5 PR Trends For Singapore And Malaysia In 2022

You might not be aware of this but public relations, as an industry, is going through a bit of an upheaval. This means a few things; firstly as an agency, you have to adapt and also help educate the market about these changes. Secondly, change is going to be slow compared to other industries, but faster than ever before for the PR industry. Third and lastly, there will need to be an adaptation from the client, agency and media side to ensure these changes don’t cause a lot of problems.

To better understand what is going on and what this means for the industry, we try to break it down into trends that the industry is currently following. If you’re interested, we have a comprehensive set of PR trends and insight into the causes of these trends, which might be useful, but for now, these 5 best encapsulate what we expect to see in 2022 in Singapore and Malaysia.

PR trends for 2022

The question does remain, what does this mean for PR moving forward. That is why we decided to put together the top 10 PR trends that we will likely see in 2022.

Let’s jump straight into it:

1. Measuring success will finally align with business goals and we will, for the most part, ignore PR value. It is the bane of any PR executive’s existence and makes no sense. Measurement of success should make sense and should be in line with your client’s goals.
2. Media events will no longer be commonplace in the industry. COVID made events go virtual or be cancelled altogether and this impacted PR events as well. There were fewer press conferences in 2020 and 2021 than ever before and this wasn’t a bad thing for the industry. Usually, press conferences do not result in better outcomes for businesses. However, they’ve been a staple in the industry for ages, but we should be seeing a lot less of them in the months to come.
3. Automation will become commonplace. Using tech solutions to speed up our work is pretty normal nowadays, but automation is still lacking. Any experienced PR vet will tell you that a lot of the job is pretty routine, so by definition automation is possible. In our estimation, 2022 might be the year we see a lot more automation become mainstream in the industry.
4. The press release will evolve. The current iteration of a press release tends to follow a standard template – from intro, quote, body and fact sheet – should start to evolve into something more functional for the media. This could be a long-form article to a functional list of bullet points to highlight the key points. How it will evolve may depend on the market and the media.
5. Newsrooms will continue to get smaller, so PR agencies will need to be proxies for news. However, there needs to be a change in what we deem ‘news’. If PR agencies prove to be efficient and effective filters for news, this should help alleviate the strain on newsrooms without them having to filter out ‘PR spin’ or ‘rubbish’ and get real news delivered to them in a packaged format.

What does this mean for your business?

Businesses need not be too concerned, the majority of the changes are happening within the PR ecosystem. Agencies, media, freelancers and your marketing team are probably seeing some of these changes happening right now.

However, the impact will be felt in time. Brands have to learn to adapt to the changing public relations landscape and this means understanding that PR needs to be used wisely and effectively, rather than trying to cobble together some barely coherent story each time to fit a temporary need.

This should be seen as an opportunity for all businesses and PR agencies and stakeholders. It is the dawn of a modern PR ecosystem.