29/03/2026
We hosted a small meetup in Bengaluru last week. The room said things most agency corridors won’t
Bloomingdale Public Relations wanted honest, unfiltered opinions from our stakeholders and so we invited senior journalist Swaminathan, Balasubramanian to moderate the session.
The meetup brought together a focused group of marcomm leaders for a Knowledge Sharing conversation about where this industry is going and what it needs to do differently.
No presentations and no jargon. Just honest conversation.
AI was naturally at the centre of it. Not as a threat. As a mirror.
Because what the discussion kept revealing was this - AI is not the problem. It is exposing problems that were already there.
Here is what the room said, plainly and without diplomacy.
PR agencies were never meant to be press release dispatch service, where the client writes the brief, the agency formats it, sends it, and reports the clips. That is not public relations. That is logistics.
What clients actually want is an agency that understands their business as deeply as they do. Not just the brand. The competition. The industry dynamics. The regulatory environment. The market shifts happening three quarters from now.
If you are handling a technology client and nobody on your team has ever worked in or studied technology, that is a gap that no amount of media relationships can bridge.
Which is why the room said something the industry needs to hear more often. Hire people from engineering, science, and domain backgrounds. Not just communications graduates.
The PR professional of the next decade needs to understand what they are communicating, not just how.
The discussion also turned to something most agencies are still treating as optional SEO and digital fluency.
The press release is now a piece of digital content before it is a media pitch. Keywords matter before the headline is written. The journalist you are pitching is also searching the same terms your audience is searching. If your team doesn’t think this way instinctively, you are already behind.
And then came the point about India. One press release. Sent everywhere. In Eng
