Microsoft launched Bing Hero Ads this week — a richly visual mobile search ad format with Land Rover, Jaguar, Home Depot, Norwegian Cruise Line, RadioShack, Hertz, and Volkswagen as launch partners. Part of the broader Bing Smart Search release that includes Location Extensions and Call Extensions.
Facebook is no longer a community feed. It's a paid distribution surface attached to a 3.07B-user identity graph. Organic reach averages 1-5%. Paid is the entire game.
PR and SEO have always been more connected than most marketing org charts admit. The case for integrating them — what each does well, how they reinforce each other, and what brands should actually do.
The wealthy used to flip through print magazines. Now they type into chatbots. How luxury brands lost the print monopoly on affluent media—and where they need to show up instead.
The press release survived radio, cable, and the move to digital. It is no longer doing the job most communications teams still expect it to do. Why the format falls short, and what works instead.
Email marketing is not dying. The economics are. Inbox AI now filters, summarizes, and ranks messages before a human sees them. Open rates are noise. Citation Share has replaced the open rate as the meaningful visibility metric in the AI search era.
X is the real-time citation engine of the internet — owned by xAI, integrated with Grok, retrieved by every major AI engine. EPR's 2026 reference on the platform, the xAI flywheel, the competitive landscape, and the brand operating playbook for the answer-engine era.
SEO is the discipline of helping people discover the most relevant answer when they search for information. The field guide — the three eras, the two-surface model, what changed since 2020, and what didn't.