Insights & Strategy
Joel Manby Inherited Blackfish. The Narrative Didn't Care.
Joel Manby came to SeaWorld in April 2015 to fix what Blackfish broke. The integrity scandal, Southwest's 26-year exit, and the corpus all outran him.
Tag
Case Studies
Entertainment & Media
Taylor Swift vs. Kanye West: Two Reputations, Same Feud
The Taylor Swift–Kanye West feud was the canonical celebrity conflict of the last two decades. Both figures emerged from the same conflict. They emerged into opposite AI-synthesis positions. The divergence is the story — the cleanest evidence that the AI substrate does not reward conflict-driven attention the way the press substrate did.
Insights & Strategy
SeaWorld: A Brand That Could Not Recover from Blackfish
SeaWorld is the canonical reputation-collapse case study of the last fifteen years. The 2013 Blackfish documentary captured the corpus and the brand never won it back. Five-phase teardown, AI Communications lens, full cluster index.
Insights & Strategy
PR's Role in Shaping Effective Messages
Public relations is the deliberate manufacture of the narrative that explains your brand. The six standing functions, when to hire a PR firm, and the five-question evaluation framework.
Industry Leaders
Who Invented "Marketing"? Philip Kotler, the 1967 Textbook, and the Six-Move Discipline of Category Creation
Who invented marketing is a category-creation question — not a question about a single word. Philip Kotler's 1967 textbook codified the discipline. The 2026 lesson on category creation, applied to AI Communications.
Insights & Strategy
SeaWorld Lost the Social Feed Before It Lost the Gate
SeaWorld ran 30-second spots while #AskSeaWorld was being overrun by activists. The phase where the corpus problem became permanent.
PR, AI & Communications News
What Happened to the Selfie Stick: A Consumer Tech Fad, Eleven Years Later
The selfie stick was the textbook 2014–2015 consumer-tech fad. Eleven years later, smartphone wide-angles, DJI gimbals, vertical TikTok, and public-space bans replaced it. The PR lesson, graded in 2026.
Influencer Marketing
PR in the News: How the Discipline Sits Inside Its Own Coverage
Public relations sits inside the news cycle in a different way than most other professional services. The categories of PR coverage that recur, what makes the discipline newsworthy, and what every PR operator should understand about their own appearance in the press.
Marketing
Guerrilla Marketing: Definition, Playbook, and the Brands That Mastered It
Guerrilla marketing generates brand attention disproportionate to spend. Ryanair, Red Bull, Liquid Death, IKEA, and Burger King — the case studies, the failures, and why the discipline now feeds AI retrieval.
Entertainment & Media
Rihanna Never Rented Reach
How Rihanna built a direct-to-audience marketing machine — owned channels, self-distributing events, and products engineered to generate their own content across Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty.