Social took the attention. That does not mean press lost its value. It means it lost its monopoly, and those are different problems.
A brand talking about itself on its own channels is not the same as a journalist deciding your product is worth writing about. One is marketing. The other is a third party vouching for you, and audiences, search engines and AI tools alike still weigh those two things differently. That gap is not closing. A press feature is indexed, permanent and citable. It gets found in a search two years later, and it is exactly the kind of source AI answer engines now pull from when someone asks a question your brand should be part of the answer to. A social post has a shelf life measured in hours.
It also reaches people who are not spending their attention on Instagram. Trade and specifier audiences, the people actually recommending or stocking a product, still read the trade press, and there is no social feed that reliably replaces that. The honest challenge is not relevance: it is proof. Press has always struggled to show its working the way a paid social dashboard can. So we track it properly: pieces published, print circulation, online readership and page views, reported the same way we would any other channel.
What that looks like in practice
- 1,100+ pieces of coverage since 2022 for Roca and LAUFEN
- 700+ pieces across seven years for Ledbury Studio
- 2.4M opportunities to see for Karndean since November 2024
- 70+ pieces of coverage since 2025 for Lisa Hensby