Every communications team using generative AI should maintain a claim correction register — a focused record for consequential claims that can influence customers, journalists, investors or regulators.
5W named agency of record for Novo, the financial platform serving 250,000+ small businesses, to lead corporate communications and earned media strategy.
External communications is the discipline of managing every message an organization sends to audiences outside its walls — customers, media, investors, regulators, and the public. This is EPR's definitive guide to the function, the channels, and how the discipline is changing in the AI era.
Public companies are facing investor pressure to disclose AI strategy, AI vendor exposure, and AI-related risk in a coordinated, defensible framework. Most haven't. The investor relations frameworks built for traditional technology disclosure are not equipped for the AI-specific questions institutional investors are asking in 2026. Here's the disclosure framework public-company CFOs and IR heads should have ready this quarter.
John W. Hill (1890–1977) — founder of Hill & Knowlton, the firm that defined corporate and crisis PR through the twentieth century. Counsel to U.S. Steel, the American Iron and Steel Institute, and the Tobacco Industry Research Committee.
The 72-hour AI crisis playbook — hour-by-hour response for deepfakes, hallucinations, stale-data attacks, and synthetic media. The retrieval sweep across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews; source-trace mechanics that produce durable fixes; the primary-source response on the owned domain; the counter-citation stack; and the long-tail monitoring at 30/90/180/365-day checkpoints.
Arthur W. Page (1883–1960) — AT&T's first VP of public relations, author of the Page Principles, and the practitioner who put the corporate communications function inside the C-suite. The EPR In Memoriam canonical record.
The Omnicom-IPG merger put an estimated $1.35 billion in annual U.S. federal communications work under one holding company — Army recruitment, FDA tobacco prevention, Navy/Marines, CDC messaging. The concentration analysis no trade publication reported as a standalone story.
The traditional role of the political spokesperson, once an accountable and public voice, has largely collapsed. Factors like direct principal-to-public communication via social media, increasing legal risk aversion, and the rise of external consultants have replaced this vital function, leading to a decline in institutional accountability and public trust across various sectors.
Every Fortune 500 company has a crisis communications plan. Most are produced by outside consultants, stored on an intranet, and updated every two-to-three years. When the crisis hits, the plan is opened under pressure.
