The New Role of Public Relations | Ipsos

Public relations used to be seen as the function that shaped the message after the decisions were made. That is not enough anymore. In a world shaped by geopolitical shocks, cultural division, AI disruption, and rising reputational risk, communications leaders are being pulled closer to the centre of power. They are no longer just storytellers or spokespersons. They are becoming strategic sensemakers: the people expected to read the moment, interpret the pressure, and help leadership decide what to say, what to do, and sometimes whether to say anything at all. 

Our job is evolving to help brands survive the storm.

If you work in PR, corporate affairs, or communications leadership, this episode will feel familiar fast, because it names the job as it is now, not as it used to be. And if you have not yet felt that shift in your own role, you will soon.  

Listen For

3:00 How Has the PR Professional Evolved into a Strategic Sense-Making Role?
5:58 When Should CEOs Speak Out. And When Should They Stay Silent?
10:23 What Is Strategic Ambiguity, and Why Are Companies Using It Now?
13:09 What Skills Do Future PR Professionals Need to Succeed?
15:01 How Do Communication Leaders Really Feel About AI?

Guest: Tom Fife-Schaw, Uk Managing Director of Corporate Reputation, Ipsos

Email | LinkedIn | Navigating Through Turbulence Report 

Doug

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Farzana

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Transcript

Solomon Ibeh (00:04):
Leaders need more than updates and key messages. They need someone who can filter the noise, make sense of the facts, and help them see what matters most.

Farzana Baduel (00:21):
In Apollo 13, three astronauts were headed to the moon when an oxygen tank explodes. The mission changes in an instant. There is no script for this, no clean message, no easy way out, just a spacecraft breaking apart, a crew running out of power, and a room full of people on Earth trying to make sense of a very bad situation before it gets worse.

NASA audio (00:46):
Okay. We've had a problem here.

(00:48):
 This is Houston. Say again, please.

(00:51):
 Houston, we have a problem.

Farzana Baduel (00:56):
And what saves them is not spin. It's not optimism. It is judgement. Calm people, reading the facts, sorting signal from noise, and helping others decide what matters most right now. That is what makes the story last. In moments of pressure, the real value is not just in speaking well, it is in seeing clearly. That feels close to the job in public relations now. The world is louder and faster and less stable, and the pressure comes from every direction at once. And more and more, the communicator is not just there to shape the message after the decision. They are there to help leadership make sense of the moment while the crisis is still unfolding. Today, on Stories and Strategies, the modern communicator is not just a storyteller, they are part of mission control. My name is Farzana Baduel.

Doug Downs (02:03):
My name is Doug Downs, guest this week, Tom Fife-Shaw, joining today from Scotland in Edinburgh. Hey, Tom.

Tom Fife-Shaw (02:10):
Hello.

Doug Downs (02:12):
It's raining where you're at. Is that typical for this time

Tom Fife-Shaw (02:15):
Of year? It's typical most of the year in Scotland, but the sun's coming out into my walk home. So fingers crossed, it's still sunny in half an hour.

Doug Downs (02:24):
Farzana was telling me how beautiful it is. I would love to go to the Fringe Festival at some point.

Tom Fife-Shaw (02:29):
Well, worth your time.

Doug Downs (02:30):
Tom, you are the UK managing director of Ipsos' corporate reputation, where you help some of the world's biggest organisations understand, protect, and strengthen their reputations. More than 18 years in reputation research, your work focuses on the complex mix of geopolitical, social, and economic pressures shaping business today. And through your work with the Ipsos Reputation Council, you have a unique view into what senior communicators are seeing, fearing, and planning for next.

Farzana Baduel (03:00):
Now, Tom, I wanted to ask you, do you think that today's PR professional, they have morphed into something completely different to what they were doing, I don't know, 10 years ago. So let's just say 10 years ago, the average PR professional was knocking out press releases, bit of social media content. Are you beginning to see this sort of evolution of the PR pro where they're becoming more strategic, sense making function at the centre of business decision making, becoming an expert in all sorts of things from geopolitics to video production. What are you seeing because you have this wonderful vantage point as you have this council of senior communication professionals that you engage with? So I'd love to get your thoughts on this.

Tom Fife-Shaw (03:47):
Of course. And so absolutely the role is changing, and I think it feels very different to what it would've felt like in 2016. And also it's changing what the future of it looks like too, based on how the role's evolving. And I guess for a bit of context for your listeners, the Reputation Council that we run is a group of senior in house communicators, so chief communications officers and others at some of the world's largest and most consequential companies. And it is truly global. So there's about 150 members and we're very careful about who we have in the council. And we've been running that since at least 2009. So we've seen the evolution over that time as well and how they're thinking and feeling about their role as custodians of reputation and those who tell stories and other things now on behalf of their companies.

(04:35):
 And I think we're seeing recently that in an era of restlessness, unprecedented volatility, globalisation fractures, that CCO role has evolved. And I'm saying evolution deliberately. So we've had a lot of our members have had decades under their belts living through loads of shocks and crises, but they're telling us now that they've never seen anything like this before. It's so chaotic out there. And what it means, it's really hard to identify, at least in the near term, how to respond to the world, given that so much turns. And so their role is moving from a functional expert in their department and their role into a strategic sense making hub, whose job it is to interpret the chaotic external environment for their boards, for their senior leaders, and helping navigate a path through it. And I guess because of that, we're seeing a shift in the importance placed on that role by their organisations too.

(05:35):
 So we hear sort of over nine in 10 Reputation Council members say that they have direct access to their CEO and they have ready access to their CEO as well. And I think because there are so many crises, so much turbulence, it means they are a non negotiable strategic partner for those CEOs. And it's not just a perk, it is a necessity for businesses navigating that turbulence.

Doug Downs (05:58):
I'm getting this caricature in my mind of a series on Netflix, and there's the harried CEO that just goes to their more harried PR counsel with two Starbucks coffees, and they've already had five and they're, "What's going on?" But I'm sure it's a lot more sophisticated than that. One of the big questions would be from leadership, when should we speak out and when should we not, which is pure risk management in 2026? How do they use their judgement on that?

Tom Fife-Shaw (06:28):
Well, I think this is the crux of why the role has changed and how it's changing. I think we are seeing a very geopolitically charged environment for corporates where what you say and do in one market can be received very differently in another. And that's not necessarily a new phenomenon. I think corporates in a globalised world have always sort of balanced how do you deliver messages or strategy with cultural nuance on the ground, but with consistency at a central level. But I think because there's so many more tensions now and because the world has become much more politically polarised, both from the institutions that can pave the way for doing business successfully through to consumers and citizens and so on, it is really, really complex. And I think the communicator now needs to really be attuned to the external environment in many, many different ways to understand where do we show up and where do we speak and what do we speak about that satisfies as many stakeholder groups as possible.

(07:33):
 So your customers, your people, wider stakeholders, with the full knowledge that you probably will annoy some constituents at some point and being comfortable with that, but also holding back from having a point of view on absolutely everything. And certainly I've been in rooms with communicators where they've had to get on the phone with their CEO and say, "Don't get on social media and say anything about that. You don't need to." But it means you've got to make judgements in different contexts. When do you talk down the CEO? Do you have your finger on the pulse on shifts in public opinion? And do you understand those cultural nuances and the implications of what might happen if you do or don't say something?

Doug Downs (08:12):
Can I give a quick example here? A Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, when the conflict in Iran or war in Iran, whatever you want, I don't care what you want to call it, his first statement was, "We're not in. We're out. We're not in." I'm sure he then got a tonne of feedback from Canadians saying, "Well, we don't like that." And so all of a sudden it was, "Well, I'm not ruling out. We might be in." And then I'm sure he got a tonne of feedback and then he comes out with, "Well, but we're not actively..." And he's sort of flip flopped three different times to have four different stances. What's the risk of that when you're advising leadership? I mean, your council's got to stick.

Tom Fife-Shaw (08:47):
So leadership as much as society wants a bit of consistency at the moment, particularly in the face of so many things that are causing widespread sort of pessimism, fatalism, and that polarisation. And I think you need good data and to form a view carefully with the knowledge of the impacts of what you're going to say and where you are prepared to take risks, where you're prepared to alienate some quarters of your audience and where the risks and rewards of that are. And I think for politics, it's hugely difficult because you're trying to keep a lot of people on side whose views are very different. And with business, you have similar tensions, but it's in a slightly different sphere. But I think you have to bring your people with you. And this is where the communications role is also quite interesting in that continuing and long term phenomenon that we would've started to see 10 years ago of the merging of internal and external comms, you've got to make sure that what you're saying externally is reflected by what your people believe and what they're actually doing and getting that right.

(09:53):
 But I think if you have those things considered and you have good advice and counsel from those who are paying attention to this stuff, you shouldn't end up in that kind of situation where you have loads of different contradictory positions. But as you've seen in the news cycle, people get buffeted by contradiction. It is really, really difficult. There are no easy answers to this. You just have to understand what are your principles, what makes you authentic and what you are saying and doing and sticking to that, which is reputation 101 in many ways.

Farzana Baduel (10:23):
Tom, you're beginning to see a lot of organisations sort of one foot in, one foot out when it comes to sort of polarised situations. And I came across the term strategic ambiguity. Are you beginning to sort of see that as a choice that communication professionals are making because the world is so polarised and it's full of conflict? And although they understand that being ambiguous doesn't build trust, it fundamentally perhaps is a better road to take than taking one position or the other.

