I’m fresh back from Orlando where I spoke at the Ragan Social Media Conference about AI spokes-bots as well as all other manner of horrifying digital futures and the monsters that will populate them, and for the first time in a while I feel somewhat hopeful about our collective future.

At first, I wasn’t sure how it landed. I was a bit worried about the tepid in-room response some of my spicier takes received, but those worries were allayed when I was approached afterwards by no shortage of attendees who said they appreciated me calling out the worst perversions and transgressions of the AI era in communications.

I think most of us are peering over the edge of the deep ravine separating the promise of AI from its real life consequences – reductions in force thanks to purported “automation”, CEO after CEO actively bragging about their plans to gut headcounts and handwaving AI as their rationale, degrading the workforces that got them to where they are, and the dystopian slop work product that’s coming out in place of what was once professional comms work.

A few other points of consideration from the talk:

• My own back-of-napkin math suggest the communications profession and associated disciplines have shrunk by 168,000 jobs since the start of 2024. The industry gained some 150,000 jobs from 1990-2005. So that’s 15 years of growth gone in 30 months.

• Most AI adopters across the industry are doing so because of some form of mandate or obligation, not because of a genuine interest in the technology.

• An army of AI spokes-bots unleashed across social media would likely crater campaign ROI, drown out messaging, and make it impossible to capture anyone’s attention.

• AI is incredible technology and can be used in comms to reduce burdensome tasks like administrative management, task automation, list building, productivity tracking, research, querying big data sets, gamification, programming, and brainstorming. There’s a good chance that when we cure cancer, AI will have played a significant role.

• The problem is, cures to cancer are not what we are getting right now. We’re getting banal slop.

Against this backdrop, it’s hard to drum up that 2023-ish excitement about this friendly little chatbot that can save you time writing up a-matter or press releases or whatever.

No More Binky

The topline takeaway for some attendees will be that I deleted All Points West’s OpenAI account on stage and committed to never again using ChatGPT for any elements of agency management.

I had literally so many reasons for this. But that’s just the splashy attention-grabber. Instead, I hope the bigger takeaway was the call to self-regulate the communications fields (including marketing, journalism, public relations, and traditional and social media) by adopting some basic standards.

Look, maybe I’m too harsh a critic, but I believe that the things we make shouldn’t suck. And right now, if we’re being honest, most of this stuff sucks. So what to do?

Let’s Expect More From/For Ourselves

Below are the “Six Standards”, as I’ve decided to brand them (lol). This is a very, very basic framework, something we can debate and build on. I wrote these with the specific intent of reining in AI usage in creative work – think bland copy, stilted voiceovers, uncanny videos, creepy virtual avatars, and downright bad graphic design – not just because of how offensive that stuff is to our sensibilities, or how it collectively lowers the bar for what we expect from a creative endeavor, but because that’s the largest vector for loss of jobs and where we risk losing the creative artisanship that requires human inputs.

The Medicis are dead, and that means almost all creative output in our lifetime has been made in a commercial context. We can argue about why that sucks or why it’s good, actually. But there’s no arguing that if commercial interests are chiefly responsible for creative output, and those interests are chiefly interested in reducing cost, then it stands to reason the creative arts will be under attack for the foreseeable future.

We need to fight back.

Let’s start with transparency. There should be some disclosure when we’re looking at AI, right? This will become more important as this content becomes increasingly prevalent and indistinguishable from the real.

(Somewhat related, I find it interesting that many of the same people who defend AI content are not proud enough of their AI content to label it as AI. If it’s so great, why are you cropping out that Sora watermark?)

Headcount neutrality is something we should be pushing for across the board before, during and after taking on a project or a client. Is this going to impact someone’s job? Is my AI program implementation going to help people be more productive, or is it going to be a permissions structure for you to fire teams of people? This is a sticky, thorny question, and the answers won’t always be good, the criteria for judgment quite imperfect. But it should at least be a conversation.

Maybe don’t settle for the very first output from your prompt? It sure seems like a lot of the most discerning clients I’ve ever worked with are now just snapping up whatever the LLMs serve up uncritically – but most of what they’re serving is slop. How about we try iterating, fine-tuning, downloading and opening it in Photoshop or Premiere (remember those?).

On stage, I made the point that the idea of not stealing goes back at least as far as the authorship of the Old Testament. It shouldn’t be a revolutionary idea to make it unacceptable to blatantly rip-off the work of actual human beings in your AI creative output.

My readers with legal backgrounds might be familiar with the term “de gustibus non est disputandum”, loosely translating to “in matters of taste, there can be no dispute.”

I disagree. Look at this shit, man:

No disputatio that this suckssss

If we absolutely must make this stuff, can we all agree that the general quality of AI-supported creative work cannot dip below, say, a standard of what was acceptable in 2020? I’d love to resurrect my biggest pre-COVID era nightmare client, the one who picked every little nit she could find and apply her sensibilities to everyone today. We didn’t know how good we had it.

Resource Management & Impact: The Next Frontier

And finally, the big one: resource management. Energy use. We’ve all heard about the ridiculous AI environmental impact and water usage problems, and that’s a very nuanced issue that most of us have not even begun to understand yet. Some companies and their models use far less water, some recycle coolant, some are wasteful, and some are piggies who just want to gulp down our grids and reservoirs.

We can do a lot to address this. Small-language models can be leveraged to reduce impact. We can continue to defeat the data centers on a municipal level that aim to drive up costs and deplete resources.

As comms people, we need to read the tea leaves. We’ve been here before. The next public awareness awakening will come in the form of a collective demand for guardrails governing smart resource management in AI. AI use will soon be judged against its environmental impact. It’s already starting. If you’ve ever managed a crisis before, you can see what’s coming. The next series of “Here’s what we got wrong/Our commitment going forward”-corporate mea culpas are going to be about how brands cooked through natural resources and human capital during the mad rush of AI’s early period.

As communicators we are eternally asked to reframe narratives around corporate virtue signaling, and this will be no different. We’re going to have to invent terms like “ethical language modeling” or “net zero compute” the same we way pushed “going green” and “corporate social responsibility” in recent decades.

The benefits of that “brand ambassador” spokes-bot you build will ring hollow when Wired Magazine is writing about how your brand had to boil Lake Huron to make it.

This seems like a huge undertaking, but it is possible. Just as architects in the 1990s convened to promulgate the first versions of what would become LEED Certification, we can come together and define these standards, ultimately providing a framework for safe, effective, ethical AI usage in communications.

My idea – and we’re just brainstorming here – is an industry-wide set of standards governing LLM operators and practitioners for real ethical execution. Or… SLOP FREE.

We can do this, and we don’t even have to start from scratch. There’s no shortage of professional organizations out there with governing bodies, advisory councils and leadership groups aimed at picking apart these issues. The infrastructure exists.

The genie isn’t going back in the bottle. We can either make some rules about what we are allowed to wish for, or make our own bottle, crawl into it, and die.

Full Disclosure: I used Google Gemini and ChatGPT (pre-nuking) to research some elements of this post, but it is written by my meat-hands and meat-brain. In even fuller disclosure, I’ve created agents like this for external deployment on the web and use across internal comms channels, but I’ve never designed a “Lil Miquela” and don’t want to intimate that I have.

Ok, so you sat (or are currently sitting) through my revolutionary call-to-arms at Disney World, and maybe you’re thinking, “when will this guy shut up and tell me how to make a spokes-bot.”

Well, I’m not gonna. At least not in person. But I understand nobody wants to be bait-and-switched so I’m creating this runbook for anyone who – despite my warnings – wants to deploy the next blunt-cut-bangs-sporting AI avatar to pretend to try on makeup or whatever.

In this document, we’re going to do character design work and operational backstopping, so we can do some fun imaginative stuff with our spokes-bot and then position it (or “him” or “her” or “them”) as a real full-service marketing channel.

Resources

First, here are the AI third-party resources and tools I use throughout this process.

The Basics

You know ‘em, you’ve used ‘em, you might be bored of them, but you’ll need them for this project:

ChatGPT: Personality, dialogue, scripting, and brand voice

Midjourney: Visual identity and character design

RunwayML: Turning still images into video content

ElevenLabs: AI voice generation

HeyGen: Combines voice, avatar and script into a working product

Next Level

These are more esoteric and specific apps that are needed for this project:

Audiense: Audience segmentation and cultural intelligence.

Flick: AI-assisted social scheduling, captioning and hashtag (findability) strategy.

Predis.ai: Competitor monitoring plus AI content/ad generation and auto-publishing.

FeedHive: AI-powered publishing workflow and content recycling.

Metricool: Cross-platform planning, analytics, competitor tracking, and link-in-bio conversion support.

Process

Now let’s put these tools to use. This is a project that is rife with specificity, and since I can’t know all the specifics of your particular use case, I’ll need to be general or vague in some steps. I’d ask your forgiveness, but hey, you’re the one bringing another AI avatar spokes-bot into this world, so maybe you should be the one apologizing lol.

Step 1 — Define the Character

Before opening any AI tools, define the character concept. Your spokes-bot needs a clear identity. Treat it like a creative brief: write a one-page “character dossier” that includes these basic identity elements:

• Name

• Age or perceived age

• Occupation or role

• City or region

• Personality traits

Brand Alignment

Then, define the way the character interacts with the brand. Is he an employee? A superfan of the product? A tongue-in-cheek troublemaker? A Statler-and-Waldorf kind of critic of the industry, taking shots from the balcony?

Questions to answer:

• Why does this character exist?

• What perspective does it represent?

• What type of content will it create?

Good spokes-bots act like characters in a show, not mascots.

Step 2 – Create Personality and Tone

Ok, now that you’ve done some human thinky-work you can use your first actual AI tool. Pop open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot, and ask it to develop the character’s personality after feeding it your brief. Some prompts for personality generation:

• Backstory

• Speech style

• Slang or vocabulary

• Humor style

• Social media tone

Example: “Write a personality guide for a digital travel influencer who works with a luxury hotel brand.”

Use the output to document the following aspects of your nascent spokes-bot:

• Tone rules

• Catchphrases

• Favorite emojis or expressions

• Cultural references

• In-jokes

Altogether, this provides the basis for the character’s brand voice guide.

Step 3 – Design the Visual Character

Let’s move onto visual identity. We’ll design our character’s look using Midjourney. Start by generating hundreds of character variations until you find a look that works.

Prompt example:

“Photorealistic Gen-Z travel influencer, cinematic lighting, fashion editorial style, natural pose.”

Be sure to export several types of images. Character assets can include:

• Headshots

• Lifestyle photos

• Full-body images

• Expressions

• Poses

Consistency matters. Your character should look identical across posts. Continue to home in on this “true” look through iterative prompting and correcting. Many brands build a character reference sheet to maintain visual continuity.

Step 4 — Animate the Character

Now let’s turn this character into video. Useful tools include. Runway is your best bet, but I’ve also had success with Sora and HeyGen, to lesser degrees.

Runway ML

Best for for stylized AI video generation and short scenes.

Sora

Useful for cinematic video sequences or storytelling.

HeyGen

Best for talking avatar videos where the character speaks directly to camera. (I’ve also used Synthesia for this, but it is more limited.)

Use these tools to create:

• TikTok style clips

• Product explainers

• Travel footage

• Influencer style content

Start with short 10–30 second clips – a lot of subscription levels cap you at this length anyway, which is a limitation unless you have significant budget for the project.

