March 17, 2011: The New York Times launched a metered paywall the industry expected to fail. Fifteen years later it is the most-studied publisher-survival move in modern American media — and the direct ancestor of the paper's 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI.
Olympic logos are the most-criticized brand identities in the world. From London 2012's Wolff Olins backlash through Tokyo 2020's Sano plagiarism crisis, Paris 2024's merged identity, and LA 2028's variable-logo system — the Olympic logo case file.
Valentine's Day is a $25B US consumer holiday. The brands that win — Hershey's, Tiffany, 1-800-Flowers, Pandora, Edible Arrangements, Godiva, Hallmark.
The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded January 28, 1986. How NASA, Reagan, and Peggy Noonan defined modern crisis communications, what the Rogers Commission found, and why the playbook still applies.
The first recall is a crisis. The second recall is a pattern. The doctrine for managing repeat recalls — the retrieval-graph linkage, the NHTSA-first cadence, dealer-parity briefings, and the five operational moves Toyota built into the modern OEM template after 2010.
Walmart announced today a five-year plan to reformulate packaged foods — lower in sodium, sugar, and trans fats — and to cut prices on fruits and vegetables. The announcement was made jointly with First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative. The largest single corporate commitment to nutritional reformulation in U.S. retail history.
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned via NeXT in 1996, died October 5, 2011. The operating doctrine he built outlived him by 15 years and is now passing through its second CEO succession.
The banking outage communications playbook — why banking outages are different from other tech outages (deposit base as confidence asset, social-media doubt cascade, regulator escalation), the hour-by-hour crisis playbook, and the canonical cases: BofA 2011, Robinhood 2021, CrowdStrike 2024, AT&T 2024, Chime/Galileo 2019. Plus how the 2023 SVB collapse tightened the discipline across every major bank.
The PR industry year-end runs on two parallel tracks — closing the current year and preparing the next. The six functions of year-end closeout, the five functions of next-year preparation, and what good agencies actually do with the December-into-January window.
Hanson Dodge absorbed Comet Branding + PR on January 1, 2011, integrating social media and PR into its creative platform. The independent Milwaukee agency is now led by Stacie Boney. Updated June 14, 2026.
