Media, marketing and tech website Prolific North asked the leading lights of northern agencies for their thoughts and predictions for 2025.

They sought out Caroline Aspinall, Smoking Gun’s commercial director and head of B2B, to get her expert take on the exciting times ahead in the PR industry in 2025. See the full article below:

Staggering advances in technological innovation and an ever-evolving media landscape makes for an uncertain but exciting future for public relations.

Artificial intelligence is revolutionising content creation, audience targeting and predictive communication. Machine learning algorithms can now generate initial drafts, predict media trends and identify optimal communication channels with remarkable sophistication.

Despite all these useful tools – there is still a truth at the heart of public relations and that is that the dial is ultimately shifted by people telling stories to people.

The most successful PR strategies will integrate advanced AI-driven insights with human emotional intelligence to ensure an emotional connection is made. Brands that can balance technological precision with authentic, purpose-driven narratives will emerge as leaders in this evolving communication landscape.

The industry is increasingly focused on brand building – creating a strong base from which to build the rest of your messages. The other marketing layers will be less successful if we haven’t put those foundations in place.

Brands are speaking to customers through unified, multi-channel storytelling with stronger personalities to cut through the clutter – but all this stems from building that brand in the first instance.

Emerging technologies will be key to advances in another cornerstone of PR effectiveness: measurement. Analytics tools will provide granular insights into campaign performance, moving beyond traditional metrics to comprehensive impact analysis. PR professionals can quantify brand sentiment, track precise audience engagement and demonstrate clear return on investment with unprecedented accuracy.

At Smoking Gun we’re always on the front line of the battle for accurate and thorough measurement and we have exciting plans for a new measurement tool which we will be perfecting throughout 2025.

These AI tools are not replacing human creativity but augmenting strategic decision-making, allowing PR professionals to focus on nuanced storytelling and relationship building.

People-powered but AI-assisted.