The return of storytelling: Why PR must own the narrative
As AI floods the internet with content, the brands that win won’t be the loudest — they’ll be the most credible. New data suggests earned media and authentic storytelling are becoming more valuable, not less, in the algorithmic age, writes Ashford Pritchard, co-founder, Kicker Communications
Kicker Comms' Ashford Pritchard: "Communications that matter will be the ones that feel unmistakably human."
Much has been written about how AI will disrupt — or destroy, depending on your appetite for euphemism — the public relations sector.
The doomsayers have had considerable airtime.
But a recent Gartner report offers a striking counter-argument: by 2027, corporate PR and earned media budgets are set to double, and AI is the reason why.
Search volumes across AI platforms are growing exponentially, the report notes, while traditional search engine traffic is stagnating.
But here’s the caveat: AI search algorithms don’t reward the highest bidder or the most keyword-stuffed landing page.
Instead, they prioritise authoritative sources such as high-domain news outlets, government content and academic research — the kind of coverage that has always been the currency of good PR.
Most PR professionals will have spent many an awkward call explaining to an SEO manager why a top-tier masthead won’t drop a backlink to a brand’s website (and why, frankly, you shouldn’t ask them to). Or, alternatively, why shaping communications to fit an SEO framework took away from the effectiveness of the writing.
For years, that felt like a limitation we had to apologise for. Now it looks rather like a competitive advantage.
Answer: engine optimisation has emerged as the successor to SEO, and the rules of the game have fundamentally changed. The onus has shifted from keywords to narrative; from technical optimisation to the kind of genuine storytelling that earns its place in publications people actually trust.
For marketing and communications, this isn’t just a structural shift — it’s a cultural one. Just before Christmas, The Wall Street Journal declared that the hottest new job in corporate America is “storyteller”, a job title that PR professionals have, of course, been doing under various other names for decades.
Linkedin data backs it up: US job postings using the term doubled in the past year alone.
Businesses are waking up to the fact that in a world drowning in AI-generated content, the scarcest commodity isn’t information — it’s meaning.
For PR professionals, or storytellers, to embrace the rebrand, this is the moment we’ve spent years making the case for.
The best communications work has never been about volume or reach alone.
It’s been about having a strong point of view and a human story at its centre — work that starts from the outside in, that uses what a brand genuinely stands for to say something worth hearing.
Not just a voice in the room, but a perspective that makes a genuine difference in an industry or, at its most ambitious, society at large.
This isn’t purely an altruistic argument, though it needn’t be an embarrassing one either. Stories that create genuine emotional resonance both cut through the noise and, more importantly, drive behaviour. They move people from awareness to action.
As AI continues to commoditise content production at speed, the communications that matter will be the ones that feel unmistakably human: specific, credible and earned.
Most importantly, this signals a need for businesses to support and invest in the ultimate platform for authentic and powerful storytelling: free, independent and trustworthy media.
It’s almost ironic that the AI platforms many predict will swallow the jobs of editors and journalists hold “traditional” media in such high esteem as authoritative sources.
In a world where anyone can build content instantly, the sources we trust are infinitely more valuable. We need news and insight from people who know what they’re talking about — journalists, editors and commentators who hold truth in higher regard than vested interests. The very ones being disrupted are, algorithmically speaking, the most valuable people in the room.
In the AI era, supporting media isn’t just good citizenship, it’s a smart strategy.
The brands that back quality journalism while investing in genuine storytelling, and the PR and comms professionals who can actually deliver it, won’t just survive what’s coming — they’ll define it.
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