and hangover. PR professionals will nonetheless be shaping narratives. web optimization specialists will nonetheless be optimizing. Model managers will nonetheless be branding. Tv promoting will nonetheless be reaching mass audiences. E mail entrepreneurs will nonetheless be delivering ROI. There’s something great in that persistence. Whereas advertising undertakers sharpen their headlines and promoting eulogists put together their convention displays, the remainder of us merely get on with it. We adapt. We evolve. We proceed. We ignore.So, as 2026 approaches, let’s settle for that every part from PR to web optimization to manufacturers to promoting will nonetheless be with us into the New 12 months and past. Let’s make a disciplinary New 12 months’s decision to put off the fascination with advertising loss of life.Blissful New 12 months. See you on the opposite facet.Mark Ritson will educate the ADWEEK MiniMBA in Advertising in April 2026, a ten-week MBA stage program for senior managers who by no means acquired (or have utterly forgotten) correct advertising coaching. Enroll right here.