Step 5 — Create the Voice

What’s a spokesman who doesn’t speak? Give your character a voice using the clear sector-leader, ElevenLabs, to generate a custom voice that soundes natural and recognizable.

You can create:

• Narration

• Dialogue

• Podcast-style audio

• Multilingual versions

Once you choose a voice, never change it unless there is a narrative reason to do so. Voice consistency reinforces the illusion of a real personality.

Step 6 — Create the Social Presence

This character has to occupy the “real” digital world, not just your desktop, so give them a real social footprint. The most conducive platforms to deploy AI spokes-bots include (in this order):

• Instagram

• TikTok

• YouTube Shorts

• LinkedIn (for B2B brands)

• Facebook (yes, still)

I don’t recommend deploying these campaigns on X or Reddit, frankly, because they don’t jibe with the core dynamics of those platforms.

Be sure to write posts in the character’s voice, not the brand voice. Also, be sure to “de-AI” the dialogue. You know what I’m talking about: like those cringey LinkedIn-style posts, “That’s not X. That’s Y.” Ugh, scratch all that. Make them talk like a person. They should feel like a personality interacting with the brand, not a corporate spokesperson.

Step 7 — Plan the Content Calendar

Your spokes-bot should have a consistent content rhythm. You’ve created a content calendar before, this is no different. In fact, you could easily graft this calendar onto your brand’s larger slate of content. Make your avatar one integrated piece with your overall social efforts.

Like most new social initiatives, I recommend about 3–5 posts per week including things like lifestyle posts, product features, behind-the-scenes, industry commentary, and some funny or trendy takes. This keeps the character from becoming a one-dimensional marketing tool.

Step 8 – Add the Social Media Operating System

Running a spokes-bot requires the same infrastructure as running a social media team. Use AI-assisted management platforms such as:

• Flick

• FeedHive

Use them to automate your grunt work:

• Schedule posts

• Generate caption ideas

• Optimize hashtags

• Manage content calendars

Step 9 – Understand Your Audience

Use audience intelligence tools such as Audiense to analyze social communities and identify:

• Audience interests

• Demographics

• Online behavior

• Cultural trends

This allows you to segment audiences like:

• Luxury travelers

• Budget travelers

• Travel advisors

• Frequent fliers

Your spokes-bot can then tailor posts to each audience.

Step 10 — Monitor Competitors

You should track what other brands in your category are doing on social media – not to copy or steal, but to inform yourself of the organic direction of your sector. You can use tools like Predis.ai to analyze competitor accounts reveal the following:

• Posting frequency

• Content format trends

• Hashtag strategies

• Engagement performance

This helps you find content opportunities competitors are missing.

Step 11 — Track Performance

Your spokes-bot is a marketing asset, so performance matters. Trust me, you’re going to be grilled at some point over whether this thing is working or not, and you’d better be able to defend it. I’ve used Metricool to track performance, including:

• Traffic

• Link clicks

• Follower growth

• Campaign performance

These are pretty chalk categories of measurement, but you should take some time to create a custom performance dashboard. You can also track which posts drive users to:

• Product pages

• Newsletter signups

• Brand websites

Step 12 — Create a Measurement Dashboard

As I said, be ready to defend your little pixel-baby. At a minimum track:

• Followers

• Engagement rate

• Reach

• Traffic to brand website

• Conversions

Most companies review these metrics monthly, but I prefer having a dashboard that is live. Do that.

If the spokes-bot does not generate engagement or traffic, the character likely needs:

• Stronger storytelling

• Better visuals

• Clearer brand role

Step 13 — Scale the Character

Once the character works, consider expanding its presence.

Possible extensions for your spokes-bot include:

• Livestream appearances

• Customer support chatbots

• Podcasts

• AR or metaverse experiences

Eventually the spokes-bot becomes a digital brand personality. And then you’ll finally be ready to hand it the reins and ride off into the proverbial sunset.

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Welcome to Comms Magic & Dark Arts, a new, semi-regular Failure to Communicate feature wherein we scrutinize a PR crisis case study and explore ways to guide our theoretical clients through it, first using standard best practices (the “Comms Magic”) and then using less savory, some-might-say underhanded dirty tricks (the “Dark Arts”).

By reading CM&DA, you hereby absolve Failure to Communicate, All Points West, David Quiñones and/or any of their associates of responsibility for any negative career or reputational ramifications suffered by you or your clients because of your stupid choice to do any of this stuff.

This week, CM&DA casts its gaze westward to Los Angeles, where billionaire NBA owner and world’s oldest toddler Steve Ballmer is sweating like it’s 1999.

For the uninitiated: 11 years ago, Ballmer, the former-Microsoft CEO, purchased the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion. The sale was historical in value and controversy, as Ballmer’s seller was Shelly Sterling, the straw-owner of the team who was signed over its executive authority by her husband, California businessman and all-around sleazebag Donald Sterling.

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Donald Sterling was sort of an urtext to the Me Too movement. In 2014, after a series of leaked recordings from his mistress outed him as a racist, homophobic, manipulative asshole, Donald faced mounting pressure to sell the team (through Shelly, to whom he had slyly conferred ownership). The NBA’s owner-in-waiting was Ballmer.

I’m really giving this story short shrift because, while juicy, it’s not our scandal. FX made a mediocre miniseries about the whole saga last year wherein Ed O’Neill played Sterling. It was called “Clipped”. You can skip it.

Fast-forward a decade and Ballmer has brought the moribund Clipper franchise to the doorstep of relevance, thanks to a dynamically constructed team led by superstars James Harden and Kawhi Leonard, a shiny new $2 billion stadium, and Ballmer’s legendary maniacal and enthusiastic management style.

Leonard, aka “The Klaw”, came to Los Angeles in 2019 after leading the Toronto Raptors to an unlikely NBA title. His free agency signing was seen as a coup for Ballmer and the Clippers, who have long occupied lil’ bro-status in LA, playing in the shadow of the far more successful Lakers. In the ensuing years, Leonard has disappointed fans with a litany of injuries and “load management days”, but that’s not really germane to our story.

The Crisis: Show Me the Money (Just Don’t Talk About It)

Here’s where we get to our scandal. In the summer of 2019, Leonard was widely considered the most consequential free agent on the market in years. Every team wanted what the Klaw was selling, and if contemporaneous reporting is to be believed, some made larger and/or longer contract offers than Ballmer, who is the richest owner in all of sports.

At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that Leonard probably opted to take less money because of the size of the media market – despite the fact that Leonard is a notoriously media-averse, quiet player who allows his uncle, agent, and business advisor Dennis Robertson, to do all his negotiations.

This month, it was reported by Pablo Torre that the Clippers orchestrated a $28 million “no-show” endorsement deal so that Kawhi Leonard would receive payments from Aspiration, a now-bankrupt sustainability/financial firm hocking carbon offsets partly funded by Ballmer. The deal allegedly required virtually no promotional work or public appearances by Leonard; its main obligation was keeping him under contract with the Clippers.

Aspiration filed for bankruptcy amid separate fraud accusations. Some internal documents reportedly show Aspiration still owes Leonard $7 million under this deal.

If true (and, like, come onnn…) this arrangement could constitute a violation of the NBA’s salary cap rules. The cap is about the perception of fairness, intended to limit what teams pay players through their official salaries; side deals or hidden payments that act like salary without being counted under the cap undermine that framework. While all NBA owners are obscenely wealthy, there are levels – even at that level – and a guy like Ballmer is final boss-level.

Because Ballmer had invested heavily in Aspiration, critics argue there may have been a conflict of interest or even active coordination to structure payments that would appear legitimate (as endorsements or sponsorships) but in effect serve to increase Leonard’s compensation outside of cap limits. The lack of transparency around the deal, and how much work (if any) Leonard performed, raised red flags internally, according to former Aspiration employees who spoke with Torre.

As this scandal has quickly became the biggest story in sports, the Clippers and Ballmer have strongly denied wrongdoing, calling the claims “absurd” and “provably false,” maintaining that Ballmer had no knowledge of the specific endorsement agreement. However, they still have not “proven” the claims “false”. Rather, further reporting by Torre has chipped away at the organization’s counterclaims.

Meanwhile, the NBA has opened an investigation into the matter. Possible penalties, depending on how the deal is judged under the collective bargaining agreement, could include fines, voiding parts of contracts, or loss of draft picks. While the allegations are still just allegations, the court of public opinion – you know, people with two eyes and a brain – have mostly arrived at the conclusion that there was foul play.

For NBA fans (like me) this is profoundly troubling, as it is the kind of underhanded “fix” many of us have always suspected is at play – and now there’s way more smoke.

Let’s Do Some Comms Magic

This scandal is multi-faceted, implicating not just Ballmer but a cofounder of Aspiration and a board member (both arrested on federal fraud charges), an NBA franchise that employs about 500 people, an NBA superstar and his uncle, and the entire Democratic Party. (Joe Sandberg and Andrei Cherny, Aspiration’s cofounders, were political movers-and-shakers who had the Clintons and Obamas on speed dial. They relied on that rolodex to find likeminded investors like Ballmer, a Dem donor and party supporter.)

That’s a thorny scandal, but it also gives us a wonderful opportunity to find a toehold in a lot of different, creative vectors to execute our Magic strategy.

Let’s get into it.

Magic Strategy

Our tone will be calm, transparent, and fact-based. There are already so many voices who have gas-bagged ad nauseum about this scandal, that we will provide a counterbalance with language that tones down rhetoric.

Our key messaging will rely on facts:

· “Steve Ballmer had no involvement in structuring or approving Kawhi Leonard’s endorsement deal with Aspiration.”

· “The Clippers organization and Mr. Ballmer fully support the NBA’s review and are cooperating completely.”

· “Mr. Ballmer’s investments are managed independently and at arm’s length from the Clippers’ operations.”

· “Transparency and integrity are hallmarks of both Mr. Ballmer’s business career and his stewardship of the Clippers.”

· “The organization remains focused on building a championship culture on and off the court, with full respect for league rules.”

· “And with respect for those rules and the process they govern, we will not make any further public statements at this time.”

This simple, clean, standard, out-of-the-box framing hews to the truth and stresses the importance of allowing the process to play out and reserving judgment.

From the things we say to the things we do, let’s consider some activations that dovetail with our messaging.

· The First Truly Transparent Franchise Audit in League History: From the New York Knicks winning the Patrick Ewing lottery in 1985 to the Tim Donaghy refereeing scandal in the 2010s to today, much of the NBA fandom’s obsession with rule-breaking scandals fixates on things that happen behind closed doors. So, let’s open them.

Along with two of the Big 4 as independent auditors (my recommendations would be Ernst & Young and Deloitte, IYKYK) our client will open the books, the ledgers, the tills, the filing cabinets – everything, every dollar and cent, all in the name of radical transparency. All findings and reports will be published online for open-source sleuths to pick through at their leisure, and Ballmer will empower independent brand ambassadors like super-fans “Clipper Darrel” and official media to question him on their own platforms. These opportunities will be vetted for fairness and friendliness.

We’ll use the findings to create content that distances the mainstream narrative from the originating scandal. The Clippers spend HOW MUCH on straws? An NBA TV deal pays THAT each season? They pay their parking vendors HOW MUCH? The audit creates a veneer of transparency and simultaneously provides grist for the talking heads to jabber about other less scandalous topics.

