Instead, the summit has taken the shape of a much-needed reckoning.
In a room filled with strategists, campaign architects, ethics professionals and reputation advisors, the legacy of Bell Pottinger hovered quietly in the background.
For those outside the industry, Bell Pottinger was a once-prominent UK PR firm that was expelled from the profession in 2017 for running a racially divisive disinformation campaign in South Africa.
It remains a textbook example of what happens when communications is weaponised and not guided by ethics.
Listening to global voices such as Mary Beth West, Paul Holmes and David Richard Evans, it became clear that while the firm is long gone, the conditions that made its work possible are still very much with us.
Mary Beth West, a senior strategist from the US, challenges the industry to confront its role in blurring the lines between advocacy, ideology, and profit.
She describes a concerning trend that PR has, in some quarters, become an industrial complex built around victimhood, partisanship and disinformation, then repackaged and sold under the label of brand purpose.
She points to a failure within the profession to grapple with truth itself, not just in the factual sense, but in how we define, test and defend it.
She made an important distinction between two questions: what is truth, and what is the truth of a situation?
The former may be abstract or debated; the latter requires rigour and honesty.
Her reflections led to a broader conversation in the room.
I shared a South African perspective that Bell Pottinger’s disinformation campaign continues to reverberate years later.
We didn’t catch it early. We only understood what was happening in retrospect, and the damage takes far longer to undo.
In that moment, the conversation shifted toward the current moment, where misinformation, manipulated narratives and ideological storytelling are deeply embedded in the public discourse.
Truth is no longer only about what’s accurate.
It’s about what people trust, and in the age of post-truth, simply stating facts is no longer enough.
Communicators, whether they sit in boardrooms or work in civil society, have a responsibility to interrogate what’s real and not just echo what’s said.
That means holding space for uncomfortable truths, competing viewpoints and complex realities.
It also means noticing when the tools of communications are being used not to inform, but to divide.
This brought me to a question I kept turning over long after the talks were done.
Did Bell Pottinger’s approach to narrative manipulation help lay the foundation for what we’re seeing now?
Are we watching the long tail of that playbook in moments like South Africa’s current tensions with the US, and in AfriForum’s direct appeals to those within Donald Trump’s orbit?
AfriForum, a South African lobby group known for positioning itself as a voice for minority rights, recently made headlines for engaging with American conservative political figures.
It’s the kind of ideological lobbying that draws a clear through-line from the Bell Pottinger era, using foreign platforms to frame local narratives in polarising ways.
That pattern of strategic influence with blurred ethical lines is exactly what Paul Holmes, founder of PRovoke Media, warned about in his keynote.
What’s needed now, Holmes said, is pattern recognition. That means anticipating risk, spotting ideological shifts, and preparing organisations to act based on principle, not just optics.
David Richard Evans, Baron of Sealand and a former campaign strategist for the UK Labour Party, offered a more granular view of that principle in practice.
Drawing on recent election cycles, he explains how political persuasion has changed.
The most successful campaigns, he said, are not built around policies, they’re built around emotional sequencing.
If people do not feel heard on safety, security and aspiration, no amount of progressive messaging will reach them.
The Labour Party reshaped its communication to start with reassurance, then build toward hope and national pride.
The work wasn’t abstract, it was rooted in door-to-door feedback, hyper-local listening, and messaging from real people about real problems.
Evans reminded us that communication is often at its weakest when it forgets how to listen.
People do not respond to decks, data or slogans.
They respond to stories that feel relevant to their lived experience, and are more likely to engage with narratives that reflect their world, not the version of it presented from a stage.
The issue is no longer whether communications has power.
It’s whether we’ve used that power responsibly.
While Bell Pottinger no longer exists, its legacy persists in every campaign that chooses tactics over values, division over truth.
In a world still grappling with post-truth dynamics, the responsibility to lead with integrity falls squarely on all of us in the profession.
Truth can no longer be treated as a PR strategy, it has to become a daily practice. If we don’t restore that foundation, the industry risks losing not just its credibility but its purpose.
Look out for Lebo Madiba's final article from the World Communications Forum Association’s Davos Communications Summit
Aa-isha Hassiem 8 hours
Brendan Seery 1 day
