PRISA’s PRISMS Summit & Awards took place last week. The Media Online profiled this year’s Top 10 Young Voices, emerging talent shaping the future of public relations and communications in South Africa.
Selected from a competitive pool of youth entries, each brings a distinct perspective to this year’s theme, Kaleidoscope, Patterns of Impact Across Past, Present and Future’, reflecting on the ideas, experiences and ambitions that will influence the profession’s next chapter.
1. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the South African PR and communications industry today, and what role can young professionals play in addressing it?
2. South Africa’s communications landscape is shaped by issues such as inequality, social change, political polarisation and declining trust. How should the next generation of communicators navigate these complexities while protecting credibility and reputation?
3. AI is rapidly changing how communications work is researched, created and distributed. What do you see as the biggest opportunity – and the biggest ethical risk – AI presents for young South African communicators?
4. Young professionals are entering an industry where traditional PR, social media, content creation, marketing and journalism increasingly overlap. What skills do you believe communicators need to remain relevant and influential over the next five years?
5. The PRISMS theme, Kaleidoscope: Patterns of Impact Across Past, Present and Future, asks us to think about how the profession is evolving. What is one thing you would change about the communications industry in South Africa to make it more inclusive, innovative or meaningful for the next generation?
PRISMS YOUNG VOICE: TIISESTO KOTO
One of the biggest challenges is that we’re operating in a world where everyone is communicating, but not everyone is actually connecting. Brands are competing for attention in an environment where people are increasingly sceptical of what they see and hear. It’s no longer enough to have a good story. People want to know whether that story is real, whether it reflects their lived experiences and whether there’s anything meaningful behind it.
Young professionals have an opportunity to challenge that. We’re entering the industry with fresh perspectives and a different understanding of how people consume information, participate in culture and engage with brands. Our role goes beyond bringing new trends or platforms into the room. It’s about asking better questions, challenging conventional thinking and pushing for communication that has a clear purpose.
Working in strategy has reinforced the importance of understanding the problem before developing an idea. The same principle applies to PR. Before asking how we get people talking, we should be asking why they should care in the first place.
Understanding context
South Africa’s communications landscape is shaped by issues such as inequality, social change, political polarisation and declining trust. How should the next generation of communicators navigate these complexities while protecting credibility and reputation?
It starts with understanding that South Africa is not one audience with one set of experiences. We have different realities, different histories and different relationships with the brands and institutions communicating with us. This is where cultural intelligence becomes essential. We need to understand the contexts in which people live, what matters to them and what informs their perspectives, rather than making assumptions about audiences based on demographics alone.
We must also accept that not every conversation can be controlled. In a country shaped by our history and current realities, people will have different opinions, and brands will not always be able to please everyone. The responsibility is to communicate honestly, understand the consequences of what we say and avoid treating sensitive issues as opportunities for visibility.
The strongest messaging can only go so far when people’s lived experiences contradict it. Credibility comes from ensuring there is substance behind the story and alignment between what an organisation communicates and what it actually does.
Context is everything
The biggest opportunity is AI’s ability to accelerate the thinking process. Research can be time-consuming, and AI can help us process information, identify patterns and explore angles we might not have considered. For agile professionals, this is particularly valuable because it creates more room to interrogate information, develop insights and build stronger ideas.
The biggest risk, however, is outsourcing our thinking. There is a fundamental difference between using AI to support your thinking and allowing it to think for you. In communications, context is everything, and South Africa has a distinct cultural, political and social landscape that cannot always be captured through a prompt.
There is also a risk of producing work that sounds increasingly similar. If we are all using the same tools to generate ideas, where does originality come from? Where does the soul come in?
The answer is not to resist AI, but to learn how to use it responsibly without losing the curiosity, critical thinking and cultural understanding that make us effective communicators. Technology can strengthen our capabilities, but it should never replace the human perspective that gives communication its meaning.
Creativity is essential
Communicators need to become more rounded in how they approach their work. PR can no longer be viewed in isolation from marketing, social media, culture or the broader business objectives of a brand. These disciplines are interconnected, and understanding those relationships is essential to developing communication that delivers meaningful results.
Three capabilities stand out: research, cultural intelligence and commercial thinking. Communicators need to uncover insights that go beyond the obvious, understand why those insights matter to people and translate them into ideas that support broader business objectives. Creativity remains essential, but being able to articulate why an idea makes sense and what it is intended to achieve is equally important.
The ability to work across disciplines is also becoming increasingly valuable. A PR practitioner should understand content, know how digital platforms operate, interpret data and recognise how stories travel across different audiences and channels.
Above all, curiosity will remain a critical advantage. The industry is evolving too quickly for professionals to rely solely on what they already know. Staying relevant requires a commitment to continuous learning, questioning established practices and remaining engaged with the world beyond our job descriptions.
Perspectives shaping work
I would change how the industry values local knowledge and cultural understanding. South Africa has an abundance of creativity and cultural intelligence, particularly within our townships and communities, yet this knowledge is not always recognised as a form of expertise.
The industry often looks to established institutions, familiar voices or international trends for inspiration, overlooking people on the ground who understand our culture, languages and communities in ways that cannot simply be replicated through desk research.
The industry needs to create more opportunities for these perspectives to shape the actual work, rather than featuring them in a campaign once the strategy has already been developed. Inclusion is not only about who gets hired or who appears in an advertisement. It is also about who gets to shape the idea, who receives recognition for their thinking and who has access to the opportunities that allow them to grow.
A more progressive industry would look beyond traditional definitions of expertise and recognise that some of our most valuable insights come from people whose knowledge has been built through lived experience. This would make our work more relevant to South Africans while creating a more inclusive, dynamic and meaningful industry for the next generation of communicators.
