It’s that time of year again—the time when we can’t help but greet each other with “Happy new year,” “How was your holiday?” and “I cannot believe it’s this cold” (at least where I live).
But it’s also the time of year when we at Fullintel—along with our power-packed panel of PR professionals—like to pull out our trusty crystal ball and predict what PR trends we’ll likely see during the coming year.
This year’s panel consists of:
- Johna Burke, Managing Director of the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC)
- Sean David Williams, Associate Teaching Professor of Media and Communications, Bowling Green State University
- Martin Waxman, Digital Communications Strategist at Martin Waxman Communications
- Katie Paine, Measurement Queen and Founder/CEO of Paine Publishing
- James Rubec, Head of Product at Fullintel
Let’s dive into what they had to say!
Table of Contents
- 1. Navigating Fractured Audiences and News Avoiders
- 2. Listening Everywhere, Not Just Your Preferred Channels
- 3. The Accelerating Convergence of PR and Marketing
- 4. AI Usage Disclosure
- 5. Advanced AI Usage, for Good and Bad
- 6. AI as Media Measurement Enabler
- 7. The Decline of Influencer Value
- 8. More Informed Issues Management and Narrative Tracking
1. Navigating Fractured Audiences and News Avoiders
It’s no secret that distrust in traditional media is growing, with recent Pew research saying a majority of Americans now get their news from social media. Further research from the Reuters Institute says nearly 40 percent of global respondents now actively avoid the news—a three percent rise from last year, and an unthinkable number compared to decades past.
Some consumers have even started avoiding social media, as well.
But while brands could simply shrug this contingent off as unreachable, AMEC’s Burke says that would be a mistake.
“The avoiders aren’t going to factor into your datasets as much,” she says, “but they should. And that’s where research is absolutely critical to finding out where those people are, where they are getting information, how they’re sourcing information, and how and where to communicate with those people where they are—not where the comms team wants them to be.”
Bowling Green’s Sean David Williams agrees, with the caveat that this trend almost certainly makes the job that much more difficult. To build market share, teams will have to “find places with the people you want to communicate with, which is a much more research-based and difficult focus than simply trying to get more eyeballs.”
2. Listening Everywhere, Not Just Your Preferred Channels
Speaking of finding people in the right places, Burke says it’ll be imperative for PR teams to listen to conversations on all relevant channels—not just the PR team’s preferred ones—when operating in what PR Week calls the “permacrisis era” of today.
Without monitoring conversations and relevant issues wherever they take place, PR teams could easily miss a brewing crisis.
“No matter what the audience’s beliefs are, you don’t have to like it or agree with it, but you still need to listen,” she explains. “You don’t even have to give it acknowledgment. But you need to be listening on all channels, whether or not you think they are toxic—it’s an obligation to your brand, so if something happens you aren’t quite so flat-footed.”
Fullintel’s James Rubec adds that it’s important for brands to monitor for chatter of potentially relevant issues, wherever the content may reside and “even if the organization doesn’t want to address those issues.
“Even if the organization doesn’t feel like those issues are going to have an impact, it’s real and can be measured in footfall traffic at stores,” he says. “It can be measured in website traffic. All of those things are death by a thousand cuts for an organization.”
3. The Accelerating Convergence of PR and Marketing
The PESO model has long distinguished between paid, earned, shared, and owned media. But Williams says these four previously siloed functions will accelerate their fusion into one within organizations in 2025—something he calls a “triumph of grand strategy.
“We continue to see that students who get hired from our university get put into situations where they’re not just doing advertising, even if they’ve majored in advertising. They’re not just doing PR, even if they majored in PR.”
This convergence, he says, has both good and not-so-good implications:
- Instead of siloed groups competing against one another, the same group can take a holistic view of an organization’s comms activities and tailor each activity—whether it’s marketing, advertising, or PR—to the most appropriate audience.
- Such consolidation, however, often comes with job cuts, meaning additional pressure on teams to do more with less.
Katie Paine of Paine Publishing agrees but says many organizations still have a long way to go on the convergence front—especially when it comes to data.
“I don’t know of a project I’ve worked on in the last two years where, whether it’s social or marketing or paid versus owned, I can’t get the data I need because somebody is sitting on it in some other department,” she says, “and frequently the department is in a different building.”
Fullintel’s Rubec says that as organizations downsize, PR teams will need to focus on the highest-impact activities while letting go of labor-intensive practices.
But he says PR pros should always command a seat at the table when big communications decisions are made. “The PR function needs to act as an ethical lens by which the organization views itself and how the public views it,” he explains. “And when that ethical lens isn’t actually put forward and doesn’t have a strong voice, you end up with catastrophe and more brand risk.”
4. AI Usage Disclosure
2024 was partially characterized by the emergence of AI usage and disclosure policies at some organizations, and experts say that trend will likely accelerate this year.
