Aniruddha Bhagwat is the CEO & Co Founder at Ideosphere Consulting
Acta Diurna
Social media has become the first place where people find out what is happening in the world.
A short video. Thirty seconds. A scroll through the comments.
You decide what you agree with. You may even add your own comment to strengthen that view. This is how influence is now created. If this is influence, then PR in its current form is dying. Our jobs and organizations are going with it.
Influence is not trust
PR has evolved from influence to trust. A post, a video, and a chain of comments can change an opinion. They can create noise. But they do not build trust.
When the weather is the most trusted part of any news package, we are in trouble. And we are. People no longer trust news. At best, it influences. A viral post and a front-page headline have similar reach, but both suffer from low trust.
How did we get here
It is our fault. We fixed the news for years and assumed readers would not notice. Now they know. The cat is out of the bag. What got us here will not get us there.
Ivy Lee saw this coming. His “Declaration of Principles” said that openness and truthfulness were essential for PR to succeed. But over time these principles were chipped away. Bernays gave women “torches of freedom.” Media became a business. Social platforms arrived. AI blurred the lines of what is real and what is not.
Today’s audience is smarter. Every article must prove its authenticity. Readers assume it is false until proven true. They feel they know everything, or at least they can search for it.
Looking back to look forward
The future of PR may not lie in AI or in technology. It may lie in history.
PR began with village elders. Their words were trusted more than anyone else. Gladiators in Rome endorsed products because their fame was a trust signal. Philosophers in Greece persuaded citizens by lending their credibility to civic causes.
The most powerful PR campaigns of the future will not begin with a press release. They will begin with a moment. A moment that is consistent, visible, and real. Or a moment that is so different from the claimed reality that it stands out.
A true PR moment is not created in a boardroom. It is created in the lived reality of people. Think of a company quietly paying its workers during a shutdown while others lay off staff. Or a brand refusing to delete a controversial post, standing firm on a moral stand. These moments are not announcements. They are demonstrations. They are lived acts that others notice, talk about, and amplify.
Moments have consequences. A single moment can expose hypocrisy, reveal strength, or inspire loyalty. Unlike campaigns that are engineered to fade, moments live longer because they are anchored in truth. They are harder to control, but that is also their power.
The campaigns of tomorrow will focus on creating the conditions where such moments are possible. That means organisations will need to behave in ways that are consistent, transparent, and human, so that when the spotlight falls, the truth shines through. It also means that communicators must sharpen their ability to spot and frame these moments, connecting them to wider cultural narratives. A powerful moment, once seen, cannot be unseen. It will tell the story by itself
What makes a moment different from a campaign is its unpredictability. Campaigns are planned. They follow calendars, budgets, and timelines. Moments break through because they feel unscripted. A brand admitting failure before anyone else exposes it. A leader staying silent when everyone else is shouting. These are not strategies written on slides. They are fragments of reality that carry more weight than any designed message.
The challenge for communicators will be twofold. First, to help organisations behave in ways that create the possibility of such moments. Second, to recognise them in real time and amplify them before they vanish in the flood of content. PR will move from manufacturing narratives to curating and protecting them. And that shift will decide which brands people trust in the future.
The lesson of origin
Think of the recent Astronomer HR/CEO controversy. We all know the story. But do we know the exact source? Who posted it first?
Now imagine if we could scan the universe of media and identify those origin points. If seeded there, a story could grow global. Today we scatter influencers like darts and hope they stick. Tomorrow AI could help us find the true points of origin.
Humans and AI
AI will take over much of the delivery chain. But the value of the communicator will live in the white spaces that AI cannot fill. Cultural instinct. Emotional timing. The ability to connect invisible dots between what a company does and how people feel about it.
AI may help us gain reach, scale, and even influence. But long-term trust comes from understanding human beliefs and habits. Algorithms cannot explain what makes us cry or what makes us forgive. Humans can.
The new focus of PR
The art of PR in the future will be the art of understanding trust. Mediums, tools, and tactics will be accessible to everyone. What will matter is the depth of human understanding.
Used to be that someone would show, and PR would tell. The future may be in the business of showing. The telling now belongs to billions of people and the channels they control.
Truth will win. Not once but again and again.
A daily act of truth. For future generations.
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