An op-ed from Chris Dodds, ICON co-founder and Managing Director, Digital.
If you work in a PR or creative communications agency (or any knowledge work area), you’ve likely seen the “Rearview Mirror” in action. Media professionals are currently using the most sophisticated artificial intelligence in human history to write better versions of something invented in 1906: the press release. We’re essentially using a warp-drive engine to pull a horse-drawn carriage.
Marshall McLuhan, the patron saint of media theory, warned us about this. He noted that the first thing a new medium does is consume its predecessor’s content. The movies filmed stage plays; the internet digitised magazines and mail. Right now, AI is busy eating the “artifact” – the draft Word file, the PDF, the pitch, the static op-ed.
We can sense the shift coming, which is why so many of us are feeling uncertain and uncomfortable. New forms of content and the systems surrounding it are beginning to emerge. They are what McLuhan describes as “environments that are not passive wrappings but are, rather, active processes.”
We are transitioning from the “Visual” age of PR (linear, literal, and document-heavy) into the “Acoustic” age: an environment where information is simultaneous, non-linear, and happens in all directions at once. A multiverse of information!
The End of the "Inbox" Era
For a century, PR has been a sequential game: Write → Send → Wait based on an old formula: Client → Agency → Media → Consumer. It’s a visual process, like stacking bricks. But we are moving into what McLuhan called "Acoustic Space" – a, non-linear, multisensory, and "all-at-once" environment that envelops the observer, contrasting with the structured, sequential “visual space” of print culture (which the initial digital age inherited).
In this environment, the inbox is a relic. While future gazing is a hazy exercise, your primary job won’t be pitching a story to a journalist’s email. It will be managing something like a Brand Knowledge Graph.
Think of it as a live strategy model – a persistent, vibrating field of brand truth. When an AI-driven newsroom or a consumer’s personal agent needs to know your brand’s stance on carbon credits, it won’t wait for your 10:00 AM wire blast. It will query your brand’s logic in real-time. If your data isn't structured for that machine-to-machine handshake, you effectively don’t exist.
We can see this realisation emerging with the volume of PR agencies rushing to offer Generative Search Optimisation (GEO) services.
Supporting Signals: The Handshake in the Machine
We’re already seeing the breadcrumbs. Search engines are becoming Answer Engines. Journalists are already using AI filters to shield themselves from the tsunami of automated slop in their inboxes.
The next step is the Agentic Pitch. Imagine a sub-second negotiation between two autonomous agents. Your brand’s agent presents a data fragment; the journalist’s agent verifies its reputation score and relevance. If the logic gates align, a handshake occurs, and your message is amplified across relevant channels – some of which don’t yet exist.
This is a fundamental shift in information currency. We are moving from storytelling (which is for humans) to signal engineering (which is for the machines that tell humans what to believe). Don’t get me wrong. Storytelling has underpinned human development for thousands of years and will continue to resonate. But these new active processes move storytelling from the performance to the infrastructure.
In the old, visual world, the story was the finished product – the shiny car delivered to the showroom. In the acoustic world of AI, the story is the engine's logic. We are no longer just crafting a narrative to be read or heard; we are programming a narrative to be retrieved.
We are potentially entering an era where the most persuasive story isn't the one with the best adjectives, but the one with the most integrity in its metadata. If storytelling is the soul of communication, signal engineering is its new, high-speed nervous system.
We aren't losing our humanity; we’re just building the machines that help it travel faster than ever before.
The Reversal: A Retrieval of the “Real”
McLuhan’s most biting law was the “Reversal": push any medium to its limit, and it flips into its opposite.
When communications becomes 100% synthetic – when “thought leadership” is just a high-fidelity prompt and LinkedIn is a hall of mirrors – we will hit the Trust Wall. At this limit, the medium reverses, forcing a desperate retrieval of the town crier. In a world where the digital signal is indistinguishable from noise, the only un-fakeable currency will be the meat-space – physical presence, cryptographic proof, and the verified human witness.
If I can’t see you breathe, smell you or touch you, I don’t believe you.
We’ve seen the beginnings of this with younger generations embracing a pre-digital age – one filled with printed zines, vinyl music, film cameras and muted social feeds. I recently saw a music poster touting a new album being available on tape cassette and CD.
My prediction
The PR professional of 2030 isn't a writer; they are a Narrative Architect.
Success won't be measured by “clips” or “impressions” (the visual metrics of a dying age). It will be measured by Narrative Integrity. How well did you define the parameters of your brand’s logic? How securely did you bake your truth into the global data stream? How prepared was your technology stack for negotiating with automated AI agents seeking information?
The road ahead is simultaneous, loud, and incredibly fast. It will take a fundamental shift in how information is transmitted and how we communicate ideas, opportunities, and influence for an era where the message is no longer the story we tell, but the integrity of the environment we build.
My advice is to move beyond the peripheral thrill of experimentation. Stop asking AI to polish the artifacts of the past –to fix a sentence or summarise a deck. Instead, ask how the very architecture of influence must be reborn for an environment that never sleeps. We must stop being passengers in the rearview mirror and become the architects of the new infrastructure of trust.
There is an important question McLuhan would want us to consider: How is this medium “working us over”? (The massage in his “the medium is the message” theorem). As we delegate our communication to agents, how is our own thinking changing? Are we becoming more precise and logical, or are we becoming passive observers of a process we no longer understand?