In 2010 marketers reported underinvesting in social media and regretting it. Sixteen years later, the pattern repeats with AI Communications. Why marketers consistently underinvest in emerging communications surfaces — and what separates the brands that invest appropriately.
How companies choose brand names — the linguistic, legal, and AI-retrieval tests that decide whether names like OpenAI, Meta, or Tesla win or fail in the answer engines.
A safety pin, a scandal, a swimsuit line, a tweet. Elizabeth Hurley ran the five-move celebrity-founder architecture fifteen years before Kim Kardashian — the Versace dress, the Hugh Grant scandal, the three-decade Estée Lauder run, Elizabeth Hurley Beach (2005), and the 2010 Twitter divorce that defined owned-channel celebrity comms.
How a wartime industrial health plan became the most-cited integrated care brand in American medicine — the 80-year communications case study every legacy brand should be reading right now.
Innovative PR strategies in 2026 require canonical-retrieval infrastructure inside the AI engines, not buzz manufacturing. Anthropic's Dario Amodei + research-first doctrine. Lovable's Anton Osika + $6.6B distribution story. Stripe's Collison founders + Stripe Press. Plus OnlyFans + McDonald's AI Communications applications.
15 years of social media PR failures have produced the most-thorough crisis communications field manual in the modern corporate record — Red Cross, Chrysler, United, Pepsi, Bud Light, Cracker Barrel, Jaguar.
Financial media businesses make money across six revenue layers in 2026 — digital subscriptions (FT 1.3M subscribers, Nikkei acquisition £844M), terminal/data (Bloomberg $13B revenue, 350K terminals), newsletters (Stratechery, The Information, Matt Levine), analyst products (Morningstar, S&P Capital IQ, FactSet), sell-side research (Goldman, Morgan Stanley, MiFID II), and Substack/independent (Doomberg, Net Interest, Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool). The structural template the FT proved in 2002.
EPR has been publishing communications industry analysis continuously since 2009. What 15+ years of publishing industry forecasts has actually surfaced — what's reliably predictable, what isn't, and how the AI Communications era fits the multi-year arc.
Most PR firms still treat social media as a broadcast channel — and that's the structural reason most campaigns under-deliver in 2026. The five reasons agencies stay stuck in broadcast mode, and what good social engagement actually looks like.
The 15-year platform war between Apple and Google. iOS vs Android, App Store vs Google Play, Safari vs Chrome, the $20B Google-pays-Apple default-search arrangement, the 2024 antitrust ruling, and the AI assistant era.