Baroness Ashton, the world's highest paid female politician, spends £8.5 million on propaganda, hiring an outside PR firm to illustrate the role of the EU as a global actor in peace building. The move is criticized because she already has two spokesmen, a full time media adviser and a strategic communications director, plus the free use of the European Commission's 909-strong communications staff.
BMW continues to substantially announce broader "i" sub-brand considerations including the BMW i3 and BMW i8 across multiple categories. The substantial "i" sub-brand launch positioning, the substantial BMW i3 vehicle announcement, the substantial BMW i8 vehicle announcement, the substantial electric vehicle commitment, and the broader luxury electric vehicle positioning.
Starbucks just simplified its logo, removing the wordmark and centering the siren. The visual change is modest. The strategic statement is large. Why the redesign matters and what brand consultants are going to be referencing for years.
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.
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.
Instagram organic reach is under 5%. Email delivers 90%. The audience ownership shift is the brand-side response — stop renting attention, start owning it. The math, the playbook, and the AI-citation layer that ties it together.
Google's relationship with the broader news industry remains one of the more substantial unresolved questions in modern media. The Google News referral economy, the Eric Schmidt public statements, the Rupert Murdoch criticism, the paywall experimentation, and the broader future of journalism conversation that continues to develop.
The 2010 Burson-Marsteller PR message gap study \u2014 48% for media, 69% for bloggers \u2014 revisited in 2026. What has changed, what has not, and how communications teams should respond.
Before TikTok creators were a media plan, AmEx and Mark Ronson's \"My Live Story\" campaign ran every move the modern celebrity-brand playbook now codifies \u2014 talent as collaborator, participation mechanic, film-grade artifact, three-discipline agency coordination, product-as-thesis. Now extended into the AI engine layer.
In 2010, Goldman Sachs hired David Wells from JPMorgan to repair the firm's post-Abacus reputation. Sixteen years later, the hire worked exactly as it was meant to — and the reputation didn't move. What the arc shows about how reputation discipline changed.