PR Statistics: How Marketing Executives Choose, Measure and Invest in Public Relations

Five Findings at a Glance

For decades, PR reported its value in impressions, the theoretical audience of every outlet that ran the story. The buyers have moved on. Only a quarter of executives still count impressions among the ways they measure PR, the second lowest of any method tested. What replaced it is more demanding. Half of executives now judge PR by whether it improves their sales and marketing channels as a whole, and four in ten measure it in revenue.

Goal-setting has moved in the same direction. 70% of executives say their PR goals are set by the business results the work should influence, meaning leads and sales, compared with 48% who still set goals by share of voice. PR is being managed like a growth channel rather than a clippings service.

That said, a fifth of the market admits it isn’t really measuring at all. 21% say PR is too difficult to measure but that experience tells them it works. That honesty points to a real gap in the industry: most executives believe PR works, but many still lack the instrumentation to show where. For a practical approach, see our guide on how to measure public relations.

We asked executives which three marketing channels they would keep if they could only have three. Forced choices like this tend to reveal what people actually believe. Digital advertising and social media, the channels with the most immediate and measurable output, took the top two places. Public relations came third, kept by 37% of executives, ahead of traditional advertising, email, influencer marketing, events, video and SEO.

The context makes that ranking more impressive. This is the same group of respondents in which a fifth of executives say PR is too difficult to measure, and they would still protect it ahead of channels with much cleaner dashboards. That kind of conviction comes from experience, from seeing what happens to the rest of the marketing mix when PR is present and what happens when it isn’t.

AI adoption in marketing is no longer a prediction. 96% of the marketing teams we surveyed already use AI somewhere in their operation, led by data analysis (67%), social media (54%) and content writing (51%). Public relations sits in the middle at 35%. And executives told us exactly where they want that number to go, and where they don’t.

Read down the list and a pattern emerges. Where executives see a role for AI, it is production work: creative assets, analysis, social posts and monitoring. Even there, confidence has limits. Less than half of executives believe AI can help write a press release, meaning the majority don’t trust it with even the most templated writing in PR. And at the bottom of the list sits the task where belief collapses entirely. Only 31% think AI can help pitch a reporter, the lowest score of any tactic tested.

For anyone deciding whether to hire a PR agency, this is the most important finding in the study. AI has made the production side of PR cheap and available to everyone. Any company can now generate a draft press release, a media list or a monitoring report. What it can’t do is what executives said earlier in this report they hire agencies for: a strategy built for their specific company (65%) and deep industry experience (46%). It also can’t do the thing that actually builds journalist relationships, which is crafting stories, pitches and press releases that engage reporters. Those relationships are earned by consistently bringing journalists stories worth covering. Executives appear to understand this. They will let AI help produce the materials, but only 31% believe it can handle the pitch. And as AI fills every reporter’s inbox with generic, machine-written pitches, the agencies that can craft stories reporters actually respond to become more valuable, not less. For where AI genuinely helps and where it hurts, see our guide to using AI in PR.