Congratulations to the winners of this year’s MEPRA Awards. Following a nail-biting, adrenalin-pumping and highly animated event, the winners of the best PR campaigns from across the Middle East got onto the catwalk for the trademark photo-ops brandishing trophies.

Of course, the envy of all was the winner of the Agency of the Year category, the poster child of the industry. The all-star team will proudly carry that label and the bragging rights that go with it until the next champion is crowned.

But what will a PR agency look like ten years from now? Are today’s PR firms in the Middle East awake to the challenges and the changes ahead? What about the communicator of the year? How would PR pros’ skill sets evolve to continue adding value and maintain their relevance in an environment that blurs boundaries between marketing communications disciplines’ practitioners?

The only answer is that PR simply needs to prevail if it doesn’t want to perish. There is no middle ground. It’s all or nothing.

Speaking at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbul in 2012, innovation editor Thomas Frey from The Futurist predicted that over 2 billion jobs from different professions will disappear by 2030.

With 68 per cent of all purchases unplanned, 70 per cent of brand choices made in-store and only 5 per cent of shoppers loyal to a particular brand within any particular category, the value of PR agencies in the marketing mix may be put to test as brands today have affordable technologies at hand to make without us.

The challenge for PR professionals is to evolve together with the changing landscape and enhance and diversify their skill sets.

Content creation PR-style can no longer be solely associated with crafting press releases or holding statements. While still relevant, writing skills will simply not be enough to keep PR people afloat in an ocean of information that has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s.

If all the data today were bound into books it would reach from the Earth to Pluto and back more than 10 times, according Oracle. And that simply means that our impact as communicators is being diminished in diametrical contrast with the bulging narratives.

The PR industry needs to ponder about its own future and take initiatives that will help it evolve as we have already embarked on a one-way journey to a world where Digital dominates.

As we try to balance on a very thin thread — the threshold between remaining competitive or simply becoming redundant — it is time to take our fate into our own hands by first defining and then shaping our future.

PR firms and practitioners must urgently address the emerging information consumption trends by adapting their services to the new media landscape and consumers’ surfing needs. They must adopt techniques that would help them maintain their competitiveness in the constantly changing world of the information overload age.

PR professionals must improvise and seize the moment by carving our niche at the forefront of the marketing mix as communicators who truly understand where the world is heading and prove we can reach there before anyone else does.

It’s not just about arriving to a completely new and unknown destination, but rather preparing ourselves for a journey having a clearly defined mission and carrying the tools we will need to accomplish objectives.

When all is said and done, would the existing format of evaluation criteria still be relevant to reward PR excellence in the next decade? And how credible would the awards continue to be six years from now if the sector fails to adopt a universally acceptable ROI (return on investment) measurement framework following the publication of the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles in 2010?

After all, recognition needs benchmarks, and those are still nowhere to be found.

— The writer is Head of PR and Social Media at Al Futtaim Group and author of ‘Back to the Future of Marketing — PRovolve or Perish’.