· The YouTube/podcast circuit: While our forward-facing influencer/podcast friends will be helpful, they are “owned media” at the end of the day. We need our campaign to break containment of our LA-based buddies; we need to get Ballmer on shows that will allow him to preach to converts, not choirs.

The sad reality is that most of the “new media” is not like Torre – rigorous, steely-eyed, ink-stained journalistic wretches on a quest to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Most new media figures are comedians or social media influencers or Disney stars-turned-amateur boxers, and most of them just want to hang out with rich guys.

Hey, we’ve got a rich guy! Now, we don’t want Ballmer to go full-2024 Mark Zuckerberg-on-Rogan and morph into some weird manosphere-coded parody of himself, but there are plenty of other ways for Ballmer to stay true to his brand while reaching millions of new eyes and ears.

· Formal dialogue with the league office: A select task force of Clippers leadership and a player representative (I nominate the estimable Patty Mills) will establish a communication channel with the NBA as it conducts its investigation. This task force is charged with effecting two-way communications, sharing information with the league office while also updating the Clippers organization.

· The community aspect: Ballmer is no stranger to philanthropy, which is good, because deserved or not his reputation is going to require him to work that muscle set. And not just his check-writing hand – Ballmer will need to personally show face across Southern California to smooth over the bad feelings.

Fortunately, there are no real “victims” of this scandal. No one was hurt. It’s not like the Clippers ever won anything at some other team’s expense – if anything, they lost on the Leonard deal before the scandal broke. Without those sensitivities at play, the recipients of Ballmer’s largesse are less important than the optics of him giving.

We will undertake a historic team giving campaign to deepen already existing roots within the community. The parties and details can be hashed out by the L.A. Clippers Foundation, but what matters is 1.) the activations are on-the-ground (no fancy balls or galas) and 2.) Ballmer himself is in attendance, visible and accessible.

· Leverage All-Star Weekend: This coming season will mark 75^th NBA All-Star Game, and wouldn’t you know it? The signature weekend is slated to be hosted by the Clippers and their shiny new Intuit Dome.

What better opportunity to show off that incredible community investment than All-Star Weekend? Leveraging media that we’ve captured via philanthropy, highlighting those freshly burnished community roots, and telling the story of a team that cares about its city with our client positioned as the main character, All-Star Weekend will be the coup de grace for the story we’re trying to tell about what the Clippers actually do – not what one podcast reporter claims they are.

And Now… The Dark Arts

Let’s take a quick dark arts inventory:

· Our client: Steve Ballmer. Not not Kawki Leonard, not Uncle Dennis, not Aspiration, not the Democratic Party, not the NBA. We are working to further Ballmer’s interests.

· Our weaknesses: Every single circumstantial fact. Also, probably, the actual facts.

· Our strengths: All the money in the world, unlimited resources, and a lack of definitive proof.

Ultimately, if our client is Ballmer, we must work to mitigate his exposure, preventatively rehabilitate his reputation, and counter the narratives that are damaging his business interests. Our client is a giant of American business, a folk hero among the Patagonia-vested capital class. It’s not an overstatement to say Ballmer’s name will be taught in MBA courses for decades to come. The work we do here will be reflected in the first lines of a front-page New York Times obituary one day.

Helping kids and the less fortunate is nice, and we can hope our Comms Magic obscures some of these allegations, but if we’re being ruthlessly efficient, we need to find a way to disappear this story from the front of the media mind. Or, maybe drown it out.

Let’s start with a model for our goal: Brady Anderson. We want Steve Ballmer’s Kawhi scandal to be Brady Anderson. “Hey DQ, who the heck is Brady Anderson?” Who, indeed.

At the epoch of baseball’s scandal-plagued steroid era, anyone with two eyes could look at ultra-jacked stars like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Jose Canseco and know that something was up.

One of the first clues that got the baseball literati buzzing was in 1996 when a skinny, pinup model Baltimore Orioles outfielder named Brady Anderson exploded for 50 home runs, nearly triple his career high to that point in his career. The power surge happened when Anderson was 32, an age when most ballplayers have already begun to see a decline in production. The implication – and I want to stress it was only ever that – is Anderson’s season was powered by performance enhancing drugs like steroids or human growth hormone.

A couple years later was the famous yearlong home run derby between Sosa and McGuire that ushered in a brief resurgence of America’s pastime, and shortly after that the larger public added “performance enhancing drugs” or “PEDs” to its lexicon. Today, when we think back about that era, we think of home run king Barry Bonds whose personal scandal eclipsed the entire sport for years. Only true ball-knowers remember Anderson’s name.

Like our client, no definitive, smoking gun proof was ever published that Anderson was juiced – in fact, there’s a plausible case that he wasn’t. Ideally, our client’s name will be a “Brady Anderson” in this era of NBA dark money – or at least not the Barry Bonds of the whole imbroglio.

I’m not sure if it’s possible for Ballmer to get the Brady Anderson treatment, but if investigative reporting got us into this mess, maybe it can get us out.

Dark Strategy

Anyone reading between the lines of public statements by current and former NBA players and executives can pick up on one theme: the Kawhi Leonard scandal is not an isolated incident. (Oh by the way, we’re also making sure to refer to it as “the Kawhi Leonard scandal” from now on, not “the Clippers’ scandal” and definitely not “the Steve Ballmer scandal”.)

Leveraging our strength (an enormous mountain of money) we will not try to hide from the allegations that shadow money contracts exist in the NBA. Rather, we will root out and report on all these deals, surfacing them to the public awareness to create distance between our client’s scandal and the next juicy scandal. When people write the book about this era, our aim is for Steve Ballmer and the Clippers to be brief early entry, a footnote, a “Brady Anderson.”

Here’s how:

· Shadow newsroom: We will fund and stand-up a shadow newsroom of investigators and out-of-work journalists to collaborate with well-sourced media relations pros who will feed their clandestine reporting to mainstream outlets (maybe even Torre himself). We will need to obscure the source of the reports, of course, because the existence of this newsroom will raise its own questions. The dissemination of these tips and leads will need to be carefully handled, as their provenance will also be interrogated.

It would be best to contract a firm that works with the league on the periphery, as opposed to better-known agencies. Familiarity-and-distance is the profile we’re seeking. The folks staffing the newsroom will be precluded from being read into the true nature of their work and, if we’re being careful, they won’t even be aware of who they’re working for.

The shadow newsroom’s work product will be un-bylined until it is handed off/tipped off to unaffiliated journos who, presumably, will run with each new story. NDAs all around.

· This town ain’t big enough for two scandals: As news cycle after news cycle drags on and your brand stays under the microscope day after day, these controversies can often feel interminable. It’s important to remember that they’re not, and that eventually you will be bumped from the front page.

In this case, we can see the next controversy looming in the middle distance. L.A. is a wonderful city – one of my favorites – but it is dealing with a unique set of social, political, and structural challenges as it prepares to host the 2026 World Cup and the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad in 2028. As World Cup and Olympic fever take hold of Southern California, new narratives will emerge.

Already, human rights monitors are concerned about the actions that city and state officials might take to, ahem, “hide” the less desirable traits of a city struggling with food and housing insecurity, homelessness, poverty and crime.

With our media outreach resources and, again, enormous piles of money, we will amplify these stories of international import – shunting aside the relatively unimportant questions of which injured small forward did or didn’t get paid to hock carbon offsets 6 years ago.

· Targeted discourse dampeners: Earlier I alluded to the existence of the so-called “Player Podcasts”, popular online shows that feature outspoken retired players and entertainers whose status affords them a platform to speak candidly about the league.

These shows are the modern drivers of NBA fandom discourse, and by focusing our messaging on them via quieter influence like the dissemination of fam trips, inclusion in glitzy media events, and third-party sponsorship opportunities (we already know Ballmer knows how to do these!) we can curry favor with a group of influencers who, frankly, are not bound by anything resembling journalistic ethics.

· Sorry, Kawhi. Later, Uncle Dennis: Remember, our client is Steve Ballmer, who still maintains that he knew nothing of this financial arrangement. However, Leonard and his camp cannot make such a claim. They knew they were getting paid.

If push comes to shove, an options exists for the blame to placed on Leonard and, specifically, his Uncle Dennis, who has a long and storied reputation of doing what it takes (and sometimes doing too much) to extract concessions from NBA teams.

Pinning the scandal on Leonard’s camp is yet another tactic that will require a third party to execute, and it is far-and-away the highest risk of any option outlined here. If it ever came out that an NBA owner was tossing a player under the bus like that, the ramifications would make it difficult for that team to ever sign a high-profile free agent again.

· The Nuclear Option – Acquisition: Look, there’s only one journalist actually pursuing this story and not merely aggregating existing reporting, and it is the venerable Pablo Torre of the eponymous Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast.

Torre’s show is co-owned by him and Meadowlark Media, a podcast network founded by former ESPN chief John Skipper and sports personality Dan Le Batard. The company launched with a $12.6 million funding round in 2021 and has secured sponsorship deals with Draft Kings in the neighborhood of $50 million. (Hey, for a bag like that you could hire two Kawhi Leonards to not show up for your fake sustainability company!)

These numbers sound big to you and me, but to a guy like Steve Ballmer it’s couch cushion change. Why not just buy Meadowlark, cut a check for $100 million? Ok, ok, I can hear you shouting that a transaction creating such an egregious conflict of interest would stir public outrage. To that I say, yeah, maybe a few years ago, but the present finds us in a world where pump-and-dump schemes and “rug pulls” have become so commonplace that our own President and First Lady have orchestrated several of their own this year. This is a hopelessly cynical moment, and those who succeed will be those who abandon all hope and embrace cynicism.

Campaign Post-Mortem

On a long enough timeline, nothing is a crisis. This dark money NBA scandal is probably not the only one of its kind out there brewing. And there are difficult, messy conversations to have about how pervasive and intangibly sinister this entire issue of invisible compensation is for major league sports.

The 15% Rule® that I just made up in my head right now asks us to imagine if a grift was done by someone 15% smarter, or who worked 15% harder to hide it, would they have gotten away with it? In this case: Yes. Kawhi could have simply shown up once or twice for photo shoots or community events. Ballmer could have concocted a more plausible scenario for his investment. The Aspiration leadership could have covered their tracks a little better. This scandal only came to light because it was done semi-incompetently. Hey Steve, next time call your crisis management guy beforehand.

I hope this first entry in the Comms Magic & Dark Arts compendium has provided a resource for any morally upright or morally bankrupt comms professional to navigate their billionaire client through the choppy seas of (maybe) supplementing his NBA team payroll with corruption and (allegedly) grafting the principals of a quasi-scam to do it with (hopefully) minimal brand impact. I hope you learned something. I hope you realize that Comms Magic & Dark Arts isn’t about getting you to try these underhanded tactics, but to improve your comms literacy and recognize when you inevitably see them being executed – which they absolutely are.

But more than anything, I hope you don’t actually try any of these Dark Arts yourself unless you have your own crisis management plan in place.

And to Steve Ballmer, feel free to take any of these strategies and implement them without attribution if it helps more quickly move past this whole mess. Either that, or wait for the Lakers to win another championship and knock you off the front pages for a few more years, lil’ bro.

