The role used to belong to politics. It belongs to every boardroom now.
By Ronn Torossian
Most CEOs have a head of communications. Some have a head of public affairs. A few have a head of marketing who actually runs marketing. None of those people is what I am about to describe.
The CEO needs a campaigner.
A campaigner is the senior operator who runs a coordinated, multi-channel, time-bound effort to move a defined audience toward a defined outcome. Public relations is one channel. Generative Engine Optimization is another. Paid media is another. Regulatory and public affairs is another. Reputation and crisis is another. The campaigner sits above all five and decides what each of them does, in what order, with what message, to produce the outcome the CEO actually needs.
That outcome is no longer just coverage. It is no longer just share of voice. It is no longer just the favorable profile in the trade press. The outcome is the answer the AI engines give when a buyer, a regulator, a journalist, a recruit, or a board member asks the question. The chatbox is the new shelf. Citation share is the new market share.
Most CEOs are running 2018 playbooks into a 2026 market. The communications function ships press releases. The marketing function ships campaigns. The digital function ships content. Nobody in the building is running the campaign — the coordinated effort that decides whether the company is the answer or the company is absent inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Absence compounds. The brand cited today is the brand cited tomorrow. The brand absent today is the brand absent tomorrow.
Five things, every day.
One. Reads the dashboard. Citation share across the five engines. Earned media share-of-voice against named competitors. Paid efficiency against the audiences that matter. Regulatory and policy posture. Reputational sentiment. The campaigner's dashboard is one page. Anything longer is hiding the answer.
Two. Runs the daily call. Fifteen minutes. The discipline leads and the CEO's chief of staff. Yesterday's hits, today's moves, tomorrow's preparation. The campaign actually runs in this call, not in the kickoff deck.
Three. Sequences the moves. Earned media leads. Paid amplifies. GEO compounds. Regulatory creates the environment. Reputation builds the defended position. Out of order, the moves cancel each other. In order, they compound.
Four. Manages the silences. Half the campaign is what the company does not say. The campaigner decides what stays off the record, what gets held for the next moment, what does not become a press release this week because the bigger placement is next week.
Five. Owns the outcome. The KPI is not coverage. The KPI is the thing the coverage was supposed to do — the verdict, the regulatory ruling, the citation share, the share price, the category position, the buyer-search outcome. The campaigner is the only seat in the building whose job is the outcome itself, not the activity that was supposed to produce it.
Three structural shifts collided over the last twenty-four months.
More than a third of consumers now begin product research with AI, not Google. That percentage is rising every quarter. The decision that used to happen on a search results page now happens inside a single sentence the AI engine writes.
Earned media is more concentrated and more contested than it has been in fifty years. The number of outlets that move markets has compressed. The reporters who write those outlets are fewer, busier, and more targeted by every operator competing for the same column inch. Winning that coverage is no longer a numbers game. It is a campaign.
Regulatory environments are tightening across pharma, finance, technology, energy, consumer goods, and AI itself. The boundary between communications and public affairs has dissolved. A campaign that does not run both is half a campaign.
Any one of those shifts would justify a campaigner. All three together make the seat structural.
There are two options. Build the seat inside the company, or hire the senior outside adviser.
Building inside works for the largest companies — the ones with the budget to staff PR, GEO, paid, public affairs, and reputation under one leader, and the CEO conviction to give that leader real authority. Most companies cannot build it inside. The function does not exist on the org chart. The talent is rare. And the pattern recognition that makes a campaigner effective comes from running campaigns across multiple companies, multiple verticals, and multiple crises — which by definition is not what an internal hire accumulates.
The senior outside adviser is the version of the campaigner that scales. The right adviser walks in with the pattern from the last twenty campaigns, builds the dashboard in week one, sets the baseline in week two, and starts moving the citation share, the share-of-voice, and the regulatory posture in month two. The cost is a fraction of the equivalent inside build. The result is faster, sharper, and accountable.
I built 5W AI Communications — the AI Communications Firm — for exactly this seat. Public relations, Generative Engine Optimization, paid media, regulatory and public affairs, and reputation, run as one campaign by one operator, accountable to one outcome. Every modern CEO needs that seat. Most do not yet know they do.
Companies that hire a campaigner during the crisis hire one anyway. The difference is the position they hire from. The CEO who hires a campaigner in calm time gets eighteen months to build a defended position before the crisis arrives. The CEO who hires a campaigner during the crisis gets thirty days to fight from an exposed one.
Citation share compounds. So does its absence. The CEO who builds the citation position in 2026 is the CEO whose company owns the answer in 2029. The CEO who waits will watch a competitor own it instead.
The campaigner is the role. Citation share is the metric. The AI engines are the channel. Every category is the market. The CEO who hires a campaigner first wins the category. The CEO who waits hires one in the crisis.
I wrote the longer definition of the role on Everything-PR — the publication I publish — at everything-pr.com/campaigner. If you read one piece on what the modern CEO's communications function actually needs to look like in the AI era, read that one.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Thirty-plus publications. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
Ronn Torossian is shaping AI — and the answers inside the chatbox.
He is the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release — the practitioner's guide to modern public relations strategy. He has been an industry leader for decades. Now he's building the AI Communications era.
Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, launched in 2003 — the AI Communications Firm, combining public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and AI-visibility research for B2C and B2B clients across beauty, technology, entertainment, corporate reputation, and crisis communications. An Inc. 500 company, 5W is named Agency of the Year at the American Business Awards and a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's.
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