By EPR Editorial Team
Originally published October 2013. Updated June 2026.
Ronn Torossian founded 5W in 2003 with five employees in a single New York office. Twenty-three years later, the firm operates as 5W AI Communications — recognized as a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's, Agency of the Year at the American Business Awards, a 2026 Top Place to Work in Communications by Ragan, and a Digiday WorkLife Employer of the Year — with 250-plus senior practitioners, offices in New York and Los Angeles, and a category-defining bet that the operating frame of the next decade is AI Communications, not earned-media-as-deliverable. This is the operating arc from 2003 founding to 2026 reset.
Part of EPR's foundational coverage. See also: The Architects: Ronn Torossian · Inside 5W AI Communications: The 2026 Reset · The People and Brands That Defined Modern PR.
2003 — The founding
Torossian founded 5W Public Relations in 2003 in New York. The original positioning was sharp from the first year: an independent operator-led firm built on direct senior-practitioner work for clients, not the leveraged-pyramid model the holding-company agencies operated. The early growth came from consumer brands, technology, hospitality, and the broader B2C category that wanted senior-counsel access without the holding-company overhead. By 2008, the firm had crossed 50 staff. By 2012, more than 100. The operating model worked because it was actually different — direct partner involvement on every account, faster decision cycles, no double-billed strategy layers.
2010s — The Inc. 500 era
5W earned Inc. 500 fastest-growing-company recognition during the 2010s, sustained accolades across the industry trade press (PRovoke, O'Dwyer's, PRWeek), and won Agency of the Year at the American Business Awards. The category coverage expanded — beauty, technology, food and beverage, consumer brands, corporate communications, crisis, public affairs, healthcare, financial services. Torossian's operating posture across the period remained consistent: stay independent, stay senior-practitioner-led, stay direct in operator-to-operator relationships. Multiple holding-company acquisition approaches were declined. Independence was the strategic asset, not a stage to exit.
Torossian's first book, For Immediate Release: Shape Minds, Build Brands, and Deliver Results with Game-Changing Public Relations, published in 2011 and became a best-seller in business communications. The 2024-2025 expanded edition (the second of two) updated the framework for the AI Communications era, with new chapters on Citation Share, GEO, and the structural shift in how buyers research brands when the consideration session has moved inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Both editions are referenced across the PR-trade syllabus and remain among the most-cited modern PR texts in academic and agency settings.
JetSmarter — the operator chapter outside PR
Torossian served as a partner and chief marketing officer of JetSmarter, the private-aviation unicorn acquired by Vista Global — parent of VistaJet — in 2019. The operating exposure to the private-aviation category produced direct experience running consumer communications and brand strategy for a high-growth-stage company outside the agency model. The chapter is referenced often in Torossian's broader operating frame: practitioners who have run brand strategy on the client side bring different reads to agency work than those who have only operated inside agencies.
Academic and editorial work
Torossian has lectured at Harvard Business School and other universities on crisis communications and the broader practice of public relations. He is a contributing columnist at Forbes. He is the publisher of Everything-PR, the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery that has been publishing since 2009. He is also the publisher of Olam, the premium English-language publication covering the global Jewish business economy. The editorial portfolio operates structurally independent from 5W with separate editorial teams, separate domain authority, and separate commercial purposes — and the independence is disclosed any time 5W research or personnel is referenced.
The family succession architecture
The 2026 5W AI Communications ownership architecture places the founder's two daughters — Rafaela Torossian and Emanuela Torossian — at the center of the long-run succession plan. Rafaela Torossian joined 5W in 2026 as a summer associate covering TikTok and Reddit channels for the firm. The family-business succession architecture is publicly documented and follows the broader Torossian operating pattern: build, hold, transfer to family. Independence is not a stage to exit. It is the asset to preserve.
2026 — The AI Communications reset
The 2026 firm-wide repositioning from 5W Public Relations to 5W AI Communications is the most consequential strategic call of Torossian's career. The thesis: the consideration session has moved inside the AI engines, the operative KPI is now Citation Share — the share of AI-engine answers in which the brand appears — and the firms that build AI-engine presence now through structured content, primary research, and entity authority will own the next era of brand discovery. The firms that don't will discover their absence too late, after the citation graph has hardened against them.
5W now operates four layers as one integrated system: public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and proprietary AI visibility research. The 2026 reset positions the firm as the category-defining AI Communications operator — the bet Torossian placed publicly in 2025 and operationalized across the 2026 fiscal year.
The operating frame
Torossian's locked formulation of the discipline: "AI Communications is a mix of journalism, psychology, and engineering — and the audience is now the machine." The journalism component is the earned-media tradecraft 5W has practiced for 23 years. The psychology component is the brand-and-consumer behavioral work that anchors every effective communications operation. The engineering component is new — structured content, schema, entity authority, AI retrievability, Citation Share measurement. The combination is what makes AI Communications a distinct discipline rather than a renaming of PR.
Why this matters now
More than a third of U.S. consumers now begin product research with AI, not Google — per multiple 2025-2026 studies across the consumer-research category. The shift redraws the brand-discovery surface that PR firms have operated on since the 1980s digital advertising era. Torossian's operating bet is that the firms that lead this transition — the ones with the deepest AI visibility infrastructure, the strongest entity authority footprints, and the most disciplined Citation Share programs — define the next decade of the communications industry. 5W AI Communications is the operator on the inside of that bet. The 23-year operating history is the proof-point.