Yesterday, Utah Valley University and the political world at large was rocked by the very public, very graphic assassination of conservative YouTuber and political organizer Charlie Kirk. Beloved on the right, reviled on the left, Kirk leaves behind a legacy of influence along with a wife and two children.

Let’s get the obligatory disclosures out of the way: I’ve been called a liberal, a Republican, a leftie, a socialist, a tyrant, a libertarian, and many other things in my life, but whatever my politics are, they are diametrically opposed to Charlie Kirk’s.

(I believe disclosures like this are important when discussing these topics, if only to foster trust with your readers and lend proper context to the font of the opinion they’re reading. Consider the source, and all that...)

A Perfect Media Storm

The killing has created a perfect storm of all-encompassing outrage and reaction across social media that will probably take up all the air in the room for the foreseeable future. It’s the kind of discourse that would be easy to lament or ignore if it hadn’t, sadly, become as mainstream in culture as an argument between Yankee fans and Red Sox fans. I’m far from the first person to make the observation that politics is the new American sport.

Other Substackers will have no shortage of political hot takes and somber remembrances, criticism, threats of violence and calls for civil war, tongue-in-cheek jokes or outright mockery of Kirk. I’ll leave that to them.

I’d rather take this opportunity to remind all communicators, guardians of brands, public figures and others with significant social media followings – you don’t have to post about this story. Posting is not compulsory. In fact, it’s likely that nobody is waiting with bated breath to hear from you about Charlie Kirk’s death.

I mean this in the most respectful and constructive way possible: you can – and likely should – just shut up.

This isn’t a partisan opinion. If you’re on the left, understand we are post-vibe shift. Whatever anti-right wing opinions felt safe to post 2 years ago are today the stuff of boycotts and lost employment. Conservatism in the US is ascendant, and Kirk’s fellow conservative influencers like YouTube prankster/right-wing provocateur Joseph Saladino (“Joey Salads” online) are obsessively on the hunt for people who post disrespectfully about Kirk’s death.

Here’s Saladino, best known by some for his infamous fake social experiments, yesterday urging his hundreds of thousands of followers to get people fired, evicted, or worse.

There’s no telling whose radar your celebratory shitposting might land you on. Don’t embroil your brand or even yourself in that morass. If you manage an apolitical brand account, resist the urge to engage in any “this should be a lesson for us all”-discourse or post any entreaties to high-minded, good faith discussions. We just aren’t in that world anymore.

And heaven help you if you have a public position and do a snark-post. Just ask Laura Shosh-Lightsy, who was an assistant dean at Middle Tennessee State University from 2004 until today, when she was fired for posting an Instagram Story that got the attention of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). Blackburn reposted it, tagging MTSU and calling for the assistant dean’s removal.

I’d also give a word of caution to those seeking to use their accounts to express sympathy for or solidarity with Kirk. For example, if you are the second-longest tenured member of the Miami-Dade School Public School board of directors, an apolitical position that puts you on the frontlines with many parents who find Kirk’s retrograde views abhorrent, maybe keep your thoughts off your official government social media channels.

My local board member, Mari Tere Rojas, got some well-deserved heat for this post today. And that makes sense honestly. Not to do the whataboutism game, but she has not posted any sympathies during any one of the myriad school shootings or public acts of mass political violence afflicting Florida or the country. Posting this gives an insight into her priorities, her politics, and her media diet. Honestly, it’s not very surprising that a wealthy, elderly Cuban woman in Miami is tuned into conservative media figures like Kirk. But maybe let that part of your ideology remain a mystery.

Ok, a local politician might not be the most impactful example of this. But how about a K-Pop idol with 8.7 million followers?

Choi Siwon lost a chunk of his large following after posting remembrances for Kirk, and eventually shut off comments on his page and deleted the stories. You can argue about whether it’s fair or not, but it is reality, and if you’re that big of an celebrity to that wide of an array of fans, you have to understand that this will be divisive.

Again, posting is voluntary. You do not have to comment.

Once upon a time, being aware of a figure like Kirk would be grounds for being labeled “too online”, which, sure, guilty as charged. This is the first time I remember thinking to myself, am I too online, or are these people not online enough?

What I laid out above here is, I think, standard brand-management practices. Don’t wade into these waters, it’s not worth it, even if you think you are defending some high-minded principles. You’re not. No matter how well-intentioned, it’s just more toxicity in a zone flooded with poison.

Some will call that self-censorship, but it isn’t. It’s a rational response to a hyper-politicized population of media literate, too-online consumers reading you for what you are. And like any other public political statement in 2025, half of them will love you for it and half of them will hate you.

If you work in social media brand management and you were repelled by what Kirk stood for, take the day off and go shitpost on your alts. If you revered him, join the rest of the voices on the right calling for civil war or death to all Democrats or whatever.

But before you do it, log off the main. You’ll be glad you did.

I don’t often find myself aligning politically with the famously conservative rapper 50 Cent, but I’ll leave you with a bit of his wit and wisdom from a post he eventually deleted: “It’s a good time to shut the fuck up.”

Today we’re talking about a bleak jobs outlook, bleaker AI outlooks, and an example of how cop-speak invades well-intentioned news copy.

But first, this baloney…

Marlins Make Cheesesteaks Out of Toe Cheese

I promise if I wasn’t so busy I’d spend more time on that subhed. I know, it’s gross, I’m sorry.

In any case, this first story brings us a few short miles from the All Points West studios in Miami to loanDepot Park, where a Friday night MLB game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Miami Marlins went viral – but not for anything that happened on the field.

In case you’ve been under a rock since last Friday, here’s the rundown: at the top of the fourth inning, Phillies outfielder Harrison Bader sent a home run into the stands where it ping-ponged around the bleachers before being corralled by Phillies fan Drew Feltwell. Ball in hand, Feltwell walked a few rows back to his seat and gave the souvenir to his young son, Lincoln.

What happened next has satiated the bloodlust that has infected much of the internet in this post-cancel culture era. Rarely does a caitiff appear seemingly so direct from central casting and bereft of any confounding, humanizing complexities. Our collective vitriol has begun to back up in an era of unaccountable villainy and thanks to one middle-aged woman’s entitled outfield outburst, we all now have a place to aim it:

An obnoxious “Karen” archetype? Stealing a baseball from a little kid? Screaming and yelling in entitled high definition? With a literal Cruella De Ville ‘do? The floodgates broke, and so did the Internet, which oozed raw, molten hatred for the still-unnamed ball-shagger. (That’s a sports term! Not a British sex thing! Don’t get mad at me!)

As I write this early Saturday morning, I’m sure there will be no shortage of digital ink spilled on this, ahem, “story.” But rather than focus on the negative, I wanted to accentuate the positive and recognize my hometown Marlins’ PR and fan experience teams who were Johnnys-on-the-spot, bringing Lincoln a gift basket to allay the pain of what will no doubt be the first in a lifetime of Karen and/or Ken encounters (it only gets worse, kid).

This move deserves to be highlighted because it’s the kind of in-the-moment move that can only work if you’re thinking on your toes and acting with empathy. Many brands shrink away from the spotlight when they are dragged into a viral mess that attracts millions of eyeballs.

The Marlins instead ran toward the mess, even though this was a decidedly Philadelphia-flavored melee. The team could have easily ignored the situation. Instead, understanding that they are hosts even to the fans of the away team, and knowing that few things are as pure and relatable as a youngster enjoying a day at the ballpark, the Marlins took the initiative. It’s just smart thinking on your feet and good event management.

As a lifelong Yankee fan, and generally a fan of sports teams that don’t bilk billions out of their cities for mostly empty new stadiums, it brings me no joy to give props to the Marlins. But their rapid response was a great one. It can be easy to miss an opportunity like this, especially during a live event, but they made the most of it and made a little kid’s day.

****Personally, I choose to subscribe to the conspiracy theory that this was a false flag planted by the Polish paving magnate/rich douchebag Piotr Szczerek, who just days earlier became internet famous at the US Open after snatching a hat from the grasp of a young fan who had just been handed the memorabilia by tennis star Kamil Majchrzak.

I’m just imagining the Philly Karen leaving the stadium, sauntering out into the steamy Little Havana evening and hailing a cab to Miami International Airport, dropping the skunk wig and mom jeans in a trash bin as she makes the call, flatly saying, in perfect Polish, “it’s done.”****

Healthcare: Our Last Growth Industry, Or Just Dying Slower than the Others?

From a silver lining in a grey story, we go to a pitch black story with a grey lining that is just as dark (maybe darker?) when you squint just right.

Along with cancel culture being alive and well in the NL East, Friday’s news also let us know, if we had somehow missed the signs, that the larger US economy and job market is on something resembling life support. With a dismal-even-by-Trump-administration-standards report showing that a mere 22,000 jobs were added to the economy in August, along with downward revisions of June and July’s reports, “heading off a cliff” might seem to incorrectly presuppose that we still have some cliffside under our feet.

For anyone working in comms – particularly corp comms, internal comms, or change management – none of this is news.

In fact, the only bright spot in the most recent jobs report seems to be the healthcare industry, which continues to grow apace. Without the 31,000 new jobs in the sector, net job growth would have been in a deficit, or “contraction”, a phrase we elder millennial/xennials remember from the years 2007-2010. (Not great years!)

Absent that bright spot, the murmurs about recession may have resembled shouts.

But just how bright is it? When people see that the healthcare industry is growing, I think they make a pretty natural assumption that, hey, that’s good right? We’re always hearing about doctor shortages and a lack of primary care providers. More nurses and specialists and MDs, that has to be good news.

Right?

Well, maybe not. For the past few years, I’ve had a micro-obsession with a theoretical concept called the Great Wealth Transfer, a historic, intergenerational movement of trillions of dollars from Baby Boomers to their inheritors that we are told to expect in the coming years. Some Great Wealth Transfer-watchers posit that we are already in the midst of it.

I disagree. While it is natural to assume that inheritance will continue to work as it always has – wealth and assets being left to the children of the aging or deceased – the economic reality we have built for ourselves is far from natural. With hyper-commodified goods and services being produced and delivered by hyper-capitalized firms whose leadership demand exponential, unceasing growth quarter after quarter, is it any surprise that end-of-life care has come to resemble a bankruptcy court?

Consider where the actual growth in healthcare jobs has been coming. The big growth is in costly home healthcare services, which includes hospice (7,600 jobs), skilled nursing care facilities (also 7,600 jobs) and individual and family assistance (which came from the category of social assistance, accounting for nearly 16,000 jobs). Other burgeoning job categories within healthcare were found in continuing care, retirement communities, assisted living facilities. Altogether, about 31,000 jobs were created in just the elder-care-adjacent categories in August.

The dying are keeping our economy alive.

It makes sense if you’ve been paying attention. Think about many “adult daycares” (shudder) you’ve seen pop up in your town the past 15 years. Or the ad spend increase for Medicare and Medicaid plans (before this recent round of budget cuts, of course).

This trend stretches back for years, according to Bureau of Labor and Statistics data. For decades, we’ve talked about how healthcare

Our healthcare system has responded to the incentives that define it by constructing the perfect wallet vacuum – keeping the elderly alive just long enough to exhaust whatever savings they have. It’s just another perverse reality of our economy where, if you’re counting on something like a Great Wealth Transfer, you better hope mom and dad have the decency to kick the bucket quickly and quietly.

