5X: The five seismic shifts that will reshape communications and marketing over the next five years
by Jim O'Leary, Chief Executive Officer, North America, and Global President, Weber Shandwick
Like many communications and marketing executives, I've spent a lot of time listening, learning, and thinking about where our industry is heading.
What you need to know: The next five years will transform communications more dramatically than the previous five decades. Chief communicators and marketing executives face a once-in-a-generation shift as technology fundamentally reshapes how attention is captured, how information spreads, and how reputations are shaped under intensifying pressure.
Here's the deal: The changes that are needed to survive in this environment map to what I call 5X: five seismic shifts that are reshaping the future of our profession.
1. The Attention Economy: Earned renewal
Traditional PR asked, "How do we get coverage?" Now the question is, "How do we create ideas people feel compelled to share?"
At Weber Shandwick, our Chief Creative Officer is fond of saying that traditional advertising creates work for controlled environments, like admiring animals in a zoo. Yet in today's world, ideas get injected directly into culture's slipstream and either survive the jungle or die.
The strategy: Companies can't buy attention the way they used to — they must earn it by creating ideas that move through culture, not just media.
The impact: Winning ideas spread because they let people express their identity and values. Breakthrough concepts don't just reach communities — they form them.
2. The Creator Economy: Influence redefined
Creators are no longer just a media channel; they're culture itself. Their content consistently outperforms brand-owned content because audiences trust them more.
The new reality: Brands must co-create with those who shape culture, measuring actual influence over vanity metrics.
Why it's important: Creators increasingly drive earned strategies, capturing attention that attracts traditional media coverage and fuels broader cultural conversation.
3. The Stakeholder Economy: Business meets culture
Political shifts and media fragmentation have created an environment where external posture materially impacts business results. Issues escalate faster, stakeholders expect more, and leaders must constantly balance the tensions between cultural relevance and cultural resilience to drive outcomes.
Take note: This isn't traditional "corporate comms" anymore. It's about helping leaders navigate fluid, high-stakes situations where business strategy and cultural fluency must merge.
The benefits: Modern corporations can now engage in predictive issue forecasting and real-time stakeholder intelligence, but only if they have the right partners.
4. The Experience Economy: Digital, integrated
Digital worlds crafted in games, virtual reality or augmented reality are moving beyond early awkwardness and clunky hardware to blend physical and digital activations into immersive brand experiences. The cameras, screens and speakers in our pockets will continue to take new forms.
What this means: Audiences, who increasingly live their waking hours connected, expect personalized, participatory experiences across physical and digital touchpoints. Moments must be felt, not just seen.
The challenge: Brand experiences and activations that only live in the physical world lack reach and don't effectively reach a new generation of consumers.
5. The Intelligence Economy: AI as accelerator
Artificial intelligence isn't just changing our information environment and business — it's supercharging all four other shifts. Communications leaders and teams aren't immune. Every executive should be contemplating how to use these tools for anticipatory decision-making instead of reactive responses and agentic orchestration of routine work.
How it's done: The ready availability of tools to create custom agents through platforms like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini signals a future where every agency and communications team will need proprietary AI systems as a core competitive differentiator.
The breakdown: The companies that succeed in this AI generation will look nothing like those that succeeded in the last one. If you haven't changed your playbook, you're already behind.
Why this is important now
For communications leaders: This confluence of shifts redefines how the value of communications gets measured, what skills teams need, and how reputation management works in a fragmented, increasingly-AI-paced media landscape.
For agency leaders: In today's world, nothing is siloed. The separate disciplines of earned media, digital, advisory, influence, and intelligence have converged. Only those who operate seamlessly across all areas will survive the shifts reshaping our profession.
Looking ahead: Intelligence isn't just another economy — it's the force multiplying all others. Communications leaders who understand this will lead the transformation. Those who don't will be transformed by it.
„Companies can't buy attention the way they used to — they must earn it by creating ideas that move through culture, not just media. Winning ideas spread because they let people express their identity and values. Breakthrough concepts don't just reach communities — they form them.
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