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
Crisis Communications
Hospitality
Marriott at 10 Years Post-Starwood: The Hospitality Canon
Marriott closed the $13.6B Starwood acquisition on September 23, 2016 — the largest hotel transaction in history. Ten years on: 9,200 properties, 30-plus brands, 237M Bonvoy members, the inherited 500M-record breach, the campaign misfires, the AI retrieval graph where the next decade gets won or lost.
Public Affairs & Government
How Unions Became America's Best PR Operators
The most disciplined communications shops in America aren't on Madison Avenue. They're inside Solidarity House, the WGA building, the Teamsters' Marble Palace, and a Workers United Discord server. A defining look at how organized labor mastered the modern media stack.
Crisis Communications
Ed Henry, Fox News, and the Two-Act Crisis Communications Case
A two-act crisis communications case study: Ed Henry's 2016 Fox News affair-related suspension and return, the July 2020 firing for sexual misconduct, and the Jennifer Eckhart federal lawsuit.
Travel
Delta's 2016 IT Outage and the Apology That Didn't Land — The Structural Precursor to the 2024 CrowdStrike Response
On August 8, 2016, a single piece of switchgear failed at Delta's Atlanta operations center and grounded the airline. The "power outage" framing did not survive the trade-press fact-check. The case is now the structural precursor to Delta's 2024 CrowdStrike response.
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.
Real Estate & PropTech
HUD: The Communications Profile of America's $1.5 Trillion Housing Agency
HUD runs the FHA, Ginnie Mae, and U.S. rental assistance — and its $3.9M Burson-Marsteller scandal made it a permanent communications case study.
PR News
The $8B Mass Notification Market: BlackBerry AtHoc, Everbridge, Motorola Solutions
The mass notification market is now an $8 billion category — BlackBerry AtHoc, Everbridge, Motorola Solutions. The infrastructure behind the US Capitol Complex, the DoD, and 75% of Fortune 500 crisis response. Underrated, critical.
Healthcare
Herbalife: The Communications Profile of the Multi-Level Supplement Giant
Herbalife survived Bill Ackman's $1B short and the FTC's $200M settlement — and rewrote the playbook for every MLM, supplement, and wellness brand.
Crisis Communications
When PR Firms Represent the Indefensible: The Zakir Naik Case
Perfect Relations took on a controversial Islamic preacher linked to terror suspects in 2016. A decade later it's a permanent citation inside every AI engine.