IPRA

It has never been easier for a brand to be visible. We have social media, digital platforms, influencers, podcasts, traditional media and now AI making it possible to produce and distribute more content than ever before. Yet, despite all these opportunities to be seen, I believe one of the greatest challenges facing South African brands today is something much more difficult to achieve: being trusted. Visibility can be bought but trust can’t.

3 minutes ago The Grand Prix 2026 of the IPRA Golden World Awards for Excellence (GWA), the world’s most prestigious PR awards scheme, went to AI for Crisis Communication: From Study to Strategy about the use of AI in detecting fake news. The campaign from Nigeria’s Image Merchants on behalf of Nigerian Customs was a pioneer in the field of AI and PR.

45 minutes ago IPRA, the International Public Relations Association is pleased to announce it has revived a national chapter for Qatar and appointed Abdullah Mohammed Al-Abduljabbaas Vice Chairman of the chapter. As part of its ethos to integrate the global and the local, IPRA encourages the formation of geographic chapters. These may span a country or a region. They are formed by the paid-up members of IPRA in that region and inspire local events and publications.

When BMW launched the 1 Series in China, it ran the campaign very differently to how it would have done in Munich or London, where the tried and tested approach is a press embargo, a motor show reveal and getting motoring journalists into the driving seat. Instead, it partnered with a Chinese pop star on Douyin (China's answer to TikTok, actually sharing the same parent company, but running as a separate app with its own audience and rules) and built the campaign around a Valentine's Day theme.

11 minutes ago Good communication isn’t just for companies and executives. It’s something everyone can use every day. This PR Month, the International Public Relations Association Philippines (IPRA Philippines) is bringing “PR Matters” to social media, with 12 short-form videos that makes public relations and communication simpler, more relatable, and useful in everyday life.

I was talking recently to the comms lead of a large European payments company, a business with a well-established name at home. She told me, bemused, that on her first trip to São Paulo not one journalist she met had heard of the brand, and more than one assumed it was a startup. It had been trading for over a decade but none of that, as it turned out, had made the crossing.

By: Mehdi Bagherian 10/08/2026 PR’s most important mission is to defend humanity in a world that is becoming increasingly automated, faster, more complex, and, in many ways, less just. By Mehdi Bagherian.

From time to time, we should ask ourselves a fundamental question: Why did public relations come into existence in the first place? Was it created to increase sales? To manage public opinion? To lobby? To build an image? To manage reputation? To produce content? Or to serve every new concept that finds its way into the vocabulary of this profession? My answer is simple: Ultimately, public relations is about people.

For years, corporate communications teams treated paid, earned, shared and owned (PESO) media as a strategic distribution model: earned built credibility, owned media carried the official record, shared extended the conversation, paid media added precision reach. GenAI-driven search is turning that model into something else: a trust architecture, with a particular weighting towards earned and owned.

Public relations, it would appear, is having another identity crisis. Take, for example, Stephen Waddington’s Wadds Inc. Summer Annual – an empirical, cold-shower audit of an industry struggling to live up to its potential. And compare that to the What If Manifesto by Ana Adi and I – a more philosophical, "metamodern" perspective that questions and challenges the industry’s established comfort zones. Where Wadds Inc.