Mirjamol Turapov speaking alongside his quote about the changing role of professionals and AI.
The communications and brand architect discusses traditional PR skills, localisation, media credibility and the growing influence of artificial intelligence.
When relationships still matter in modern PR
Public relations is often measured through campaign reach, social media views and short-term visibility. However, behind every successful communications strategy sits something more difficult to measure: judgment, credibility and trusted professional relationships.
I have known Mirjamol Turapov for more than a decade, both professionally and personally. During that time, I have seen his thoughtful approach to brand communications and media relations. He has consistently believed that long-term credibility and mutual respect matter more than temporary exposure.
An informal conversation about PR, media relationships and the differences between traditional and new-generation communications professionals led to this Q&A.
I invited Mirjamol to share lessons from nearly two decades in the communications industry, including around 15 years in the UAE. His answers explore how PR has changed, what younger professionals should continue learning and why human judgment remains essential in the age of AI.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview was conducted in writing. The responses have been edited only for minor spelling and grammatical clarity, without changing the interviewee’s meaning or opinions.
About Mirjamol Turapov
Mirjamol Turapov
Communications and Brand Architect
Mirjamol Turapov is a communications professional with nearly two decades of industry experience, including around 15 years in the UAE. His work spans brand communications, media relations, corporate reputation and strategic communications.
The Interview
1. You have worked in the UAE’s PR industry for around 15 years. How has the industry changed since you started?
I think the biggest change is not only in the media landscape, but also in the agency landscape itself.
When I started working in the UAE, the market was much more dominated by large international agencies and a few major groups and their affiliates. Today, there are many more boutique agencies, specialist consultancies and independent senior consultants. A lot of them are built around people who have spent 15 or 20 years in the market, built strong reputations and relationships, and then decided to create something of their own. More brands are also comfortable working with that model now because they can get very senior expertise and a more tailored approach.
The scope of PR has also become much broader. It used to be heavily focused on media relations, interviews, events and press office work. Now PR managers are also involved in digital PR, creators, partnerships, branded content and paid editorial opportunities.
Media organisations have changed too. Many now have dedicated partnership and commercial content teams, so paid collaborations can be much more strategic and integrated than they used to be. So overall, PR has become faster, broader and more integrated, but the fundamentals are still the same: relationships, judgment, credibility and knowing what makes a story relevant.
2. Has PR become more strategic, or is the industry now too focused on quick visibility, social media views and trending content?
There’s real truth in that concern. A lot of PR activity today is judged on reach, views and engagement numbers because those are the easiest things to report on, and that can pull attention away from the slower work of building actual credibility and trust.
But I’d separate the tool from the problem. Visibility metrics aren’t the issue on their own; treating them as the whole job is. I’ve been fortunate to see PR from both sides. In businesses where PR sits close to marketing, with clear commercial objectives, I actually enjoy that side of the work: making PR relevant to business performance and understanding how communications support commercial results. That’s a skill the modern comms job pushes you to develop, because PR now functions as a marketing tool as much as a communications one.
I’ve also worked on the corporate side, where PR is about reputation, crisis management and stakeholder confidence, and where success looks completely different. There, you’re building what I call a media ecosystem: trust with journalists, editors and publishers that develops over years, not a single campaign cycle.
A strong PR professional needs to be comfortable in both worlds, sitting with legal or finance when reputation is on the line, and with marketing when the job is commercial impact. So the real question isn’t whether PR should chase visibility or protect reputation. It’s whether you know which one the moment in front of you actually calls for.
“Visibility metrics aren’t the issue on their own; treating them as the whole job is.”
3. What important traditional PR skills do you feel younger professionals may be overlooking?
I think the most important thing is to learn the classics before trying to reinvent them.
PR today sits somewhere between marketing, commercial objectives, reputation and corporate communications. Marketing in particular is quite unforgiving if you refuse to evolve, so I completely understand why younger professionals embrace new platforms, formats and ways of working. They should. The industry has changed, and we have to change with it.
But sometimes people skip the fundamentals. Understanding news judgment, how journalists work, how to write and pitch properly, and how to build genuine media relationships still matters. You need to understand the original rules before you can intelligently adapt them to a new landscape.
I also think senior managers in both agency and in-house have a real responsibility here. We often tell younger professionals that relationship-building is important, but then we structure their schedules entirely around deliverables, timesheets, pitching and reporting. If we genuinely want them to build a media ecosystem, that needs to be facilitated in their workload and even reflected in their KPIs.
Someone joining a new account or an in-house PR role should be given protected time every week to get out, meet journalists, understand the landscape and start building their own network. And I do not mean handing them a list of ten people they must meet. They need the freedom to identify the journalists, editors and media contacts they naturally connect with and gradually build their own core relationships.
You cannot build those relationships only when you have a press release to pitch. Sometimes you need to meet without an immediate agenda, listen, understand what someone covers and learn how they prefer to work.
So my advice to younger professionals would be: embrace everything new, but do not skip the fundamentals. And my advice to the people managing them would be: if you expect them to build relationships, give them the time and space to actually do it.
“You cannot build those relationships only when you have a press release to pitch.”
4. How should brands differentiate between journalists, specialist reviewers, content creators and paid influencers?
I actually don’t think brands should differentiate between them in terms of the relationship. But the strategy deck should differentiate between them.
