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(Excerpted from Dear VOCAL MIDDLE: The 2025 Mid-Year Report )
“Dear VOCAL MIDDLE:” is VOCAL MIDDLE's biannual flagship insight report, published mid-year and year-end each year. Every edition revolves around one central theme: the future.
This time, we chose the theme “PR Next: The Future of Public Relations”, focusing on two key points:
The year 2025 marks a pivotal moment where the aftermath of the pandemic intersects with the widespread adoption of generative AI. Amid the profound shifts in the global communications ecosystem, we invited industry experts to collectively explore the implications of this transformation for the future.
Every job, role, and task within the communications field ultimately aims to create impact. If we say that the essence of creating impact is trust, then PR consultants represent the most fundamental, core function, role, and industry in the process of building trust.
This report not only reflects the views of VOCAL MIDDLE but also brings together partners from across the Asia-Pacific region, leaders from public associations, and communication education pioneers. Together, we ponder: as change and restructuring become the norm, how will the role of the PR consultant evolve from being “one among many” within the industry to becoming the central link connecting markets, businesses, organizations, and the public?
Expert Commentary：Sean WANG, President of Taiwan Digital Media Application and Marketing Association (DMA)
It's not only the pandemic that accelerated digital transformation and AIGC that enabled companies to reduce costs and boost efficiency; the realities of an aging population and declining birth rates have also created both opportunities and challenges for multi-generational coexistence.
With information dissemination logic being redefined and the framework of the business market upended, we see the marketing and communications industry facing a complex transformation encompassing technology, generational shifts, and ethics.
While this transformation drives efficiency and deepens precision in communication, it also raises critical challenges such as information overload, trust crises, the restructuring of talent capabilities, and ethical and copyright issues.
Digital Transformation Accelerated:
The pandemic has driven companies to rapidly embrace online communication and virtual events, opening opportunities for remote marketing operations and deeper digital content development. Teams can now more flexibly integrate global resources, delivering more adaptable and resilient service models.
Content Generation Efficiency Leap:
AIGC has significantly lowered the barriers to content production, helping marketing teams quickly generate press releases, social media posts, and video scripts. Brands can produce diverse content at lower costs, faster speeds, and in multiple languages, precisely targeting audiences with varied profiles.
Data-Driven Precision Communication:
The pandemic accelerated the accumulation of digital footprints. Combined with AI analysis, this enables us to more accurately understand diverse audiences, predict communication outcomes, and adjust strategies in real time, thereby boosting engagement and interaction.
The marketing industry can shift from “casting a wide net” to “precision fishing,” enhancing communication effectiveness and ROI.
Information Overload and Trust Deficit:
The lowered barrier to content creation has led to the widespread circulation of fake news, deepfakes, and misinformation. Building and maintaining brand trust has become increasingly challenging. Marketing and communication professionals face heightened pressure in “trust protection” and “crisis management.” Brand communications must handle credibility with greater care and actively leverage AI-based early warning systems to build trust capital.
Pressure on Talent Role Restructuring:
Basic skills such as copywriting, design, and media relations risk being replaced by AI. Marketing professionals must rapidly evolve from “executors” to “AI coordinators,” “AI trainers,” and “AI strategists” to avoid obsolescence. Organizations will likely face talent gaps and uneven adoption of technology, causing growing pains in the transformation process.
Emerging Ethical and Copyright Controversies:
Legal ownership, content boundaries, and ethical standards for AI-generated work remain in exploration. The excessive homogenization of AI-generated content may increase “noise,” intensifying consumer fatigue and making brand messages easier to drown out.
In the face of this structural reshaping, the marketing and communications industry cannot simply react passively; it must proactively redefine its roles and values, and explore atypical evolutionary paths for the “next step”:
Human-AI Collaborative Communication Framework (Atypical Channels and Applications):
Today's marketing value chain is deeply co-created by humans and AI. Humans provide judgment, creativity, emotional connection, and curatorial intelligence, while AI supports computational speed and scalability. We need to cultivate “AI marketing generalists” who can collaborate seamlessly with AI and translate AI insights into human-centric strategies. This also gives rise to atypical channel applications such as decentralized communities, virtual reality, and virtual influencers, expanding communication interfaces.
“Trust Economy” as Core Strategy (Atypical KPIs and Metrics):
Brand competitiveness stems from “trust capital.” Marketing and communications professionals must act as guardians and builders of trust, enhancing media literacy, detecting misinformation, and strengthening social responsibility and authentic communication. Through data and transparent communication, brands can establish genuine connections and reputations amidst the noise. This requires rethinking atypical KPIs such as emotional connection strength, trust scores, and AI-driven emotional intelligence metrics.
Talent Reinvention and Cross-Disciplinary Integration (Atypical Talent):
Cultivate new types of professionals skilled in data, strategy, and technology applications, breaking down traditional silos between marketing, PR, and media to foster innovative cross-sector collaboration. Encourage teams to shift from “writing” to “curation” and “brand experience,” actively exploring new content forms enabled by AI collaboration. This is the moment for the rise of atypical talents: interdisciplinary, hybrid, and tool-savvy experts.
The Digital Media Application and Marketing Association of Taiwan (DMA) will act as the industry conductor, shouldering the crucial responsibility of promoting education and regulation. DMA will facilitate cross-sector matchmaking and exchanges, accelerate media transformation and digital marketing technology innovation, promote the ethical framework and talent development for AIGC applications, guide industry self-regulation, and build more platforms for cross-industry and cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration.
For DENTSU X, we will continue to focus on Integration and Experience as our strategic core. We aim to strengthen the integration, adoption, and application of AI tools across different stages of the marketing funnel, enhancing efficiency and unleashing creativity. At the same time, we deepen the value of human-centered communication to ensure genuine emotional connections and experiences between brands and consumers.
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COVID, AIGC, and demographic shifts bring not only challenges but also tremendous opportunities to reshape the industry. The essence of communication — connection, understanding, and influence — has never changed. Yet the paths, methods, depth, and scope have been profoundly disrupted. We must view every challenge as a chance to “optimize the algorithm,” shifting from passive receivers to active definers of the future.
The era of “AI × PI” human-AI collaboration has arrived. Here, PI — People Intelligence — goes beyond Intelligence to also mean Imagination, Invention, Insight, Integration, Impact, and more. Just like this piece, it's not a solo AI performance but a beautiful symphony born from the collaboration between human and machine.
As marketing professionals, we must become the “optimization talents” of this era — meaning we need to understand technology, embrace innovation, and integrate humanity. Let's courageously embark on our own “atypical evolution paths,” together defining the future of marketing and communications, creating profound value for brands and delivering positive impact to society.
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