Brand building is the longest-cycle exercise in marketing. PR is the discipline that does it at the deepest layer — earned, third-party, durable. The operating playbook: anchor to audience, lead with proof, employees as brand assets, build for the AI engine layer, architecture not campaign.
The 2026 PR Year in Review: eleven story arcs that defined the year communications stopped being a 2014 discipline — Bud Light's close, AI Communications as a category, GEO outgrowing SEO, holding-company repositioning, and the landmark reputation cases the AI engines now cite forever.
AI engines are displacing the top of the business-media funnel. How Bloomberg, WSJ, NYT, Forbes, Stratechery, The Information, and Substack-tier publishers are adapting — and what brand operators need to know.
Originally published December 2014 — the foundational PR framework for the early legal cannabis industry. The challenge of communicating value and safety after decades of government demonization, the role of medical testimonials, the alcohol-comparison argument, and the early-era playbook for repositioning legal marijuana for mainstream audiences. Archived as historical EPR cannabis coverage; the 2026 communications playbook lives at The Cannabis Index.
Jessica Pressler's two New York Magazine pieces became Hustlers (2019) and Inventing Anna (2022). The dynamic she rode — long-form magazine journalism as Hollywood IP — is now the operating model for half of streaming's prestige slate. The pipeline, the economics, and the category.
Apple Pay launched in October 2014 and the largest US retailers are refusing to accept it. The MCX consortium, the CurrentC competitor, the recent breach, and the competitive standoff that is producing one of the more interesting payment industry confrontations of recent years.
December 2014. The Cambridges (now Wales) attend Nets vs Cavaliers at Barclays Center. Their first official U.S. visit. The case study on royal soft-power deployment inside U.S. sports media and the playbook the family has reused since.
Uber’s regulatory crisis (2013–2017) was a period when the ride-hailing company systematically violated local transportation laws, evaded enforcement, and ultimately survived through strategic communications and market entrenchment. This article examines what this taught the PR industry.
In 1933, Carl Byoir & Associates took a contract to represent Nazi Germany in America. Inside the deal, the congressional hearings, and the legacy.
BGR hired by Dorchester Group amid 2014 Brunei Sharia-law boycott. Branson pulled Virgin. Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Dorchester London, Plaza Athenee on the list.