The Future of Digital PR in Africa and Why the Industry Must Stop Arguing About Ownership

florenceakanbi
Jun 10
5 min read

A few months ago, I sat in a meeting where a PR agency and a digital agency were presenting ideas for the same campaign.

The PR team had identified creators, developed the campaign narrative, mapped audience conversations, and built a strategy around trusted voices.

The digital team had done almost exactly the same thing.

The debate that followed was predictable.

The digital team argued that influencer marketing belongs to digital because influencers operate on digital platforms.

The PR team argued that influencers are trusted third-party voices, making influencer engagement an extension of public relations.

Neither side was entirely wrong.

But both sides were asking the wrong question.

The real issue is not who owns influencer marketing. The real issue is that the communications industry is still trying to apply old definitions to a media landscape that has fundamentally changed.

And nowhere is this shift more evident than in Africa.

The Original Role of Digital PR

At its core, public relations has always been about reputation.

PR helps organisations earn credibility, build trust, shape perception, and maintain relationships with stakeholders.

Traditionally, this happened through newspapers, television, radio, and industry publications. PR professionals built relationships with journalists and editors because those gatekeepers controlled access to audiences.

As audiences moved online, the channels changed, but the objective remained the same. Digital PR emerged as the practice of building credibility and earning third-party endorsement through digital channels.

Today, those channels include the following:

Online media platforms
Industry newsletters
Podcasts
Independent publishers
Bloggers
Content creators
Online communities

The principle has never changed.

Digital PR exists to earn trust and credibility in digital environments.

That distinction matters because many organisations still confuse Digital PR with digital marketing.

They are connected disciplines, but they solve different business problems.

Digital PR and Digital Marketing Are Not the Same Thing

The easiest way to understand the difference is this:

Digital marketing is responsible for attention, acquisition, and conversion.
Digital PR is responsible for trust, reputation, and credibility.
A digital marketing campaign can place a message in front of millions of people.
Digital PR helps determine whether those people believe it.
Digital marketing focuses on performance metrics such as reach, clicks, conversions, and return on investment.
Digital PR focuses on reputation metrics such as sentiment, trust, authority, credibility, share of voice, and stakeholder perception.

The strongest brands understand that both functions are necessary.

One creates visibility. The other creates belief.

Without visibility, a brand struggles to grow.

Without trust, growth becomes difficult to sustain.

The Myth of Earned Media Purity

For years, the communications industry treated earned, owned, and paid media as separate disciplines.

That distinction no longer reflects reality.

Organic reach continues to decline across major platforms as algorithms increasingly prioritise paid distribution and platform-controlled discovery.

As a result, even the most compelling earned media story may never reach its intended audience without strategic amplification.

This does not mean PR has become advertising.

It means the modern communications ecosystem requires integration.

Today, some of the most effective campaigns begin with an earned story, strengthen credibility through third-party endorsement, and then use paid channels to scale visibility.

The responsibility of PR is still to create trust.

The responsibility of digital marketing is to maximise reach and measurable outcomes.

The most successful campaigns combine both.

Why Africa Changes the Conversation

Many communications frameworks were developed in markets with long-established media institutions, high levels of institutional trust, and relatively mature information ecosystems.

African markets often operate differently.

Across the continent, audiences increasingly rely on community validation, peer recommendations, creators, niche publishers, and trusted local voices when evaluating information.

Research from the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that concerns around misinformation remain high globally and that people increasingly place trust in individuals they perceive as relatable and credible within their communities.

This shift has important implications for communications professionals.

In many African markets, trust is not built solely through traditional media coverage. A feature in a respected publication still matters. But so does a trusted creator speaking in a local dialect. So does a niche industry podcast.

So does a community leader, entrepreneur, educator, or subject matter expert who has built credibility within a specific audience.

The modern African communications landscape requires a broader understanding of influence.

The question is no longer whether creators belong to PR or digital.

The question is whether organisations understand how trust is actually formed within the communities they are trying to reach.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

The PR versus digital debate is often treated as an agency problem. It is not. It is a business problem.

When communications functions operate in silos, organisations often experience:

Duplicated budgets
Conflicting messaging
Competing performance metrics
Fragmented customer experiences
Slower crisis response
Inconsistent brand positioning

The result is a campaign that may perform well on paper but fails to build a lasting reputation or meaningful stakeholder trust.

For brand managers and business leaders, the objective should not be determining which team wins ownership.

The objective should be to ensure both teams work from a shared communications strategy.

So Who Owns What?

A practical way to draw the line is to focus on outcomes rather than channels.The overlap is significant, and that is perfectly normal.

Influencer campaigns, crisis communications, social media engagement, and newsjacking often require both teams working together.

The goal should not be ownership.

The goal should be alignment.

What This Means for PR Professionals

PR professionals must stop defining their value solely through earned media.

The future of PR is not media placement.

It is trust architecture.

It is understanding how credibility is built, maintained, protected, and amplified across an increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem.

That requires a deeper understanding of creators, communities, platforms, data, audience behaviour, and digital distribution.

At the same time, digital professionals must recognise that not everything valuable can be measured through clicks and conversions.

Reputation, trust, and credibility remain some of the most important assets a brand possesses, even when they do not appear neatly on a performance dashboard.