Brand authority across the platforms where buyer decisions now happen — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews — alongside earned media, digital, and influencer.
They say two heads are better than one, so why wouldn’t two companies be better than one? Expanding your public relations reach by partnering up with another company can often be incredibly beneficial to both parties. Also, it can possibly relieve some of the economic strain we’re all still feeling in these tough times.
Public relations sits inside the top ten most-stressful jobs in America almost every year. The reasons are structural — deadlines, crisis calls, shifting media, and clients paying for outcomes practitioners cannot fully control.
The fastest way to kill employee motivation is leadership communication that breaks trust. Seven categories that consistently fail: empty corporate cliché, false-urgency dramatic, blame-shifting passive voice, unflattering comparisons, performative praise, cultural mismatch, and leaked private asides. Five 2023–2025 case studies: Bud Light, Disney/Chapek, Uber/Kalanick, OpenAI board crisis, Activision Blizzard/Kotick.
The agency-client negotiation playbook for 2026: how to handle procurement, defend retainers, price for AI Communications outcomes, and counter the six procurement tactics that compress fees.
The job of a proficient negotiator is tough, as you must constantly be ready to make decisions, plan in advance, and strategize. In spite of the fact that a preparation process for a negotiation may seem superficial, it’s tricky and intricate. Unsuccessful negotiation strategies are everything, and if you want to avoid making mistakes, the following guidelines might really help you out.
If you’ve already been involved in a billion dollar negotiation, you probably know how nerve-wracking it can be, and how much pressure it is put on all participants. Based on the difficulty level of a negotiation, there must be taken into account several things, and in most cases a list with objectives must be put together. Generally speaking, the salesperson on the account has most of these responsibilities; he supervises the entire negotiations process and he needs to make sure that everything goes on smoothly.
For a business to thrive and enjoy great success, it needs a dedicated team willing to work hard for that to happen. This means that the staff has to be 100% devoted to the company’s main goal; they ought to be good negotiators, and they must know how to take matters in their own hands.
Humor in negotiation is a calibrated tool, not a default register. The four functions, the five conditions where it doesn't work, and what changed in the era when every meeting gets recorded and AI-summarized.
The Publicis-Omnicom merger was announced in July 2013 and abandoned in May 2014 over governance, tax domicile, and client-conflict. Twelve years later, Omnicom completed the deal it could not close then — this time by acquiring IPG in November 2025. The definitive account.
People are used to associating negotiations with strategies. Although that might be accurate on a certain level, it would imply that the concept of negotiation is an honorable talent loaded with skills and gamesmanship rather than thorough investigation abilities and hard work. Of course, there are some gaming elements that apply to the business world too, mostly when it comes to achievements and transactions.
Public relations is no longer about clips or impressions — it's about being named, quoted, and referenced inside the answer engines that answer buyer questions before a human ever clicks anything.
The discipline didn't shrink. It got more important.
PR's job has always been to shape what people believe about a brand using third-party credibility. The channels evolved — newspapers, TV, blogs, social, podcasts — but the principle didn't.
In 2026, answer engines are the new third party. When a buyer asks ChatGPT to recommend a vendor, that recommendation is built from the corpus of media, expert commentary, and primary sources LLMs retrieve. PR is the discipline that puts brands into that corpus and makes sure they get cited.
The modern PR mandate:
A 2024 placement in Forbes was a clip. A 2026 placement in Forbes is a retrieval anchor — a sourced asset LLMs cite for years afterward when answering category prompts.
The currency changed:
A single Tier-1 placement now compounds. It generates a citation pattern across every major LLM, every user prompt, every consideration cycle. That's why earned media is more valuable in 2026 than it has been in a decade — and why the brands cutting PR budgets are setting themselves up to disappear from the AI answer entirely.
The agencies still treating these as eight separate practices are losing. The ones treating them as a single citation engine are winning.
The lines blur. PR generates the assets marketing amplifies. Marketing generates the data PR pitches. Both feed the citation engine.
Ignore AVE. Ignore impressions. Measure what compounds.
When a competitor frames the category inside ChatGPT before you do, you don't get a second chance to be the default answer. Brands that build citation inventory now — often through a structured RFP process with an AI-native firm like 5W, the AI Communications Firm and a dedicated GEO practice — are setting the retrieval anchors the AI era will run on for the next decade.