Tom Fife-Shaw (10:59):
Absolutely. And I think you could also call it strategic patience. I think a lot of the ambiguity that exists at the moment is in response to the very real risk of getting quite serious, materially important kickback from governments in different parts of the world. If you are saying something that is contrary to the shifts and the mindset that has been projected in those quarters, I think how it manifests itself is a dialling down of loud pronouncements on things such as ESG or DEI, but those policies that underpin those things that may have been loudly broadcast in recent history are still things that manifest themselves in action with employees and internally as well. So I think it may be externally ambiguous, but certainly I think corporates are quite good still in my experience at keeping employees on side and not dialling back on commitments that may have attracted their people to them in the first place or made them loyal.

(11:59):
 And I think that's quite interesting. And I think a lot of companies feel that they don't need to broadcast some of that stuff very, very loudly. I think there is risk in that though. I think you do run a bit of a gauntlet with that. I think in reputation and an employer brand, for example, people need to know what you're about, know what you stand for, know who you are. And if you're absent, you really are missing out and you haven't got those opportunities to build up goodwill in drops. And I think that's a real challenge, but I think the ambiguity will taper off eventually, but I think it'll be a bit of a reset. And we've seen loads of news stories and criticisms of companies having loud pronouncements on things that they had no real business doing so, no connection to their brand or their purpose or they got it really, really wrong and that's hard to recover from.

Doug Downs (12:53):
We're talking about senior leadership and its counsel to CEOs, but I think that filters down. If I'm a university and I have a PR curriculum, are there things that I might look to start changing within the curriculum now to prepare PR students entering into this?

Tom Fife-Shaw (13:09):
Oh, absolutely. I've had conversations with some of our Reputation Council members about how they're hiring. And also in the context of AI changing employment in the knowledge economy and in PR as much as anything else. And what are the skill sets? What's the mindset you need from people? And I think we're seeing temperamentally a real premium placed on people with diverse cultural experience. So having lived and worked in different places, being able to speak different languages even, but also being really, really across a number of different dimensions. So that could be strategy with a bit of political savvy, a good understanding of geopolitics, the mindset of a foreign minister or an economist at the same time. You've got to be good at connecting functions. So people who can bring people together and tell good stories there, an understanding of the principles of sound corporate governance, but also coaching.

(14:06):
 The communicators need to coach senior leadership about how do you be visible and human where it counts without taking too many risks, but also forecasting. So the use of data and the use of AI and the use of all the tools that are out there and the news cycle and so on to make sensible predictions about what might happen tomorrow, which is really difficult, but then tell appropriate stories or formulate appropriate strategies for communications and stakeholder engagement that bring all that kind of mix together into something coherent. And it's a tough gig. Scrutiny is everywhere. So I would say the final thing is for those students is to be taught a bit about resilience, because I think it's not going to be an easy job.

Farzana Baduel (14:47):
God, God, God, not at all. And from the conversations that you have with these chief communications officers, what's generally the take that you're sort of picking up in terms of their attitude towards AI?

Tom Fife-Shaw (15:01):
A real mix one of ... Well, actually, I'll just pull back on that slightly. A real mix for various different reasons. There's one is corporate culture, but also where you live. And so we know from our research at Ipsos more broadly that I'm quite lucky to rely on in our AI monitor that

(15:19):
 If you live in the Anglosphere, so an English speaking nation, you're more likely to be nervous and a little bit trepidatious about what AI means in various fronts, whether it's for the development of products and services or your job and so on. But actually, if you live in Latin America or in Asia Pacific, much more optimistic and excited about the potential of AI developments than you might be if you lived in, say, the UK or Australia, for example. And that plays out for communicators as much as it does your everyday citizen because they're buffeted by the same pressures. And so with that in mind, I do have a real spectrum of clients and how they're feeling about AI and it's quite different. But what I am seeing is a mixture of frustration and optimism. So frustrations in that there is a little bit of a trend towards slimming down functions because a lot of the tasks that may have been done by entry level communicators a few years ago

(16:12):
 Can be automated to a degree, crafting the first draft of a press release, for example. And there's different views on press releases and their use today, but won't go into that. But also in that number crunching, that distillation of all of that information that I've just talked about, all those different lenses you've got to look at the world through, that is made easier by generative AI and sort of packaging up complex insights into ways that you can at least start to make sense of more quickly than you would do if you had to spend time sitting in a library or reading through loads of newspapers and so on. So I think that there is a sense that the shifting role is enabled by some of these innovations we're seeing, and I think that's helpful, but there's also a bit of trepidation around the risks of AI when it comes to corporate reputation, particularly around mis and disinformation, fake news, fake CEO pronouncements.

