The Great Unlearning: Why Innovation Starts With Letting Go

Being named PRovoke Media’s Agency Innovator of the Year forced me to be honest about what innovation looks like in practice, not just how our industry talks about it.

Because in most agencies, what passes for innovation is really iteration: a new tool applied to an old way of thinking, or a familiar framework with a fresh coat of paint.

The pressure is coming from every direction. Everyone wants proof, relevance and results they can feel.

The problem isn’t effort. PR teams are working harder than ever, with more pitches, creators, channels and content. But volume is not impact. Brands still optimizing a playbook that stopped working five years ago aren’t falling behind slowly; they’re accelerating toward irrelevance.

 Here are four ways I am unlearning to move forward:

1. Unlearn the Brand as Protagonist

The brands earning real attention today create the conditions for a story worth telling. That means stepping back and letting a community, a creator or a cultural moment lead. It means creating stories journalists want to cover, not just ones the brand wants placed.

When Duolingo announced the “death” of its owl mascot Duo in February 2025, it lit the match and got out of the way. Other brands posted mock condolences. Celebrities joined in. National news covered it. The brand didn’t control how the narrative took form; they just created the opening and let the internet take it from there. The result? 1.7 billion impressions.

2. Unlearn the Habit of Crisis-Only Reputation Thinking

Most brands treat reputation management like insurance, something to scramble for when things go sideways. That model is broken, and it usually becomes the communications team’s problem at the worst possible moment.

Trust isn’t built in a crisis response. It’s revealed by one. What looks like a communications problem in year three is often a credibility deficit from years one and two.

When public anxiety about AI was at its peak, O2 didn’t wait to be put on the defensive. It built “Daisy the AI Granny,” an AI character designed to protect elderly people from phone scammers and deployed it publicly. The campaign wasn’t just clever. It was a values statement made before the question was asked. When the AI ethics conversation intensified, O2 already had an answer that didn’t need to be defensive.

3. Unlearn the Big-Platform Monoculture

If your entire earned media approach is built around chasing major placements, that’s not strategic, that’s a (bad) habit. And you’re overpaying for reach that may not convert or drive business impact.

Skincare brand Jaxon Lane didn’t launch with a national media campaign. It seeded its hero product, a men’s sheet mask, among micro-influencers with just a few thousand followers who specialized in sheet mask reviews. Magazine editors followed those creators to spot trends and reached out directly. Within a year, the Wall Street Journal was interviewing Jaxon Lane about men’s grooming habits. The niche voice didn’t just reach the right consumer; it reached the right journalist.

One deeply trusted niche voice did what no broad-reach campaign could have manufactured. Precision beats presence, and it’s a much easier story to tell when someone asks you to justify the budget.

4. Unlearn PR as a Downstream Function

The most expensive habit in modern marketing is bringing communications in after the product is built, the campaign is locked, and the decisions are made. The ask is amplification. That’s useful. It’s only a fraction of the value on the table.

PR isn’t just a megaphone. At its best, it builds the credibility and cultural relevance that make people care what a brand does next, not defensively, but proactively. The goal isn’t to avoid bad press. It’s to build a reputation strong enough that when you have something to say, people are already leaning in.

That case has never been more urgent. In the era of generative AI search, earned credibility is infrastructure. The brands appearing in AI-generated answers aren’t there because they paid for placement; they’re there because they built a body of credible, earned coverage that AI engines recognize as authoritative. Treat PR as an afterthought, and you won’t just lose share of voice. You’ll disappear from the conversation entirely.

Brought in early, great PR sharpens positioning, finds the angles most likely to resonate and pushes ideas from adequate to compelling. Brought in late, it can only dress up what’s already been built. The brands that get this right build with PR from the start.

The only advantage that compounds

Reach can be bought. A byline can be placed. But the credibility that makes either of those things land with audiences who actually influence purchase decisions, shape perceptions, and determine cultural staying power comes from a reputation that must be earned.

Innovation isn’t always an addition. Sometimes it’s a subtraction: a habit retired, an assumption challenged, a model you stop defending because the market stopped rewarding it.

That’s the unlearning. For any brand serious about what comes next, it isn’t optional.