4 Mandates for Successful Consumer Public Relations in 2026

PR Blog

Posted on: December 9th, 2025

$18.79 for Every Dollar Spent: Why Earned Media Still Wins in the Age of AI

The headlines about artificial intelligence are impossible to ignore. As a marketer, one can no longer avoid the following question – does earned media still matter in an age where AI can produce massive amounts of content? Luckily, according to our metrics, the answer is a resounding yes.

At Merit Mile, our PR team has managed to bring a significant ROI to consumer-facing brands from retail, hospitality, and lifestyle industries along with technology and financial services sectors through our PR campaigns. In the first three quarters of 2025, Merit Mile PR clients generated a staggering $18.79 in earned media value per dollar spent on PR campaigns, a consistent metric maintained quarter to quarter despite the changing environment driven by advancements in AI technology.

So, the real question for 2026 planning isn’t whether AI belongs in PR. It’s where it belongs.

Curious what a return like this could look like for your brand? Email us at hello@meritmile.com — we’re happy to explore the possibilities with you.

What AI Is Genuinely Changing

AI has earned its place in the modern PR toolkit, and pretending otherwise does clients a disservice. Three areas have changed meaningfully:

  1. Media monitoring. The process that would take an entire team hours to complete manually—to analyze media coverage, track mentions, monitor sentiment, and identify competitors’ news—has become real-time and continuous thanks to AI technologies.
  2. Drafting pitches. Artificial intelligence solutions can help PR pros generate a first draft of a pitch by structuring the text, crafting a good subject line, or summarizing the announcement.
  3. Coverage analysis. The ability to measure the value and coverage of media placements, which traditionally used to be done through slow, tedious manual calculation, can now be completed much quicker thanks to AI assistance.

This is real time savings. No serious PR campaign in 2026 can afford to neglect them.

What AI Still Can’t Do

Here’s where the conversation usually goes wrong: efficiency gets mistaken for strategy. The ability of AI to make the work of the PR team more efficient does not mean that it will automatically make it relevant or that the huge volume of data would create a connection.

According to the 2025 State of Journalism report produced by Muck Rack, with the participation of 1,500+ journalists, the human side of this industry is hard to argue with. Indeed, the fact that 84% of journalists agree that stories usually come out of pitches shows that pitches work. At the same time, 86% state that they ignore pitches that are off topic for what they cover. It is this gap that no AI alone can fill. Any journalist immediately knows whether it is an appropriate pitch or mass-produced with some personalization.

This clearly shows how PR professionals actually pitch. Industry research on 2025 pitching behavior found that while most PR pros personalize pitches to some degree, the depth of that personalization varies enormously, and journalists notice the difference between a pitch with a few swapped-in details and one that reflects real understanding of their beat and recent work. We see this play out with our own clients: a pitch tied to a lifestyle or trends reporter’s actual recent coverage consistently outperforms a generic product announcement sent to a broad media list. No AI tool does that homework for you. It can only help you execute faster once a human has done the thinking.

The same is true, with even higher stakes, in two other areas:

Editorial judgment. Knowing what story to pitch to each outlet, when to hold a piece of news for a bigger moment, and how to frame a narrative so it resonates with a specific audience: this is craft built on experience, not pattern-matching. Artificial intelligence may give some suggestions, yet it won’t have the judgment needed to protect a client’s reputation or maximize a strategic opportunity.

Crisis navigation. When something goes wrong, clients don’t need an algorithm. They need a strategist who can read about a fast-moving situation in real time. A crisis rarely unfolds in a straight line. As new information surfaces, reporters begin asking follow-up questions, and leadership has to decide what to say, when to say it, and to whom, often within the hour. AI has no way to weigh those tradeoffs or read the room a spokesperson is standing in. This is perhaps one of the clearest lines in the entire PR discipline: crisis response requires human judgment, full stop.

Where AI Helps and Where It Hurts

It becomes quite obvious based on the experience of our clients that artificial intelligence works whenever it eliminates friction from the execution, and it does harm where people allow it to replace building relationships and exercising judgement.

Programs that over-rely on AI pitching tend to look the same from the outside: generic subject lines, pitches that miss a journalist’s specific beat, and outreach that reads like it was written for anyone rather than someone. Journalists notice, and response rates suffer for it. The agencies winning coverage in 2026 are the ones that have found the right balance. AI accelerates the research and drafting, but every pitch is still reviewed and approved by a person before it goes out the door.

The 2026 Mandate for PR Teams

As budgets get scrutinized heading into next year, the agencies and in-house teams that will perform best are the ones who treat AI as an instrument, not a strategy. That means:

  1. Using AI-powered monitoring to spot opportunities and risks earlier
  2. Letting AI draft a starting point, while a strategist shapes the final pitch around the specific journalist and outlet
  3. Reserving editorial judgment and crisis decisions entirely for experienced human counsel
  4. Continuing to invest in relationships with real journalists, which continues to be the best predictor of earned media success

Why does earned media win in the age of AI? For the same reason it always has. Earned media is third-party endorsement that can’t be bought, and it’s built on the trusted relationship between PR professionals and journalists who know their pitches are worth opening. AI can help that professional work faster. It can’t replace the relationship itself.

Explore how Merit Mile’s PR team blends technology with relationships at meritmile.com/services/public-relations, or email us directly at hello@meritmile.com to start the conversation.

For a deeper look at how Merit Mile calculates the true dollar value of earned media placements, read PR ROI: What Does a 32x Return Actually Look Like? For more on why earned media continues to outperform paid alternatives for long-term brand credibility, explore The True Power of Earned Media for Brands.