(17:09):
 We've already seen social media posts moving stock market share price. For example, there was a pharmaceutical company and somebody had written a post saying, "Insulin's now free in the US," which was obviously not the case, but it was already a controversial issue. And that kind of thing has material impact on the bottom line. So it's going to change how you prepare for crises. It changes how you respond to crises and it changes how you monitor the digital environment and actually a volume of content in a fragmented media landscape. So I think that's where there's a little bit of uncertainty about what's next because of the pace of innovation and the pace of change.

Farzana Baduel (17:51):
You mentioned something, Tom, about, we discussed about strategic silence and strategic ambiguity. Tell us about the support that Ipsos give the chief communications officers in terms of how to predict the cultural response to an

Tom Fife-Shaw (18:04):
Issue. So as the cliché goes, cultural strategy for breakfast. So we tend to do research across multiple different stakeholders, including internal stakeholders, to understand how are you actually seen, how do they actually see you show up in the real world? Are you reliable? Do you live up to the promise that you're around your character, your credibility and so on and identify gaps? And in many ways, that kind of model of understanding reputation and understanding cultural nuance where you do this in different markets, where you do it in language, where you bring in local experts to help interpret certain terms and phenomena, like the nature of trust. Trust in English doing something very different in other languages, for example, is to pick that apart and then understand, okay, here are some central themes and these are things that you can address at a central level, but this is how that plays out in different countries.

Doug Downs (19:01):
Just a few years ago, the trend was that organisations need to speak out, that Gen Z or Z wouldn't stand for organisations that stayed silent during critical times. I remember doing an interview with a large US corporation saying that's the focus, but the world moves so fast. Only 21% of your council members in your Navigating the Turbulence report now want their organisation to speak out on divisive issues. In other words, put simply, four out of five say, shut up. Is that the new trend? Is that what we need to start getting used to?

Tom Fife-Shaw (19:35):
I think it is the new trend. I think that it is linked to the strategic silence or strategic ambiguity we've been speaking about. And it is slightly at odds with what the public want. It's not just Gen Z. It is across generations. We know from our research, it is what we run a study called the Global Trends Survey, which looks at 50,000 people across a number of countries on a range of issues. But one of these things is about expectations of business. We know that around seven in 10 people believe that business leaders have a responsibility to speak out on societal and political issues affecting their country. Over eight in 10 globally believe that businesses have a role to contribute or a duty even, sorry, to contribute to society, not just to make profits. And again, sort of seven in 10 agree with the idea that they tend to buy brands that reflect their personal values.

(20:27):
 But this is opinion. So whether people actually vote with their feet and their wallets in these scenarios is an interesting one. So this is where observational research is so important in addition to opinion based research. But I think this is why it's a bit of a tightrope for companies at the moment. They're stepping back because there is, from regulators and from the political sphere, there are very real material risks about standing up and talking about certain things loudly, particularly if it's going to be controversial to one or other end of a political spectrum. But I think this is why they're not entirely silent. They're just very, very careful. And those four in five are not saying we're not going to engage on anything, we're just going to be very, very picky about what we talk about. And I think that's sensible. I think sometimes silence speaks louder than words, which is a bit odd if you're in the job of communications is to stay quiet.

Farzana Baduel (21:23):
The power of pause. And on that, thank you, Tom.

Tom Fife-Shaw (21:27):
Very welcome.

Doug Downs (21:29):
Here are the top three things we got today from Tom Fife-Shaw at Ipsos. Number one, PR as strategic sense makers, not just communicators. PR leaders are now acting as interpreters of global chaos, helping CEOs understand risk and navigate uncertainty at the highest level. Number two, advising CEOs on when to speak and when to stay silent. A core part of the role is guiding CEOs through high stakes judgement calls on visibility, balancing risk, stakeholder reactions, and global context. And number three, embracing strategic ambiguity in a polarised world. How's that for PR sounding spin? PR leaders increasingly support CEOs by using restraint or ambiguity to avoid backlash while still protecting reputation and internal alignment. If I don't say anything, I can't say anything wrong.

Farzana Baduel (22:23):
If you would like to send a message to our guest, Tom Fife-Shaw, we've got his contact information in the show notes. Stories and Strategies is a co production of Curzon Public Relations and Stories and Strategies podcasts. If you liked this episode, please leave a rating and possibly a review. And thank you to our producers, Emily Page and David Olajide. Lastly, one of the nicest things you can do for a friend is share something useful with no agenda, just a quick message, a link, and a simple thought this made me think of you. Do us a favour. Forward this episode to one friend, and thanks for listening.