Public relations, advertising and branding are regularly declared obsolete, yet they continue to underpin how organizations communicate. The latest obituary came from Sir Martin Sorrell, who recently argued in a radio debate with Sarah Waddington, CEO of the UK’s Public Relations and Communications Association, that “there is no such thing as PR anymore.”
Sorrell claimed that, in the digital era, effective storytelling is about “flooding the internet with content” rather than relying on traditional earned media. In his view, PR has been absorbed into a broader digital content ecosystem and has effectively disappeared as a distinct discipline.
Many PR practitioners quickly pointed out the contradiction: using a high-profile broadcast appearance to shape a narrative is itself a textbook PR strategy. Sorrell, who has spent decades crafting provocative soundbites to attract attention, understands this dynamic well.
His comments fit a familiar pattern. Few industries are as eager as marketing to announce the death of their own tools and practices.
- At Cannes, Scott Galloway proclaimed that “the era of brand is over,” arguing that recommendation platforms such as review sites and forums have replaced the need for brand recognition.
- Gary Vaynerchuk has repeatedly predicted the collapse of television advertising, stating that “the TV companies are all dead” and that it is “only a matter of time” before they vanish.
- Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard and president of the World Federation of Advertisers, went further at Cannes, declaring that advertising “as we know it” was dead.
- In the Harvard Business Review, Bill Lee argued that traditional marketing—from advertising and PR to branding and corporate communications—was finished altogether.
These pronouncements echo decades of premature eulogies for established media and channels.
In 1950, commentators predicted the end of radio. David Sarnoff, who built RCA on the back of radio, was already shifting focus and investment to television. Yet roughly three-quarters of a century later, U.S. radio advertising still generates around $18 billion annually. The medium changed—moving toward music, news and talk formats—while podcasting emerged as a digital extension. Radio evolved instead of disappearing.
In 1982, Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told Congress that the VCR was “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” In reality, home video went on to become a primary revenue stream for studios for about two decades.
The same pattern applies in digital marketing. Email is frequently written off whenever a new platform rises, yet it consistently delivers some of the strongest return on investment of any digital channel. New formats arrive, audiences shift, and budgets move, but existing channels rarely vanish altogether.
In practice, marketing tools tend not to die; they adapt. Channels contract, expand, and find new roles in a broader ecosystem. Instead of annihilating what came before, new technologies usually sit alongside incumbents.
As 2025 winds down, it is tempting to cast the current moment as another ending. But next year will look more like continuity than collapse. On New Year’s Day, PR professionals will still be shaping narratives. SEO specialists will still be optimizing. Brand managers will still be nurturing brands. Television advertising will still reach mass audiences. Email marketers will still be generating returns.
The constant is not extinction but persistence and adjustment. While some industry voices continue to deliver dramatic “death of” speeches on conference stages and in opinion columns, most practitioners focus on the quieter work of updating strategies and integrating old and new channels.
Heading into 2026, the more useful resolution for the industry may be to retire the recurring death notices and concentrate instead on how disciplines—from PR and SEO to branding and advertising—can evolve together.
Mark Ritson will teach the ADWEEK MiniMBA in Marketing in April 2026, a ten-week MBA-level program aimed at senior managers seeking formal marketing training or a refresh of core principles.