Taylor York, National Head of Earned & Owned, Thinkerbell:
At the exact moment the advertising world is desperately trying to engineer earned-first creativity through fame and culture-shaping moments, WPP is reportedly considering selling off its 6,000-person PR crown jewel, Burson.
To the casual observer, shedding a legacy communications giant looks like a retreat from the discipline. But look closer. This isn’t a sign that PR is dying – it’s proof that the standalone PR silo is dying. With the broader industry waking up to this reality, isolated holding-company silos like Burson are struggling to justify their separate existence.
Holding companies are notorious for internal turf wars where creative and PR agencies fight over the same client budgets. Selling Burson removes this friction. It forces WPP’s remaining agencies to fully absorb earned media into their own P&Ls, delivering the simplicity modern CMOs crave: unified creative and a media/PR strategy that builds brand and wins in culture.
To understand why this is happening, we have to look at three seismic shifts currently reshaping the industry:
Measurement and commercial reality
Looking at the longer-term impacts of earned media is an area ripe for growth, but the PR industry has historically struggled to show its true commercial value.
The industry needs a big shift away from measuring success purely by volume of coverage or column inches at one-off campaign moments, moving toward the long-term impact on consumer behaviour and the bottom line. The hard data already backs this up: the gold-standard effectiveness research from the IPA (Binet & Field) consistently proves that campaigns driving “fame”, the core output of campaigns that are earned by nature, help brands outperform their competitors across major business metrics, including sales, market share, and price sensitivity.
When PR is absorbed into a broader creative and media P&L, it can no longer hide behind vanity metrics like ridiculous reach numbers, ‘share of voice’ or ‘trust’. It is finally forced to be measured by the same rigorous marketing sciences and business/brand outcomes.
The disciplines are merging
If you look at the work driving the biggest commercial returns right now (which inevitably also take home the global awards), the takeaway is unavoidable: everything is PR. The best creative agencies aren’t just making ads anymore; they are eating traditional PR’s lunch by building earned-led, social-first brand platforms from the ground up that play in or around culture.
The first time a PR agency won the Grand Prix at Cannes in the PR category was only recently in 2024 by Golin London for Specsavers’ ‘The Misheard Version’. Yes, it won an award, but more importantly, it solved a hard business problem. It wasn’t focused on just getting lots of free attention via news media using a mass of publicists; it drove brand and commercial action. Earned media wasn’t an afterthought bolted onto a media plan; it was the genesis of the creative idea that drove the business result.
Golin is an exceptional standalone agency part of the Omnicom Group with creativity and behaviour change built into its offering. While that allowed them to produce this brilliant work, the majority of PR agencies do not share this structural set-up – and as a result the overall blueprint for holding companies is moving away from this siloed style of PR agency.
The fluid brand experience
Ultimately, the rigid distinctions between ‘paid’, ‘performance’, ‘advertising’ and ‘PR’ (and everything else) are becoming redundant. Today, you simply have a brand and its experience. There are distinct skills and knowledge areas required to build that experience, but the flow of communications and discourse in our world is collapsing and becoming infinitely more fluid and chaotic.
In this context, selling off Burson is almost a misdirection. It is an acknowledgment of a more agnostic and fluid way to interact with consumers. This feeds perfectly into the philosophy we champion at Thinkerbell: What’s your brand? And what are you trying to accomplish (what consumer behaviour are you trying to influence or what business problem do you have)? And once we know that, we develop ideas as part of an alchemical system to achieve that, that are channel agnostic and can naturally be stretched across all mediums.
You can no longer treat PR as an isolated island, geographically and financially divorced from the broader brand experience. To survive today, brands don’t need a massive, separate PR business unit fighting for its own P&L. They need an agency that ‘does PR’ effortlessly alongside everything else.
Crucially, this divestment trades a heavy 20th-century headcount model for an agile 21st-century capability model. It frees up capital to invest in opportunities like AI and creator tech; the exact tools needed to actually embed “PR everywhere” across a streamlined network.
The discipline of PR and earned media has absolutely won the war, but the traditional, siloed PR business model has lost. The sell-off proves it once and for all: PR isn’t a department anymore.