PR Didn’t Die. It Became Infrastructure.
By Debi Hammond, Founder + CEO, Merlot Marketing
People have been declaring PR dead for years.
Every year or two, someone writes the obituary. The press release is finished. Earned media is a relic. Nobody reads anymore. The gatekeepers are gone.
Meanwhile, here’s what actually happened while PR was supposedly taking its last breath.
Podcasts became media outlets. LinkedIn became a publishing platform. Influencers started doing the work journalists used to do. CEOs became content creators. A thread on Reddit can move the stock price before the market opens. A fifteen-second video on TikTok can sell out a product by lunch. And AI now reads all of it, summarizes all of it, and quietly decides what shows up when someone goes looking for an answer.
That’s not a dying discipline. That’s a discipline that integrated everything.
PR didn’t weaken. It became infrastructure.
Some People Still Think PR Means Press Releases
That’s a little like saying Netflix is a DVD-by-mail service. Technically, once upon a time, true. Wildly beside the point now.
Here’s the shift most brands haven’t fully absorbed: the old PESO Model®, created by Gini Dietrich – paid, earned, shared, owned – was never wrong, but the walls between those boxes have dissolved. Earned coverage becomes owned content the moment you post the link. Owned content becomes shared the second an employee reposts it. Shared content gets picked up by an influencer, which reads to the algorithm (and to a buyer) as earned credibility. And every one of those touchpoints becomes training data for the AI tools now sitting between your brand and the person searching for it.
Everything feeds everything.
What a Story Actually Does Now
Let me make it concrete, because in the Home + Building space this isn’t theoretical.
A manufacturer launches a new panel system. The old playbook said: write the release, pitch the trades, celebrate the pickup. And we still love a great pickup, but that’s no longer the finish line. It’s the first domino.
That trade article gets shared by the VP of sales on LinkedIn, where an architect sees it. A builder posts a jobsite walkthrough of the install to social, and suddenly the product has a face and a use case. A designer name-checks it on a podcast. Six months later, when a specifier types “best fiber cement panel for a rainscreen application” into an AI search tool, the model assembles an answer out of every one of those signals, and your brand is either in that answer or invisible.
That entire chain is PR now. Not “PR-adjacent.” PR.
PR Isn’t About Coverage Anymore. It’s About Discoverability.
Today, PR isn’t just about getting coverage. It’s about shaping discoverability, credibility, perception, and digital narrative. Simultaneously.
That’s a bigger job than it used to be, and a more important one. Because the currency hasn’t changed, even though the channels have. What we’ve always been paid to do is connect a brand with the voices that matter to its audience: the editor, the architect, the influencer, the algorithm, the customer standing in a showroom. The number of those voices exploded. The instinct required to reach them is the same one good PR people have always had.
There’s a gut-check a sharp journalist makes in about three seconds: is this story worth my audience’s time? That instinct hasn’t been automated away. It’s been distributed: to podcasters, to creators, to Reddit moderators, to AI systems trained on human judgment. The brands that win are the ones whose story survives that three-second test everywhere it lands.
This Is Why We Built PR.0™
Long before AI was in every conversation, we recognized that communications had stopped moving in straight lines. Stories don’t travel from a release to a reporter to a reader anymore. They move through ecosystems looping, feeding, and reinforcing each other across earned, shared, owned, influencer, search, and AI discovery all at once.
PR.0™ is our answer to that reality: narrative ecosystems instead of isolated tactics. We don’t chase a single placement and call it a win. We build a story engineered to move: to get earned, get shared, get referenced, and get found. And then we measure what happened to the business, not just how many clips we collected.
After 25 years powering the communications teams behind some of Home + Building’s most recognized brands, I’ll tell you the through-line: the tools change constantly, the job doesn’t. The job is to make a brand’s story undeniable, and then to make sure it’s undeniable everywhere the audience is now paying attention.
PR Didn’t Lose Its Seat at the Table. It Became the Table.
The companies still treating PR as a press-release function are playing a game that ended years ago. The ones treating it as the connective tissue between reputation, discovery, and demand are the ones who’ll own the narrative. And in a market this crowded and this fast, owning the narrative is the whole ballgame.
PR isn’t more of what it used to be. It’s more than it ever was.