****I can only imagine how much worse this will be by the time I reach old age. I’m already putting my mind to exactly which high-risk activities I can have fun doing before I become bedridden. Might take up base jumping, I hear that’s a thrill. Or maybe I’ll become the first Puerto Rican to visit Sentinel Island.****

Speaking of AI Macro Movements…

If you’ve met me, read me, listened to me, or seen me speak, you know that I am an AI realist, not an enthusiast. Look, I even put it on my LinkedIn bio:

That’s why I was maybe less surprised than others when The Information reported that OpenAI expects to burn through $115 billion through 2029 – an amount once forecasted to be closer to $35 billion. And despite the lack of sourcing on the article I wholeheartedly believe it.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the dollars and cents don’t add up for any of these GPT models – it costs far more to operate them, and they burn through more resources than they could ever earn back in subscriber revenue.

The closest comp I can come up with is Netflix, which back in 2015 was the subject of a report that claimed it would need to charge users an eye-popping $20 a month and capture a billion subscribers to continue its churn rate. While those figures seemed crazy at the time, they seem slightly less crazy today as premium users pay $24.99 and the service just surpassed 300 million subscribers.

(All that and we still can’t get a new season of The OA?)

Copy Corner

Finally, ending on a nit I want to pick. For those who pay attention, this is a bit of a hack take but it always rankles me to see the absolute gymnastics that (usually local) news outlets put themselves through to not tell you that a cop shot someone.

I’m cutting off the byline(s) of this story and not linking to it because while there’s a joke to be made about why it took five reporters to bring us one article that is mostly just quoting and sourcing from cops, anyone who’s worked in a newsroom knows that the offending headline was likely written by an editor. (Do they still have editors?)

Here’s my rewrite of this hed: “Cop shoots man in head in Liberty City; investigation underway”. Because that’s what happened.

I find this so maddening because I actually worked for years on a city metro desk reporting stories exactly like this one. From the outside I can understand how the Adam Johnsons and Nima Shirazis of the world come to think this is the result of some sort of institutionalized failure in house style, a way to turn local news into a paean for cop worship. But honestly, I cannot remember one editor ever doing this to my copy.

It’s like black mold, it just appears out of nowhere and it’s nefarious.

At the advent of the Blog Age, media watchers and commentators, uh, commented on a key tension driving the movement to online publishing and concurrently undermining what was then a thriving corporate media industry. As legacy outlet ad revenue cratered through the 2000s and 2010s, no shortage of villains and scapegoats emerged.

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Among that rogues’ gallery – Craigslist, Google, corporate mergers – some of the more prominent were bloggers, those pesky online authors and aggregators whose content was, largely, free. How can we, the serious, real journalists who draw paychecks from our corporate employers, compete for eyeballs against these hobbyist agents of chaos?

Agents of Chaos, Victorious

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need me to tell you how that turned out. The digital warriors won. Today’s news hole – and the corps of reporters and editors who deliver it – has shrunk to a sliver of what it once was.

Gone are the days of city or regional newsgathering operations with hundreds of reporters blanketing beats like organized labor, import/export, retail, arts, state and municipal politics, and other coverage vectors that now mostly operate in obscurity. The remaining skeleton crews of paid journos mostly focus on the kind of salacious stories (crime, celebrity scandals, cultural commentary, national politics) that drive CPMs and make Chartbeat pop.

Reportage still exists for those other “niche” beats, but, ironically, the best of it has migrated to the spiritual descendants of those oft-critiqued bloggers of yesteryear.

Now, for good labor reporting or analysis of specific industries, you’ll have to search in places like Substack, YouTube, podcast players or micro publishers online whose only overhead is hosting their WordPress site and paying rent. (Worth noting that last week, news broke that the once-stalwart blog tool Typepad is slated to be decommissioned next month.)

The folks delivering this coverage are a mix of journalists who once worked these beats professionally but were laid off, well-sourced subject matter experts with independent income or wealth, and obsessive cranks who simply will not shut up.

While this new wave of rogue cowboys represents a significant portion of the modern reporting landscape, there are still journalists drawing paychecks at traditional outlets that continue to shrink through attrition. And sure enough, a residual tension still exists between them and the cowboys.

Taylor Lorenz & Her Many Haters

You guessed it, this is an X.com media drama post!

Taylor Lorenz is a tech and culture journalist/opinion-haver whose outspoken stances and myriad online antagonizations have made her a lightning rod for the worst people on the internet (mostly on Twitter/X.com).

Her resume reads like a J-school undergrad’s dream, with high-profile stops at The Daily Mail, The Daily Beast, The New York Times and most recently The Washington Post as well as lucrative book deals and a personal Substack called User Magazine which has more than 80,000 subscribers with annual subscriptions running $80-per-year. For our purposes, we’re concentrating on her current status as a successful, semi-indie Substacker.

Last week, Lorenz published a very popular piece on Wired.com about a clandestine Democratic Party project to manipulate liberal content creators behind the scenes.

Concurrently, Lorenz’s most recent purported scandal came at her not from the right, but from decidedly liberal-center members of the mainstream media who took issue with a very specific promotion.

Conflict of Interest Dog Says “Bark”

Lorenz in recent weeks shared content promoting Bark, a software company that claims to help kids as young as 6 interact safely with the perilous world of the internet. Users on X.com including online gadfly Jesse Singal, Vox reporter Rachel Cohen Booth and multi-outlet independent reporter Benjamin Ryan (perhaps best known for his New York Times bylines) took her to task, pointing out a conflict of interest as Lorenz has asserted that children should be allowed to bring phones to school.

They also criticized Lorenz broadly for forging a partnership with a company operating within her area of coverage (a huge no-no in the bygone era of journalistic conflict-of-interest ethics, which seems so quaint in 2025), then for not disclosing the true contours of the partnership (Lorenz tagged the promo as an #ad but later provided proof that she was not paid) and finally for User Magazine’s business plan – the Bark promo was just a test-run, according to Lorenz, a way to build an ad portfolio she could then market as inventory.

From there, the kerfuffle descended into Lorenz calling her critics old and implying they don’t know how to use the internet while threatening legal action, and in turn her critics – specifically Ryan and Singal – devoted a not insignificant amount of time into giving the scandal the Zapruder Film treatment across girthy threads.

Last I checked it had devolved into a real “he blocked-she blocked” situation.

***Tinfoil Hat Alert: I don’t want to get into this because it’s not the crux of this post, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Lorenz’s promotional content was thoroughly examined mere days before the Wired.com article dropped. But anywayyys… /tinfoil***

So, What Are the Rules?

In the past, Lorenz has been compensated (quite well, no doubt) by the biggest outlets in journalism. But most reporters have not led so charmed a life, and as the landscape of reporting has changed, many have turned to the Substack subsistence existence to maybe scrape out a living.

Consider: If I’m a reporter who was laid off by my shrinking news outlet, but I’m one of the only people still covering my beat, maybe I can eek out 1,000 subscribers paying, I dunno, $6 a month. That’s a nice wage! You might even be able to afford healthcare and rent in a mid-size American city!

But what if I need to earn more than that because my work is based in an expensive media market like New York, Los Angeles or the Bay Area? Or what if it involves travel, software, subscriptions, legal fees, or some other overhead? What if I have aspirations to grow my little Substack garden into something bigger? Or, what if I have the most banal, American reasoning of all – I’m just fucking greedy and want more money?

At most news outlets, this is something reporters don’t have to think about. The “Chinese Wall” is an old trope in legacy media, a prophylactic separating the pure-as-the-driven-snow journalists from the down-and-dirty ad dealmakers, lest there be any appearance of impropriety or implication that a writer was guided by commercial interests (as if all coverage isn’t, at its core).

During my years at the Miami Herald, that wall was a physical barrier – three flights of stairs separating the sales floor from the newsroom. Our hours and office space were situated in such a way we rarely interacted with our advertising/marketing counterparts. At Fusion TV, we occupied opposite ends of the Newsport campus. At outlets like Reuters and Televisa, I wasn’t even in the same city as our opaque bizdev departments.

Kicking Down the ‘Chinese Wall’

I think it’s wonderful Cohen Booth earns a living wage from a big company for her reporting. I think all good journalists deserve to be supported by a business operation that drives revenue so they can focus on impactful newsgathering. I also believe that the ideal configuration for the Fifth Estate was this old way, where reporters report and ad sellers sell ads and never the twain shall meet.

It’s unseemly for a reporter to have to cut business deals within their area of coverage. It sucks that those reporters can’t all just get gigs like Ryan and Cohen Booth (who, I should mention, authors a Substack that appears to be ancillary to her main reporting at Vox). Again, ideally, journalism would happen in a setting that looks like the Daily Planet.

But news media waved bye-bye to “ideal” decades ago in its race to the bottom. Today, indie/entreprenuerial reporters must sing for their supper. Yeah, it probably means their reporting won’t be as good as it used to be. But nothing is as good as it used to be, least of all journalism. And folks still gotta eat.

This is why I rankle at criticism like the kind aimed at Lorenz. Again, I’m sure she has no shortage of prospects to continue what has been a notable career. I’m more concerned about the precedents we set that constrain the prospects of people who are not backed by robust media outfits with entire floors worth of sales and marketing. That model is gone, folks, and I don’t think we’re allowed to be angry about what replaces it.

Working the Register for Fun but Mostly Profit

The dilemma brings to mind an old joke whose provenance I’ve long forgotten (I used to think it was from Chris Rock, but contemporary searches yield no results). Talking about his time working at a fast food restaurant, the comic observed, “if I can’t work the register, how do you expect me to make any money?”

Maybe it was Dave Chappelle.

In any case, unlike her allies and critics I mostly don’t care about Taylor Lorenz’s promotional deals or assignations. If she’s robbing the till, that’s between her and her shift manager. As a dad, I wouldn’t let my kid have a phone at age 6 (she still doesn’t have one at nearly 12) and I trust such decisions to better-researched sources (my wife and myself – in that order) than a childless tech reporter.

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I do maintain some grace for the idiosyncratic and sometimes histrionic Lorenz because she has remained steadfastly correct on issues like masking, despite being a bit, uhhh, hyperbolic and mostly losing that debate in the public square. (Yes, a properly fitted N95 mask goes a long way to preventing the transmission of COVID-19. Yes, even crappy masks can help a little bit. No, I have no idea how this became a controversial statement.) Lorenz adhered to this position and others in the face of some of the most toxic vitriol you can imagine on Twitter/X.com. Good for her.

A Sneaky Double Standard

I don’t think her promotion of Bark will drive any more kids into the arms of harmful technology, as parents who buy it were probably already letting their kids rot away on far worse apps like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Roblox (all of whom have advertised on Vox, the New York Times, or both).

I also kind of don’t care if other parents let their kids burn out their dopamine receptors on phones because, cynically, that’s one less kid who mine will have to compete with in the coming resource wars.

I’m more interested in this question – what are the permissible methods for an independent Substack journalist to make money? Lorenz is in a privileged position, but many others are scraping by without freelance assignments like Ryan, whose work regularly appears in prestigious outlets like the New York Times, NBC News and The Atlantic. Cohen Booth draws her paycheck from Vox, so like salaried and freelance reporters she enjoys a layer of remove from the “business” side of publishing. She can be unconcerned with dirty dealmaking that would impugn her reporting.

