Firebrand Turns 9: Welcome to the AI Era of PR and Marketing

Every year, I write a post celebrating the anniversary of our PR and growth marketing agency Firebrand. It’s an opportunity to mark a milestone, review the past 12 months, thank clients and the team. I might call out a few highlights, like our new GEO service or the Brand Awareness dashboard that we recently launched. Perhaps give a nod to our new positioning as we work with larger scaleups and implement more sophisticated campaigns. Humblebrag about an award.

You get the picture.

Instead, let’s talk about the opportunity before us in what we are calling the AI Era of PR and Marketing

The marketing ground shifted in 2025

Marketing has changed this year. The channels that reliably delivered no longer perform in the same way. People don’t click links, they don’t fill in forms, they don’t read content, they don’t open emails, they don’t even see your social content, let alone engage. Why? Pick your trend: zero-click search, form fatigue, AI-driven spam, AI slop, and pay-to-play social media.. It’s been lot for marketers to digest – is this a temporary blip, have they missed a seismic shift, is this just them or sector-wide? There are examples of brands bucking the trend but replicating that success has been hard. For many marketers who were reliant on incremental improvements, it’s meant a return to fundamentals of building a standout campaign, with a tight message delivered in a creative way. 

At the same time, buyer behavior itself has changed. Buyers now use AI to conduct deep research on their own and want to self-serve longer into the funnel. Even big-ticket purchases are moving online. For enterprise sales, buying committees are typically larger, and the buying cycle is longer. The result? Tech startups are pivoting to product-led sales. Sign up online with your credit card. Land and expand to the Pro, Team and Enterprise Tiers. Landing is simpler today than it once was but expansion is hard. 

Marketers in the middle

What about our marketer in the midst of this? The economic squeeze of last year, and led to headcount reductions this year. We’ve seen whole award-winning marketing teams replaced even as their companies grew. That means there’s an abundance of great talent out there with many marketing teams adding in fractional team members, freelancers and agencies to fill the gaps and bring in new skills.

Then there’s the use of AI. We’re excited about the promise, but the reality for many use cases at the moment – content creation, research, design, social media – has been mixed. It’s a solid B, and that’s fine for some tasks. But to win, you need A-grade work. Brands are realizing that AI is an excellent enabling and automating tool, but it doesn’t create the final output. AI is in the loop, not in the chair.

Signals of opportunity

That’s not to say that AI doesn’t open up whole new fields of capabilities in marketing. Just look at the explosion of signals-based marketing. The promise of mass personalization is here with tools, such as Clay. It’s exciting: just talk to any marketer and watch their eyes light up with ideas as they de-anonymize traffic to the site, enrich it, match it to their ICP and then automate outreach. It still takes engineering and the cost is perhaps too high, but it’s fun to live in the marketing world so many have been talking about for years. 

Where Firebrand stands at 9

So as Firebrand turns nine,  the truth is, we’re not the same agency we were in 2024. We’ve added new services, new skills, and new technology partners. We’ve invested heavily in AI-enhanced processes, not to replace expertise, but to amplify it. We’ve tested approaches on our own site and marketing programs. We take our responsibility to guide our clients through the new rules of PR and marketing seriously. It’s complex, confusing, exciting, and ever-changing—and we’re here to help along the way.

Welcome to the AI Era of PR and Marketing.