Journalists, specialist reviewers, content creators and paid influencers all play different roles, and that should be reflected in how they fit into a communications plan. One may be important for credibility, another for technical evaluation, another for community relevance, reach or conversion. The difference is in their role within the strategy, not in their value as a relationship.
From the relationship side, I think everyone should be approached with the same level of respect, professionalism and transparency. You are still dealing with people, and strong relationships are built in much the same way: understanding what they do, what their audience expects and where there is genuine relevance between their platform and the brand.
The clarity also has to come from the other side. Journalists, reviewers, creators and influencers need to be clear about what differentiates them, what their strengths are and what kind of collaboration makes sense for their audience. That makes alignment much easier for brands.
So I would not put them into a hierarchy or say one is more valuable than another. They simply occupy different places within the communications ecosystem. A good strategy understands exactly why each one is there, what objective they can support and what success should look like.
5. The UAE has a multicultural and multilingual audience. How should PR campaigns be localised for different communities without losing the central brand message?
The UAE is quite a unique market because of how multicultural and multilingual it is, but also because it is often a trendsetter for the wider region. That gives brands an opportunity to test campaign thinking here, learn from it, and then develop it further across the GCC and even the wider Middle East and Africa.
For me, localisation should start at the concept stage, not after the global campaign has already been created.
The central brand message usually stays consistent, but global teams need to work with local teams early enough to understand which parts of the communication are fixed and which elements can be re-evaluated, adapted or even removed depending on cultural relevance.
I learned something very early in my agency career from an experienced strategist: everyone can have an idea, but a strong idea becomes a concept only when it can live across different platforms, markets and environments without losing its essence. If the whole campaign collapses as soon as one element has to change for a particular market, then it probably was not a strong global concept to begin with.
That is how I think localisation should work. You keep the core message intact, but build enough flexibility into the campaign so local teams can make it culturally and contextually relevant.
The UAE is particularly useful in this respect because it allows you to see very quickly whether a campaign can genuinely travel across different audiences while still remaining recognisably the same brand.
“For me, localisation should start at the concept stage, not after the global campaign has already been created.”
6. With AI now producing press releases, pitches and campaign ideas, what value must PR professionals continue to provide?
Judgment. That hasn’t changed and I don’t think it will.
AI can draft a press release, build a pitch angle, even suggest a campaign idea in seconds. What it can’t do is tell you whether that output is newsworthy, accurate, culturally right for the market, or on brand. That’s still on the person running the process.
This is where experience matters more than people expect. If you’ve never written a press release yourself, built a pitch from scratch, or learned to judge what’s genuinely a story, you have no real basis for evaluating what AI hands you back. It’s the same problem as managing someone junior: if you don’t understand the job, you can’t tell good work from work that just looks finished.
I’d also push back on the instinct to treat AI-assisted content as automatically weaker. Used well, it can hold up fine, and I think the industry needs to get comfortable with that rather than pretending the tool itself is the issue. What goes wrong, when it does, is usually the same thing that went wrong before AI existed: something got used without being properly fact-checked, judged for relevance, or read for cultural fit.
What I find even more interesting is what AI may mean for PR beyond content creation. We have traditionally thought about PR in terms of whether the right people see and trust a story. Increasingly, there may be another audience: the AI systems people use to research companies, products and recommendations.
Recent industry research is already suggesting that earned media and independent journalism make up a significant proportion of the sources cited by generative AI platforms. If that continues, then PR may become part of the infrastructure that shapes how AI understands a brand – through independent coverage, reviews, expert commentary, research and third-party validation.
That is also changing how we measure PR. It is not only about coverage, reach or share of voice among people, but also whether credible earned content is influencing how brands appear in AI-generated answers and recommendations. So the professional’s job hasn’t shrunk; it has shifted. Less time spent producing a first draft, more time spent deciding what’s worth publishing and what should never leave the draft stage. AI speeds up the work. It doesn’t own the decision, yet.
“AI speeds up the work. It doesn’t own the decision, yet.”
7. After nearly two decades in the industry, including around 15 years in the UAE, what still excites you about public relations?
What still excites me most is the people. PR is very much a people’s profession, which is interesting because I’m quite a private and naturally introverted person. Communication became a hard skill that I consciously learned and developed, so there is still something personally rewarding for me when I connect with people, build trust and see that communication work the way I intended.
I also like the fact that the profession keeps evolving. There is always something new to learn, and at this stage of my career, there is also a different kind of satisfaction in being able to pass some of that experience on and mentor younger professionals.
And something I never expected when I moved more fully into communications is how much the profession becomes part of your social identity. In marketing, people may never know who was behind a campaign. In PR and communications, you are much more visible and personally connected to the work. Over time, your profession, your relationships and your reputation become quite intertwined.
Editor’s closing thoughts
Mirjamol’s answers return repeatedly to one important principle: platforms, tools and measurements may change, but judgment, credibility and genuine professional relationships remain central to effective public relations.
His observations about AI are particularly relevant. The technology can accelerate content creation, but it cannot independently determine whether a story is credible, culturally appropriate or worth publishing. That responsibility still belongs to experienced communications professionals.
For younger PR professionals, the lesson is not to choose between traditional principles and modern tools. It is to understand the fundamentals well enough to use new tools with purpose.
I thank Mirjamol Turapov for sharing his time, experience and candid perspective with CriticReviewer.
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
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