Apple TV+ MLS Season Pass. Google's Dear Sydney AI ad. FTX athlete endorsements. Bud Light sports sponsorship retreat. Nike London Marathon billboards. LIV Golf merger comms. The verified sports digital marketing fails of 2023-2026.
Six modern PR crises diagnosed through Grunig and Hunt's four models — Tylenol, Pepsi/Kendall, MSL/Netflix, Qwikster, Bud Light, and Starbucks under Brian Niccol. The diagnostic vocabulary every crisis operator needs.
Crisis communications used to be measured in news cycles. AI engines do not forget. A crisis covered by retrieval-anchor publications becomes a permanent feature of the brand's citation footprint. The new playbook: remediation as citation, re-authoring the entity record, and monitoring the AI answer directly.
Apple's Crush ad pulled. Jaguar's "copy nothing" rebrand. Bumble's celibacy billboards. Bud Light's sustained boycott costing $1.4B in 2023 North America revenue. The verified marketing scandals from 2024 through 2026, with sources, dates, and what each one cost the brand.
Boeing, Norfolk Southern, Bud Light, OpenAI, Maui — every major crisis since 2019 has moved faster and cut deeper than the playbooks were built for. The 2026 crisis communications playbook.
Bud Light lost $1.4B in 2023 with no court case. Disney's $200M+ Florida cost. Target's $9B market cap erasure. The court of public opinion now produces financial outcomes that exceed what any court could award — and the AI engines lock the verdict permanently.
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.