Martin Waxman, an AI expert and instructor of LinkedIn’s Using Generative AI in Public Relations course, says such policies are likely to become as routine and baked-in as social or digital media usage, HR, and other bedrock policies of an organization.
“They’re built into the fabric of the organization, certainly to its governance, so that employees know how to behave and external audiences know what the organization is doing.”
Waxman says such policies are part of a larger discussion around how companies, organizations, and people use AI at work. Using AI for content creation, he says, can be risky because “there’s that sameness to it.
“If you’re asking it to create a blog post in a certain way for a product in a competitive category, there’s a very good chance your competitors are asking for something similar. And as a result, you get what tech people call ‘AI slop.’ And we need to think beyond that.”
Williams says the implementation of disclosure policies is especially important because many employees will be included “to keep their AI use a secret.
“And the temptation on the agency side is they don’t want clients to know they’re no longer having an intern spend two hours writing a brief, because they still want to bill that client as they have in the past.”
5. Advanced AI Usage, For Good and Bad
Some of the more advanced uses for AI Waxman identifies for PR pros includes the creation of synthetic focus groups or media personalities PR teams can use to test ideas and pitches.
Teams can create synthetic personas based on customer data, give an AI agent a list of questions and parameters, then instruct it to find out what your focus groups think about certain topics. This is something he says can be done with any public-facing large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
“And hopefully you get enough results that it expands your way of thinking in terms of A/B testing or message testing. It can provide a different perspective.”
But Waxman says AI is certainly no panacea, and Paine agrees that its potential for mayhem in the communications space is profound—and likely imminent with the rise of super-slick generative video such as OpenAI’s incredibly impressive Sora video generator.
“The big factor to me is AI as a powerful and pervasive disinformation tool,” she says. “I think the threat from AI disinformation is greater than the benefit we’re going to get out of it.”
6. AI as Media Measurement Enabler
Rubec says the power of AI will make its presence felt in the media monitoring and analysis realm more than ever before in 2025, specifically around labor-intensive tasks including brand- and entity-level sentiment, nuanced audience engagement, article tagging, media impact scoring, and even article summary generation.
“These are traditionally manual qualitative metrics scored by humans,” he says. But with strong training datasets and humans in the loop to ensure accuracy, the application of LLMs to media monitoring and analysis can be a game-changer.
“Because when you ask the models some basic questions—is this person in this article, are they speaking favorably or negatively about a brand, does what they say impact the brand—the level of detail and accuracy is incredible.
“So we’re going to see AI become the enabler, and certainly not the enemy.”
7. The Decline of Influencer Value
Burke says one of the most impactful trends to emerge in 2025 will be “a massive shift in influencer value,” citing the lack of value—or perhaps even negative value—of celebrity endorsements provided to U.S. presidential hopeful Kamala Harris.
“CEOs are going to look at that and say, ‘How did that not create a tsunami of victory?’ And it didn’t. And so brands and organizations will really have to look at the influencer model and what they’re getting from it.”
Consider that average engagement rates for influencers on social media have dropped precipitously in recent years:
- TikTok’s influencer engagement rates dropped 35 percent in 2023.
- The engagement rate for influencers on Facebook and X are a miniscule .15 percent and 0.05 percent, respectively.
Part of that is likely due to a more educated audience that now fully realizes most professional influencers (not to be confused with user-generated content creators) aren’t much different than any other business trying to sell a product.
8. More Informed Issues Management and Narrative Tracking
As Williams noted above, defining success in PR isn’t about tracking the most eyeballs and calling it a day—uncovering value and finding your core audience is much more nuanced and research-based.
Rubec agrees, adding that brands have begun focusing more on issues management and tracking to better understand narratives around their business, industry, and the world at large in an age of interconnected economies.
“Brands are shifting focus from insular narratives about themselves toward broader themes that resonate within their industries and society,” he says. Brands now see the value of positioning themselves within those larger conversations.
“You can’t just count articles and say you’re doing well. You need to see how the discussion evolves. It’s not just, ‘Are we being discussed?’ It’s ‘Are we being discussed in the right venues, amongst the right channels, and the right audiences?’”
Keep on Top of Fast-Moving PR Trends With Fullintel
The only constant is change, as the saying goes, and that’s certainly the case in PR and communications in 2025. From the twin opportunities (or challenges) of AI and convergence, to the need to navigate ever-fracturing audiences and listen to views you may not agree with, the coming year is shaping up to feature no lack of excitement for PR professionals.
No matter which trends you track for your organization, however, you can stay on top of them easier and more accurately with Fullintel’s suite of media monitoring and analysis tools and services, including AI-powered monitoring paired with expert human curation.
Contact us today to learn more about how Fullintel can provide advanced situational awareness to your enterprise.
