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Ethan McCarty is CEO of Integral , an award-winning employee experience agency. A lecturer at Columbia and Trustee of the Institute for PR.

In an era of seismic shifts across industries, leaders have a defining opportunity: invest in the ability to handle change by working from the inside out. At the heart of every transformation lies employee experience—the most potent, frequently untapped lever for building brands, strengthening reputations and driving sustainable growth. I founded Integral based on the notion that the power of earned media (in the form of employees' voices) can catalyze change from within. This approach is now more consequential than ever.

The communication landscape has changed dramatically over the past two decades. Between 2008 and 2020, the number of newsroom employees in the U.S. declined 26%. This decline underscores a larger trend: traditional earned media is becoming harder to secure and less influential than it once was. Column inches devoted to editorial content are shrinking relative to the sheer volume of advertising and social media content. Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of PR professionals continues to rise, with a staggering 6.2 PR professionals for every journalist in 2021. The gap is widening, fundamentally shifting how organizations gain influence and communicate their stories.

With earned media's reach and impact diminishing and advertising costs trending toward zero, organizations must reevaluate their strategies. We are all awash in programmatic advertising, cluttering our field of vision and our ability to break through with a message, narrative or strategy. Google and Facebook dominate the advertising ecosystem , which has driven a race to the bottom on pricing that hastens the onslaught of customized, AI-generated content headed our way. Advertising agencies are merging to survive (see the recent combination of Omnicom and IPG). The world's largest privately held PR firm, Edelman, recently announced a 5% workforce reduction , signaling ongoing challenges in the sector. These shifts highlight a fundamental truth: so-called "public" channels alone cannot sustain a brand's influence or reputation. The real opportunity lies within the organization itself.