When her Vox colleague Sean Rameswaram chooses to devote an episode of his podcast to the resurgent 27^th season of South Park, does anyone make connections with Vox parent company Penske Media, whose profit model involves taking for-your-consideration advertising cash from studios like Paramount? Is that a conflict? Does anyone use that connection to call his journalistic integrity into question? No, partly because it’s an absurd assertion, partly because who has the time to be that media literate and cynical, but mostly because he enjoys the specific privilege of working at a brick-and-mortar established outlet that keeps him above the business fray beyond the occasional ad-read. He’s fortunate, because he works in a part of media with clear, defined rules.

So, can we agree on some rules?

Happy Election Day!!!

(Sorry, I started this draft last Tuesday. Let me amend my lede.)

Happy post-Election Day Monday.

There’s no need to relitigate how we found ourselves heading into a second Donald Trump administration – literally everyone is already doing that. Rather, let’s take an opportunity to examine how this historic week in American history has unmasked just how superfluous and largely unnecessary linear advertising has become in our society – a sentiment some Democratic strategists might share today as they lick their expensive wounds.

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IF THEY ONLY KNEW…

My wife and I are doing a re-watch of one of our favorite shows, Mad Men, for the first time since it ended in 2015. We’re about halfway through the show’s run and we’re finding it a soothing balm for those kid’s-out-of-the-shower-reading-herself-to-bed witching hours, a muted and visually sumptuous wind-down to lull us to sleep. (And it totally holds up, even better on a rewatch 10 years later.)

But when the show began back in 2007, there were no kids in the shower or in bed. A young 20-something couple, we had been dating about a year. My wife was the one who hipped me to AMC’s little-watched gem before the cultural intelligentsia fell in love with it. When I tell people how much I enjoy this show, I often get back some version of, “well that makes sense, it’s about your profession.”

They’re talking about advertising, an industry that was already ubiquitous and well understood by the average person before Mad Men.

This makes it unsatisfying and ultimately pointless when I try to explain that I work in “communications”, not “advertising”, per se, although my job often involves creating and arranging pieces of advertising, defining media strategy for larger overarching omnichannel campaigns aimed at multiple consumer and audience segments to affect specific behaviors and oh my God I think I just bored myself to sleep.

In lieu of pedantry, I prefer to respond, “oh yeah, there’s a lot of overlap,” and keep the conversation moving.

THE BLACK BOX OF GUTS

If I’m being honest, even 20 years into my career, advertising is a black box to me. Much of the sinew and viscera has been drained from that box over the intervening decades that saw Sterling, Cooper and friends enjoying 9 a.m. highballs to today, when tech has overtaken organic influence in the larger advertising globule.

Advertising was, in those days, a truly human endeavor with flesh-and-blood hands on every aspect from client management to creative to strategy. Guided – for good or ill – by broader data points, arbitrary client wishes, and old-fashioned intuition, advertising was in a gilded dark age.

Agencies charged enormous sums for their work and led lavish existences, and despite the few tools at their disposals they delivered outsized results. A good primetime ad on a random Friday night in September could deliver actual, quantifiable bottom line results and get people to talk. They barely knew what they were doing, these besotted leches of Madison Avenue, but what they did moved the needle because of its novelty. “Pictures on a screen telling me what to buy? Sold!”

This is no longer true.

ZEITGEISTS, ONLY ITTY-BITTY

Sure, there are the occasional linear ads that break through and capture the zeitgeist, but today’s “zeitgeist” is defined in increasingly smaller overall terms and those breakthroughs happen less and less frequently. My readers – communications people – might not realize this because we pay closer attention to these campaigns on a granular level. But for the general population disinterested in our world, advertising laps over the extremity of their awareness, like waves on your feet as you walk parallel to the shoreline, a feature of the geography you accept as extant.

Advertising obviously still exists, but in 2024 it has mostly become noise without signal, animated graffiti, something your awareness ambles past and barely registers. This goes beyond our shrinking attention spans and collective brain-rot. What I’m describing is more of an evolutionary response.

If you were born in 1980, you’ve been inundated with ad content emanating from every available surface, space, or screen you’ve interacted with for 44 years. While Donald Draper had an entire population of virgin eyes and ears poised for capture at the onset of a new era of mass communication, our 2024 senses have been shot through to the point that advertising has become little more than a contest of absurdity – see which cute and/or weird CGI creature can make the funniest face when it steals a beer or potato chips from a baby, add a celebrity cameo and/or a well-known Top 40 track, then pay $10 million for it to air on Superbowl Sunday (the only day of the year people pay attention to commercials).

(Or dump that $10 million into digital chumbox ads that appear as 200x175 pixel tiles at the bottom of content people actually want, hoping visitors will waywardly click on an image of an AI Sofia Vergara giving a middle finger with an ambiguous caption like, “How she told them ‘Never again!’”. But let’s save our rancor for digital ads for a future post.)

I don’t watch Mad Men to think about the depressing and perverse economics of brand elevation in 2024. I watch it to be reminded of a mythical era when Madison Avenue soothsayers could weave arcane magic to shape influence and drive revenue. To someone like me who is “in the profession”, it’s akin to high fantasy fables about dragons and krakens. I’m fascinated by the depiction of eras bygone when 30 seconds of images and sounds could affect consumer decisions, drive measurable shareholder value, and move markets.

Which brings me to the election.

AD BLITZED

The New York Times podcast The Daily was out Monday with an episode devoted to a deep dive on the advertising campaigns of each major presidential campaign. AdImpact says that $10.2 billion have been spent on political expenditures across the 2023-24 election season, an ungodly amount considering most polls and pundits expect the final result to mostly mirror the past two quadrennial elections. Are minds being changed by ads? Do they raise awareness? Does the predictable cadence of a formulaic 30 second ad spot about a politician or issue, parodied almost to the point of ridiculousness, justify the spend?

I don’t know, but I’m not sure I can be convinced it does. Measurement in advertising – just like comms – is enigmatic and foundationally corrupted. It’s such a thorny topic, with indicators and metrics designed mostly by the same industry that insists on its own relevance. CPMs, impressions and Nielsen Ratings? I’d sooner trust my brand’s success to Tarot Cards. While social media once held the nascent promise of accurate engagement statistics, anyone who’s ever run a Facebook campaign can tell you how fudgy those metrics remain.

But since we’re talking about this election, a discrete moment in time, and since I waited until a few days after its completion, we can take this opportunity to judge ad results based on actual results.

Back in January, the national polling averages for the U.S. presidential election – then pitting Donald Trump against Joe Biden – had the latter with a <2% advantage (48%-46%). Most pollsters would consider this a statistical tie.

Fast-forward to August, and after tectonic shifts to the political landscape that included a viral debate failure, an assassination attempt, a new candidate, rising violence and tension across the Middle East, racial acrimony, ever louder evidence of a quiet recession, and spates of political violence, the polling averages had shifted all the way to... the exact same <2% Democratic advantage (48%-46%).

After another assassination attempt and some minor late fluctuations, and after we all learned the term “herding” together, the polling averages entered Election Day mostly the same as they had been. And today, if the current projections hold, the final difference will be about 51%-48%, a >2% spread (in the opposite direction) and still within the margin of error.

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During this time, both parties had emptied out their coffers on television advertising, but Democrats significantly outspent Republicans. The Harris campaign spent $456.3 million on television ads to Trump’s $204.3 million. Each got a boost from outside aligned interest groups, including $364.1 million for Harris and $306.1 million for Trump.

So, after an election season that saw the political class drop more than the GDP of Grenada on television ads alone, can I ask you to do me a favor? Ok? I promise this isn’t a “gotcha”: Tell me your favorite TV ad for either candidate.

(Ok, maybe it’s a little “gotcha”.)

But really, which ad made you or someone you know reconsider an issue? Which ad gave you new information to think about? Forget about changing hearts and minds – did any ad get you fired up to go vote for whoever you were going to vote for?

Yeah, me neither.

Now, being inured to advertising is a standard-issue Xennial trait, so this isn’t much of a surprise to me. Maybe it’s not for you either. But when did political advertising become such a gormless, featureless, cash void? I picture political media consultants as the stokers in the engine rooms of the Titanic, shoveling loads of cash into furnaces as fast as it could possibly evaporate.

People might still “watch” TV ads, they might be on in between our programs. They might be colorful or dour or scary and their creators, brands, and the proprietors of the hardware that publishes them might be able to regurgitate raw analytics that suggest they are being broadcast to large numbers of people.

But it doesn’t matter. Some of us are still on the couch, but our attention has checked out.

THE PROBLEM GOES DEEPER

I see this as more than a politics problem. It’s the medium.

Every year, advertising persists institutionally within organizations. Budgets mostly go up year-over-year, in lockstep with other divisions and corporate America writ large. Brands and agencies (naturally) agree that if their spends declined, it would certainly harm their bottom line (despite some clear evidence to the contrary).

Maybe they’re right. I don’t think so, but I’m so cynical about advertising I’ve developed a combination of acute prosopagnosia and oppositional defiance disorder aimed specifically at anyone or anything trying to sell me something. So don’t take my word for it.

Instead, consider our Vice President. Kamala Harris spent $225 million on ads about the economy, but did anyone change their mind about blaming Democrats for inflation? She consistently polled 10-20% behind Trump on the economy. Defenders of her ad strategy will say without that spend, it would have been even worse, but how can we know that? How can you prove a negative?

Now, I’m not writing this in hopes of some mass abandonment of political advertising across television and other legacy media. (Although a girl can dream.)

Rather, I’m saying if the effectiveness of political advertising is so ephemeral, how do we know it’s effective? How do we know any advertising is effective?

As I said, I’m a comms guy not an ad guy, and not to mix up my metaphors but to a comms guy everything looks like a nail (if we were, like, hammers, whatever you get it). I think most branding problems can be solved with a better communications strategy, messaging, planning and activation.

I don’t want to wade into what each campaign did write or wrong in the messaging or presentation (they can pay me for that, my public sector rates are quite reasonable) but it seems that while the overall positioning of these candidates emanated from a lot of places – xenophobia, economic obliviousness, their followers, their surrogates, social media trends, gaffes, viral videos, near-miss bullets, vibes – I cannot recall a single instance where an advertisement on television moved the needle.

What if the Harris campaign had shaved off a mere $100 million from its ad buys (pocket change!) and funneled it into better strategy, better surrogates, better messaging and activating voters where they are (instead of in spaces where they increasingly aren’t).

If I was actually a political consultant, I’d tell my candidate to invest in your positioning, your strategy, and modern message amplification – not just blanketing every minute of The Price Is Right’s ad inventory with campaign commercials. These spots are worthless and overused to the point that they’ve become very expensive white noise. Use that money to connect with your constituents.

PS: Oh yeah, as long as we’re out here killing mediums for political advertising, can we finally get rid of the mass text messages? Talk about worthless and overused.

Heading into the last weekend before the election, I am grasping at straws for a topic to write about that isn’t overtly electoral. I thought about discussing my recent spate of Florida-centric TikTok videos, which were less about serious political analysis and more about me scratching an itch and getting comfortable editing longer shortform vertical video (lord, what a cursed phrase).

I also considered getting into the preparations brands should be making for the potential pandemic and spread of bird flu, but jeez, I mean, aren’t we’re all dealing with enough this week?

