When it comes to the evolution of budget allocations, the maketing and communications sectors have not taken the same path, Notified CMO Adam Christensen tells Doug Simon.

"Over the last 20-plus years they really haven't changed that much on the communications side," Christensen says, "but that's not the case with marketing. That marketing budget has gone up significantly as an overall percentage of the overall cost."

That has happened, he tells Simon, despite the increasing complexity of the environment that communications pros have to negotiate. Marketing, he says, has been "able to scale the budget as a percentage of revenue, as a percentage of the company and maybe communications hasn't."

But he adds that "I think there's some promising opportunities for client-side PR people to be able to capture a larger share of that."

One advantage that marketing has when it comes to pulling in budget dollars is its measureability. "It gives you that ability to really be able to see the direct correlation between effort and outcome."

He says that communications pros "didn't evolve and try and really help to understand the role that we play in earning media and in shaping and driving conversation, and how that can translate into the paid aspect of social."

However, Christensen notes that "things are turning a little bit because those returns on the marketing side are harder and harder to come by. Some of the factors for that are the overall challenges that communications and everyone else is facing, which is a really distributed environment—I think that opens a window for PR professionals."

This makes employing an earned-first mindset a must. "You need to earn the attention, the eyeball, the engagement. And for the PR professional, the communicator, they need to know then how to be able to blend and use paid advanced analytics and other things to be able to take advantage of the earned media that they're driving."

Christensen also addresses the changing nature of trust. "We think advertising and PR maybe aren't the most trusted. But we all know the Edelman Trust Barometer. It shows that business is very high. And what also scores very high are very traditional kind of things that we do—what's on our corporate website, press releases. So, there are a lot of things that we have termed as being sort of traditional that actually have kind of come around full circle into their value that they provide."

He also proposes a new role for AI, saying that it "gives people a more accessible way to do large data analysis and you can identify where mistrust, distrust and challenges are happening. I think the artificial intelligence opportunity is uniquely positive for PR professionals because those give us really good tools to be able to understand large amounts of data, to understand the message dynamics of it, and then to be able to rapidly engage."

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