Jennifer Risi
Jennifer Risi

The structural shifts that once felt distant are now playing out in plain sight. Golin and Ketchum closed their merger this June—new brand, new logo, the works: Golin Ketchum. It's not an isolated story. WPP already folded BCW and Hill & Knowlton into Burson. The cuts keep coming across these newly combined shops, and more are on the way as the integrations carry on.

Here's what gets lost in the org charts: what happens to the people. Senior leaders have been exiting these newly combined agencies since the integrations started—the kind of departures that don't always make headlines but show up in who's running client accounts six months later. That's the real cost. Consolidation doesn't just trim junior headcount. It pushes out the senior people who spent a decade or more building the relationships and instincts that are the product in this business. Every merger memo says, "no disruption to clients." The senior people walking out the door are the disruption. And they're exactly who independent agencies are built to hold onto.

Those veteran experts are more critical than ever because the way people find information has fractured completely. Per Pew Research Center, U.S. adults now get their news from a wide mix of sources at once: news websites or apps (65 percent), search (63 percent), social media (53 percent), podcasts (32 percent) and email newsletters (30 percent). Scale no longer comes from one channel, and it no longer comes from one holding company network either. The brands breaking through are building connected communications systems—traditional media creates credibility, executive visibility adds authority, digital content extends reach, live moments deepen trust.

Within these connected systems, executive visibility is no longer a nice-to-have; it is a business driver. Seventy percent of Fortune 100 CEOs now maintain at least one social media account, and readers trust a CEO active on social media up to nine times more than one who isn't. According to Forbes, a CEO's personal LinkedIn post generates 8x more engagement than the same post from a company's branded page. A clear, consistent executive voice builds trust in a way a brand channel alone can't.

Now AI is raising the stakes further. Generative AI is doing to brand discovery what search engines did in the mid-2000s—and earned media is the algorithm. According to a MuckRack study, more than 95 percent of links cited in AI-driven searches come from non-paid sources, and 85 percent of those are earned media. Data from research and advisory firm Gertner shows traditional search volume dropping 25% this year as AI chatbots replace conventional queries, and 60 percent of Google searches already end without a single click. The brands showing up strongest in AI-driven discovery are the ones that invested consistently in earned media and thought leadership—building a credible public record over time instead of turning PR on and off with the budget cycle. Brands that don't do this are losing more than share of voice. They're being written out of the answers AI gives their most important audiences.

This is where judgment comes in. AI can accelerate output, but it can't manufacture taste, instinct or lived experience. The agencies that win won't be the ones with the slickest AI tooling—they'll be the ones with senior people who know when a message feels off, when a moment is too sensitive, or when saying nothing is the smartest move. Over the last 18 months, I've watched the C-suite's relationship to PR change. Leaders aren't coming to us for press releases. They're coming because they want senior counsel and a partner who can connect business goals to the story the company tells in the market.

I left a large holding company seven years ago because I saw this fundamental shift coming: corporate communications were about to become far more central to the business, and the firms built to meet that moment wouldn't be the biggest ones. They'd be the ones built around boutique agility, earned media, and the kind of senior judgment no amount of scale can replicate. Everything starts with the client's business objective—what we're trying to move, what perception needs to change, what outcome we're working toward. If a campaign doesn't support that goal, we don't do it. That discipline is why the work performs, and why journalists trust us to bring them stories that matter.

The market fragmented. AI changed how people discover information. Corporate leaders became some of the most powerful media channels their companies have. None of that was a gamble by the time it arrived. It was simply where the future of the industry was always going to be won.

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Jennifer Risi is the founder and president of The Sway Effect.