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This is a communications newsletter, frequented (hopefully) by professionals in the communications industry, so instead of doom and gloom and in the interest of not completely ignoring the quadrennial 800 pound gorilla of news stories, I figured I’d give some helpful advice as we wrap up Halloween and head into the last weekend before Tuesday’s election. Let’s talk about the unique opportunity offered by the next few pre-election news cycles.

A JAM-PACKED NEWS HOLE

When I was a young reporter covering the weekend metro breaking news beat, I’d always be sure to check out the Saturday, Sunday and Monday edition makeups ahead of time. These were pre-early edition digital mockups usually stored on our shared servers, laid out on Adobe InDesign. Days in advance, you could see enterprise news stories, features, blocked space for articles about things we knew were going to happen, ads, photo layouts and basically an early draft of the news.

As a reporter, I cared about this because it helped gage how much I could “write to” – that is, how much space I would actually have for newsgathering of unanticipated goings-on around the city. Murder, scandals, accidents, traffic, natural disasters, protests and more would fill in this remaining news hole. Some weekends, the pre-ordained content out-clipped the column inches left for me to such an extent that I knew I wouldn’t be able to squeeze many stories into print.

Today, print is no longer the dominant form of newsgathering and wide swaths of America don’t even have newspapers. But if you were to imagine the contemporary media’s collective attention span as Friday’s draft of a traditional Sunday Edition, this weekend’s makeup pages would be jam-packed.

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Editors today (to the extent that editors still exist) are looking at “makeup pages” that are almost entirely dedicated to the election, local news about the election, the election, election polling, early voting, mail-in voting, macro business trends that inform the potential outcome of the election, fallout from gaffes and statements made during the election campaigns, and the election. It promises to make an either boring or busy weekend for reporters, but for stories with no connection to the election, it offers comprehensive camouflage.

As a young reporter in 2006, on a weekend like this, I’d probably kick my feet up on the desk and hope for quiet.

GET IT OUT NOW

In that quiet, there is opportunity. Cynical opportunity, but our business often relies on our tolerance for cynicism, so suck it up buttercup. As I hit publish on this blog, it is the early afternoon on the east coast.

So, you have time. You have veritable hours to dust off that press release announcing that product recall your ops team has been waiting on. You can hastily assemble a response to that brewing controversy that the executive leaders have been whispering about. That one business vertical that hasn’t turned a profit in 10 quarters? Maybe today’s the day to quietly admit it wasn’t your best idea and shutter it.

The only caveat here is reductions-in-force (layoffs to the laymen). Not because of my inherent, closely held belief that nobody should lose their job the day after Halloween, but because any news of hirings and/or firings are sure to be lumped in with larger political debates, the economy, cost of living, inflation, and before you know it, you’re down the same coverage rabbit hole you sought to avoid.

Now, I’m not advocating dishonesty. Manipulation, sure, but not dishonesty. Brands that knowingly carry around an affliction must always have a plan for the moment when it’s time to take their medicine. As a communications professional, much of this falls to you. We consider the timeliness of the news we make every day. There are good and bad times to make any announcement. That decorum and judgment is part of what makes you valuable.

DAY 2 BECOMES WEEK 2

If you decide to do this, be ready for an elongated “Day Two” story cycle. Depending on the story, it might take a few days or even weeks for any scrutiny to arrive, but arrive it will. Be sure your key team members have memorized your key messages and are well-coached.

Also, just because you get the news out doesn’t mean it’s over. I’m working very hard not to make a “flushing the toilet” metaphor here, but that’s kind of what it’s like. Be prepared for things to come bubbling up later in the doldrums of Q4 when journalists have more time on their hands. Whatever the news, keep it dry, anodyne and boring. Scrub it of human angles, wherever possible. Keep it on a spreadsheet, or in programming language, or even in modest dollars-and-cents. Don’t proselytize, evangelize or editorialize.

Left to right: Joey Levi (LumApps), Yours Truly, Megan DiSciullo (PwC), and Matthew Kinsman (Ragan)

As I draft this, it’s been two weeks since Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in Nashville where I was fortunate to be a part of a panel on that included Megan DiSciullo from PwC and Joey Levi from LumApps, moderated by Ragan’s Chief Content Officer Matthew Kinsman. Our panel, Using Generative AI to Enhance the Employee Experience, was enjoyable and, I hope, informative.

But I’m a little AI’ed out from all the week’s conversations. Frankly, the topic I feel more compelled to write about is the overarching theme of the event: “employee experience”, “engagement”, “change management” – all phrases used to describe that big, amorphous blob of our industry we colloquially refer to as internal communications.

Internal comms has been a passion for me since I left journalism 12 years ago and started doing this job. One of my first leadership roles was heading an agency-of-record team whose chief priorities were to protect a multinational blue-chip QSR brand and guide it through a pair of complex financial transactions that effectively doubled its size in a couple short years.

During this time, about three-quarters of my billable hours went to some form of internal comms remit. While other teams at my agency were doing couture runway shows on Miami Beach, staffing swanky awards shows, and hobnobbing with the glitterati, my working group could usually be found hunkered down and embedded in some open-concept, semi-private makeshift workspace, drilling down on strategy.

A Burgeoning Need for Brands

Our business would not have survived its early days without the gritty, unsexy, and anything-but-glamorous work of internal comms that buoyed us back then. As our big client’s culture changed post-transaction and the ground shifted below the feet of its stakeholders, our work satisfied a crucial need for them.

If I learned anything in Nashville, it’s that the need has only grown.

Walking through the well-attended Ragan event and talking to the internal comms practitioners whose bosses deemed their professional development important enough to shell out for airfare and a room at the Four Seasons, I’m reminded of why I left newsrooms for agency life. These young professionals might not realize it, but they are refreshingly well-provisioned in their careers. There are resources and attention being paid to their development. The people who make budget decisions at their companies have deemed their internal comms work a priority worthy of investment.

The difference with early-career journos couldn’t be starker. Being in the media in 2024 is a feast-or-famine proposition. If you’re not fortunate enough to be at an outlet whose business model is somehow flying above the fray (e.g. backed by VC or legalized gambling, owned by a billionaire, a tech-content play that’s part of a larger complex financial transaction, or literally the New York Times) nobody is sending you to the Four Seasons for a professional development conference.

Public Relations vs. Media Relations

As long as there is a public, Public Relations will matter. But the specific subgenre of Media Relations is dwindling in lockstep with the media itself. Most pitching happens on a local or regional level, but in 2023 an average of 2.5 local newspapers closed each week. The ranks of professionals in journalism shrank by 43,000 during the past decade.

The shrinking news hole affects TV and radio stations as well, as mergers and consolidation result in more serialized licensed (read: cheaper) content, supplanting valuable local airtime for the types of stories we pitch.

And here’s the dirty secret no one wants to talk about — let’s assume, even with the challenges of the modern media environment, you have a strong pitch for a compelling story, and you’re able to find one of those few reporters on the endangered species lists to write it up and get it published. Let’s say you even get it on the front page, or somehow it leads the 11 o’clock a-block. You’re still talking about an outlet whose reach – even including digital – is a fraction of what it once was, driving nowhere near the same results in earned media impact.

But you know, whatever, the death of local/regional media is a story that’s been told a million times since before my old ass even entered the workforce. This post is about a sector in communications that’s fresh, thriving, and a point of focus.

Internal Engagement is the Coin of the Realm

As there become fewer outlets to tell their stories, and as they become increasingly unapproachable and insular to the general public, brands are going to need an internal comms strategy that effectively shares their vision, mission and wins across their organizations.

These strategies don’t come out of a box; in fact, no two internal comms plans are even close to the same. They’re as diverse as the groups they seek to engage.

But there are some common guiderails you can use beyond just ensuring your lists and org charts are up to date. I’ve put together about a hundred internal comms plans in my career (some of them even worked!) so here are a few recommendations:

1. Identify Your Stakeholders: Apart from being an obnoxious 2020s buzzword, the concept of stakeholders is critical when assembling an internal comms plan. Don’t be so quick to conflate “stakeholders” with “employees”; they can also include directors, investors, contractors, vendors, tenants, neighbors or franchisees. Anyone invested in your success is a stakeholder and should be part of your internal comms plan.  

2. Get Executive Buy-In: Shouting into the void is just as pointless an internal comms strategy as it is with external comms. Identify a voice or voices who will be the spearpoint for your strategy. Enlist the sponsorship (or at least tacit cosigning) of your executive team – the higher up the better. Position them as avatars for what’s happening organizationally, give them the tools to be effective communicators, and carve out time to let them cook. Make it worth their while and internal comms won’t be synonymous with a chore on their to-do list.

3. Leverage Your Internal Influencers: Everything mentioned in recommendation No. 2, but this time focused on well-regarded internal influencers with soft skills. Find the manager/director level folks who are leaders, who are well-liked, who are strong communicators plugged into the corporate culture. Make them your “Brand Ambassadors” and empower them to not just share information downward to their colleagues, but to collect and report feedback upwards to leadership. A strong Internal Brand Ambassador program can be a huge driver of engagement, but it has to be a two-way street.

4. Embrace Multimedia: If I use the phrase “pivot to video” in this post I might just trigger some theoretical algorithmic limit for obnoxious buzzwords, so I’ll avoid it. That said, most current metrics available to us suggest that video has surpassed text as an effective method of communicating. This is doubly true for workforces that include non-traditional “knowledge workers” (ugh, another one) who spend their hours on their feet, behind the steering wheel, or operating specialized equipment. I’ve had a lot of success in recent years launching internally focused podcasts for brands that feature significant blue collar work populations, as audio content is easier to fit into their busy and demanding days.

5. Don’t Fracture Your Hub: Sometime around 20-25 years ago, your organization probably dumped a whole bunch of time, money and energy into building an “intranet”. Since then, you’ve probably relaunched, rebranded or migrated it multiple times. You probably don’t even call it an “intranet” anymore. Whatever you call it, this place is your hub. It’s the one-stop-shop for anything your people need to know. Don’t create another one. Don’t make your people have to check in on multiple platforms, pages or inboxes. Keep one comprehensive place to house it all.

6. Email Ain’t It: This one is more tactical, but if you can, steer your content away from long, wordy, over-designed email newsletters. Everything we know about how people consume content informs the idea that we have less appetite for consuming information this way. Instead, along with multimedia (recommendation No. 4) use infographics, maps, displays, environmental branding, desk drops – basically anything that will cut through the mundanity of the inbox. Email is still important and should be a part of the strategy, but it ain’t it.

7. Use Your Inside Voice to Retrofit Your Best Stories: I continue to be surprised by how many clients I engage with who send out press release after press release – to varying degrees of success – but fail to share their contents with their internal stakeholders. No reporter will beat the drum louder or more effectively than your own people. Share your wins internally. Maybe consider prioritizing internal audiences over media (sacrilege, I know!) by sharing select information internally before sending a media alert. “Oh, but DQ, what if one of my people leaks it to the media before we have a chance to share it?” Uhm, great? Isn’t that what you wanted anyway? Just be sure the message is in a form that is appropriate for mass consumption, and maybe you don’t even need to send a press release.

