In a recent edition of this newsletter Jack O’Dwyer asked an intriguing question that stoked my interest and imagination: “Where are the celebrities of PR?”

Indeed, where are they? Jack believes that, save Richard Edelman, Mike Paul and Fraser Seitel (who writes a regular column for the O’Dwyer’s newsletter), there aren’t any real celebrities left in today’s PR industry. According to Jack, the 60s, 70s and part of the 80s were the “Golden Age” of the PR profession, with celebrity PR executives rubbing shoulders with reporters (also celebrities?) and other boldfaced names.

I mostly agree with Jack’s thesis that the PR profession today is pretty devoid of high profile personalities and practitioners. It’s not surprising that one of the few well known players left in the PR business is Richard Edelman, who runs one of the last of the big firms that remains proudly independent.

In a world ruled by global agency holding groups, the senior execs now running the largest PR agencies need to toe the corporate line and focus incessantly on delivering an ever increasing share of profits to their corporate owners. If they miss their numbers, they are gone. That does not leave much time for interacting within the industry or for building visible profiles in the business and cultural realms.

On the corporate side, when was the last time you saw the head of corporate communications for a major company actually being quoted in the media? Jack clearly has a point. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s easy to see why there are so few remaining PR celebrities.

The lack of celebrities that Jack bemoans is, in my view, emblematic of an even larger problem threatening both the PR profession and our brethren in the advertising industry. The real problem is that the PR and advertising functions themselves have lost influence and clout in modern marketing and communications. That epicenter of power has shifted to the technology industry, and especially the growing universe of start-ups that are reinventing and disrupting media and marketing (and PR).

So, where are the marketing and media celebrities now? They are running web-based, socially-driven companies with names like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Huffington Post and LinkedIn, to name just a few. The hot new celebrities can also be found in the dominant hardware companies like Apple and Samsung, which are creating the must-have devices that are giving consumers and business executives more power and communications connectivity than ever before.

Those are just the best known of the highest profile companies, founded and run by today’s legitimate business celebrities. We may have heard of Zuck, Larry and Sergey, and Marissa, but there are many other B2C and B2B tech company founders and smart young executives who are stepping up to become the all stars of marketing.

For example, who needs to employ a high priced direct marketing agency when you actually have more lead generation firepower at your fingertips by using a marketing automation platform like Marketo? (Phil Fernandez, co-founder and CEO of Marketo, may not be a marketing industry celebrity yet, but for a growing group of savvy marketers, he and his ilk are the new marketing heroes.)

I read an article in TechCrunch this past week that quoted from one of the founders of Benchmark Capital, a blue-chip Silicon Valley VC firm that has backed some of the Internet industry’s aristocracy. He said that one of his main criteria for deciding whether to invest in a start up is their reliance on marketing to grow their business. The more they spend on marketing and PR – and use agencies providing these services – the less he is interested in funding these start ups. (If that is not a wake-up call for our profession, I don’t know what is!)

I recently blogged about the rise of “growth hacking,” a hybrid capability that combines product marketing, engineering and social media expertise. Growth hackers are pretty dismissive of marketing and communications professionals, claiming that start up success today is much more about APIs than MBAs. Growth hackers are now becoming celebrities in the technology world.

Now, I am not predicting the imminent demise of PR and advertising. In fact, I am constantly amazed at how resilient PR and ad agencies continue to be. These agencies survive (and some even thrive) in today’s socially-driven media and marketing environment, where their particular expertise and capabilities are increasingly in less demand by more and more technology-enabled businesses.

What I am arguing is that the PR and advertising professions need to fully and honestly embrace the stark new reality that they don’t own the marketing and communications game anymore. They need to double down on innovation and disruptive thinking if they want to compete and win in a global marketing game where the rules, tools and media channels have fundamentally changed. From where I stand, that level of breakthrough innovation and big thinking is sorely lacking in the PR and advertising industries, both in agencies and corporations.

I believe we should treat Jack’s commentary about the lack of celebrities in today’s PR industry as akin to a “canary in the coal mine” for the profession. Simply stated, PR (and advertising) professionals need to strongly and visibly assert their influence and impact in the global business world. If that entails creating more celebrities in our profession, then let’s get busy.

We will only have ourselves to blame if the best days of our profession can only be experienced by watching a re-run of “Mad Men.”

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Patrick Di Chiro is the founder and CEO of THUNDER FACTORY, a San Francisco-based marketing and PR firm. Formerly, he was chief communications officer of E*TRADE, and held senior PR positions at Ketchum, Visa International and American Express.