How to reflect on 2025… it has been odd, challenging and, more than anything, noisy.
When you work in PR, the noise is unavoidable; professionally speaking, you exist right in the middle of it. But it’s been true this year more than any other for a few reasons...
1. Artificial intelligence
You can’t move for talk of it. How will it be used, how could it be used, how should it be used.
But here’s the issue: how many people can genuinely claim to have any real expertise in the subject? Precious few.
The result, from a PR perspective, has been (to be frank) a lot of poor content around AI. Bland, banal chatter of the technology’s ‘disruptive potential’ that has become increasingly tedious.
This poses the question: Do you enter the fray and, if so, how do you cut through the noise?
Our answer has been to strip away the needless speculation and postulation. The clients we have commenting on AI are the ones who truly understand it and are not just using it so they can appear ‘on trend’.
And for those AI specialists, our advice has been to focus on brutal honesty and real-world examples. Don’t tippy toe around the big subjects – regulation, bias, rogue systems, security concerns, job losses – for fear of upsetting audiences, and don’t speak in vague and jargonistic terms.
2. The content creation cycle
At some point in 2025 it felt as though everyone launched a podcast – celebrities, sportspeople, journalists, TV personalities, businesspeople, founders, investors, commentators, and specialist content creators. For context, global monthly podcast listeners have risen from approximately 332 million in 2020 to around 584 million in 2025.
Obviously, podcasts aren’t new. But what has changed is their role in the media ecosystem. They’re no longer just a channel; they’re a source. What’s said on a podcast is clipped, shared on LinkedIn, debated on X, written up as an article, reacted to in another podcast… and suddenly a throwaway comment becomes “news”.
For PRs, that creates opportunity – but also risk. Messages don’t live in neat silos anymore. A casual remark can snowball, context can evaporate, and narratives can form before brands have had time to react. The job is no longer just about placing stories, but about understanding how ideas travel, mutate and resurface across platforms.
Over the past year, we’ve focused more on integrated comms than ever before. Every piece of content, announcement, milestone and major news story sits at the heart of an integrated campaign to ensure we maximise exposure for clients, reach audiences across multiple touchpoints, and deliver consistent messages for brands on all relevant platforms.
3. Politics, the Budget, and the fog of uncertainty
And then there’s the backdrop to all of this: political and economic uncertainty.
This might be recency bias (I am still grumpy about it), but the Budget was a perfect illustration. Confusion over policy direction, mixed messaging, and rapid reinterpretation by commentators meant businesses were left scrambling to understand what it all actually meant for them.
We’ve seen this acutely in PR, too. Marketing budgets are under pressure, procurement teams are tougher, and leadership wants to know not just what activity is happening, but why. It’s a drum we’ve been banging for years, but vanity metrics simply won’t cut it anymore. Share of voice without impact, coverage without relevance, awareness without action – these are no longer enough, and tightening budgets have increased scrutiny of how to make comms work for businesses.
Paradoxically, this has been a good thing. It’s forced better conversations whether PR is genuinely influencing reputation, trust and behaviour, rather than just creating noise for noise’s sake.
Time to kick on…
The factors outlined above have all made 2025 louder, faster and harder to navigate. But they’ve also reinforced something fundamental: good PR has never been more valuable. Indeed, in a world driven increasingly by AI and machine-generated content, the power of a human voice, authentic brands and messages that stand out should not be underestimated.