8. Celebrate & Recognize: Recognition is the cheat-code for any internal comms strategy. It’s catnip, immediate engagement, a comfy setting to tell the best stories your brand can tell. Don’t compartmentalize recognition into “Recognition Time”, shunted off to the end of staff meetings. Instead, integrate it into everything – comms, town halls, videos, all corporate communications should feature someone who did something the right way, and an implicit call-to-action for more people to be like them.

These are pretty simple strategic suggestions and, again, they won’t all work for every organization. If you are one of the sharp internal comms minds I met in Nashville, much of this might even seem remedial.

But you would be shocked at how many organizations I encounter who still either don’t subscribe to these fundamentals or entirely disregard their most important demographic – their people.

Don’t let that be you.

It’s been 24 hours since President Joe Biden finally acquiesced to the rising cacophony of voices – constituents, pollsters, party leaders, media and more – demanding that he end his 2024 reelection campaign. As I type these words, the news cycle has already moved on to “Day 2” stories like House Speaker Mike Johnson calling on Biden to resign immediately and Vice President Kamala Harris’ potential VP picks.

The pressure had been silently building for months before Biden’s debate with Donald Trump on June 27, but following that disastrous performance, power brokers across the Democratic Party began aligning behind the scenes (and sometimes out in front) to encourage Biden to step down. It didn’t help that Democrat voters, if polling is to be believed, seemed to agree with them.

But stepping down from the biggest job in the world, preserving one’s own dignity and legacy, all while setting up your successor for, well, success is a uniquely challenging prospect.

From a communicator’s perspective, we can learn a lot from the steps (missteps?) made by Team Biden, such as it is, yesterday and in recent weeks.

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The Statement & The Strategy

Here’s the statement that rocked everyone’s Sunday afternoon. On “Joseph R. Biden, Jr.” letterhead (notably not official White House or Biden-Harris campaign authority) Biden spent two grafs invoking his record of the past 3½ years, then another thanking his target audience while lightly gaslighting us about COVID-19 being over, laughably written as the President himself recovers from COVID in the midst of the biggest summertime spike in the virus’ four-year history.

All this throat-clearing is prelude to the money graf, where Biden announces he will be the first U.S. President since Lyndon B. Johnson to not seek reelection.

The lack of official executive or Democratic Party imprimatur on the message is notable, as is the tonality compared to past Biden communications that have been delivered in conjunction with those institutions. To keen eyes, this message was clearly drafted by Biden, in his voice, and with little input or interference from his communications support team.

The message tails off with some vague allusions to a future statement, a general thank you to unnamed supporters, and a specific thank you to Vice President Kamala Harris. (Conspicuously absent: an explicit endorsement of Harris.)

The communication was delivered across social channels (reportedly to the surprise of Democratic leaders, organizations, and stakeholders) and neither Biden nor any official spokespeople were made available to media.

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What Was Good: The Timing, The Delivery, The Framing  

Put your personal politics aside for a moment (in full transparency, mine are far to the left of ol’ Dark Brandon) and consider the challenge of having a client whose organization has morphed in less than a month into a collection of careerist vipers hoping to outlast their waning leadership and willing to leak any details of private interactions in the hopes of getting them to step aside. (Ironically, then-President Trump experienced a version of this, as well.)

This dynamic quickly caused Biden’s inner circle to shrink to the point where it was reported his “small council” came to consist of his wife Jill and son Hunter. Not exactly a team of rivals. Family is great, but making the biggest decision of your life that will materially impact the entire planet should maybe include a few people who aren’t deeply invested in the status quo.

There’s no perfect time to announce that you won’t be seeking reelection to the highest office in the country. There’s no Friday evening news-dump-friendly cycle to hide behind, no national tragedies that can trump it. This isn’t a bad earnings call, or a weaker-than-expected jobs report. The announcement would immediately be the biggest story in the world in a moment of acceleration, when the public is routinely fire-hosed by earth-shattering, mind-warping news stories on what feels like a daily basis.

(A quick aside about this: I can’t recommend enough the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary for the BBC, HyperNormalisation, when trying to better understand the challenges of communicating in this insane era when entire generations are losing touch with the reality of power and money.)

That said, let’s think about yesterday, a chill Sunday afternoon in July where the biggest news story was Team USA’s Men’s Olympic Basketball squad nearly losing to South Sudan the day before. It was one week after a failed assassination attempt against Biden’s political rival, what promised to be an iconic and transformative moment but turned out to be little more than a windfall for t-shirt bootleggers. It was just days after a rollicking Republican National Convention focused squarely on Biden’s infirmity, and just hours after anonymous Democratic lawmakers became more and more emboldened to speak on the record against Biden. Cynical? Sure, but from a communications perspective this was the best moment among less-than-ideal choices.  

On Thursday, August 8, 1974, facing impeachment, Richard Nixon’s resignation came via primetime television. Six years earlier, 1968, the aforementioned LBJ – who had made up his mind up to a year earlier, according to his Press Secretary – sent his message on Sunday evening, March 31, 1968. Prior to those instances, all other presidential campaign resignations were communicated solely by print.

Biden was a 31-year-old freshman Senator when Nixon resigned, and his career endured to 2024, when a simple black-on-white JPEG shared across social channels can achieve wider reach with more control than primetime television or radio. This delivery method, along with the benefit of being a light production lift, holds added benefits when your chief spokesman’s best public speaking days are behind him.

As much as I disagree with the substance of his purported policy wins and political successes (buy me a drink someplace private and we can talk politics) it was the correct framing to use. Absent this context, the communication comes across as an expression of failure and  weakness, an explicit mea culpa. Good on him for taking credit for his legacy, such as it is.

What Was Bad: Discordance, Coordination, Succession, Saltiness

One of the most loathsome places for a communicator to find themselves is the absolute depths of hell that is the 30^th day of a crisis that could have been stanched on Day 1. When all other strategies, trick-plays, and delays run out, and your client finally decides to do what they should have done all along, it’s all you can do not to rub your fists into your eyes and shout, “FINALLY. THANK YOU.”

I can’t help but think about the comms pros on Team Biden who were doing this yesterday.

Sunday’s resignation came after weeks of discordant on- and off-the-record messaging from Biden, the DNC, leadership and other party elites. Biden, as recently as Saturday, signaled his intention to serve out this term and the next. During a recent well-intentioned but poorly executed TikTok influencer outreach campaign, Biden was questioned frankly by young content creators about his age and viability, and about his intention to stay in the race. He was unequivocal – “One thousand percent,” he told one interviewer. When reports emerged to the contrary throughout July, stating that Biden was weighing his options, his official team would return with ever more forceful assurances that he was all-in.

This discordance led to a lack of coordination with other Party extremities, who were largely taken by surprise by Sunday’s announcement. This was doubtless a bit of saltiness on Biden’s part, feeling the firm push in his back from entities scrambling to replace him while offering disingenuous plaudits and appreciation on his way out.

Whether or not there was enmity behind this lack of coordination, it was perceived as a slight to his Vice President. It took a half hour for Biden to issue a Tweet (sorry, we don’t use “X” on this Substack) clarifying his support for Harris. The execution felt either slapdash or intentional, but either way, it raised eyebrows. Time will tell if any deep divisions between Biden, Harris, and the party elite erode the Democrats’ brand in the eyes of voters.

Overall Grade: B-

The overarching contextual challenge of this communication effort was self-inflicted wounds. Candidate Joe Biden earned his victory in 2020 with an implicit promise that he would be a “transitional president” (remember that?) bridging the Democratic Party from the olden days to future generations of leaders, and voters bought into that.

The more cynical among us saw Biden as a somewhat capable administrator for an unsteady empire lurching into its flop era; a familiar face to remind us of the good old days as the seas continue to boil, the world around us continues to price us out of existence, and corporate greed makes the “American Dream”, whatever that was, less and less attainable. He was the perfect grandpa to tuck us in with stories about Camaros of yore, gently putting us down for the long sleep.

Still others saw a vote for Biden-Harris as a vote for a permission structure that would allow them to stop caring about the toxic morass of American politics. Hey, I get it.

In any case, Biden had the chance to make his intentions known well before suffering a national embarrassment. He squandered the trust and equity he earned over his term. He made the Democrats’ path to remain in power infinitely more difficult. His obstinance forced fissures throughout the party and the electorate – many of whom retain loyalty to Joe.

But if we’re being honest, most crisis responses stem from self-owns like this; our job is to rate the response to the crisis, and faced with limitations in time, resources, and options, the folks in charge of this comms effort did about as good as they could. They had a candidate who was unfit for live or even taped media; a candidate who has visibly diminished in recent years; a candidate who himself was gaslit into believing he could muster the verve to compete in this election and who (let’s be honest) probably holds a deep reservoir of hubris from decades of political fame and success that made him eager to believe.

With these limitations, and on a truncated timeline to deliver success on the largest political stage there is, Biden’s eventual resignation could have gone far, far worse.

Enjoy retirement and your ice cream, Joe.

In any case, here are some things we went over. (BTW if you haven’t please add yourself to my mailing list by clicking the button below.)

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So, if you loved my PowerPoint deck, you can find it here.

Here’s the New York Times article by Farhad Manjoo, Welcome to the Post-Text Future.

I share this survey with my clients to help them conceive their podcasts, and you’re welcome to use it as well.

This is a website called Peerspace, and I’ve found it to be very helpful in identifying quality recording studios in large and medium sized markets.

I host with Captivate, and I recommend them as a podcast host.

I use Riverside for virtual interview sessions, and I recommend them.

Apple Podcast is still the king platform, and you’ll need to add your show in Apple Podcast Connect. This process usually only takes a few hours, but it can take up to a week, so be advised.

I mentioned AI certificate courses, and here are a couple:

• Coursera: Generative AI for Everyone

• Kellogg School: AI Applications

First things first, here is the presentation I shared during the event (PDF and PowerPoint). Feel free to use whatever is in there, but please credit me for it you little slimeballs!

FutureTools is a great index of all the AI projects and resources out there. It’s a searchable database and is platform agnostic, meaning that it doesn’t give preference to any one tool over another. This is a great starting point for communicators.

Let’s check out some other resources. Also, don’t forget to…

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AI Text & Copywriting Tools

ChatGPT is still the gold standard in this space, and it is the easiest to use. The cost is $20 a month. Below are some alternative AI text and copywriting tools for you to experiment with.

AutoWrite App

Clickup

Copy.ai

AI Image Generation Tools

We workshopped Midjourney, which is our agency’s favorite image tool but does have a learning curve. Here’s a link to Midjourney and a great tutorial to get started in case you forgot.

Dall-E

NightCafe

AI Video Editing Tools

Runwayml.com

Cool Stop-Motion Tutorial for Midjourney

Krockio Storyboard Generator

Deepfake Detector

Other Links & Resources

Durable AI Website Builder

Great ChatGPT Tutorial to get you up and running

TechPolicy article about the U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum

Miami Dade College AI Degree Program

ChatGPT will ‘help us with extremely hard problems’ in the future, says OpenAI’s chief tech officer

A CNET Glossary of AI terms that isn’t unnecessarily technical and has practical applications to communications professionals

Tutorial How to Seed your projects

Tokenized AI by Christian Heirdorn is a great Midjourney learning resource

Thank you!

Thank you all, I had a blast! I hope you each remember me in my truest form.

One last thing, if you go all the way down here. Please take this poll and let me know what you thought of the presentation.

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