Originally published: December 9, 2010 · Updated: June 16, 2026

I lost a client in December 2010 and wrote about being relieved. The setup: 5W had been hired by the international headquarters of a major global brand. The U.S. office opposed the engagement from day one. Every directive from international got countermanded by the U.S. director of marketing, who refused to meet, grunted through conference calls, and treated every campaign success as a problem to manage. The work produced — the actual metrics — exceeded every benchmark we set at the start. The international CMO eventually took another job. The U.S. director terminated us inside a day.

I named the post Not All PR Clients Are Good Clients. Sixteen years later, the lesson is the same. The way it shows up has changed.

The 2010 lesson, restated

A client is not a logo. A client is the operating relationship between the firm and the people who actually run the work. Two-tier governance — international against U.S., parent against subsidiary, marketing against legal, founder against board — destroys campaigns even when the campaigns are performing. Internal misalignment is the single highest-correlation predictor of client failure I have seen across more than two decades of running 5W. Bigger than budget. Bigger than category. Bigger than competition.

The receipt from that 2010 engagement: the metrics were all green. The relationship was all red. The metrics never get to matter when the governance is broken.

What 2026 added

Three patterns I would not have written about in 2010 because they did not yet exist at scale:

The procurement-versus-marketing split. By 2020, procurement had taken the contract negotiation away from CMOs at most enterprise accounts. The CMO buys outcomes. Procurement buys hours. The agency that wins on outcomes loses on procurement scorecards if it does not staff to the line items procurement scores. Operating governance is now two-tier by default at large clients. The agency that does not get both sides aligned at the start loses the engagement in month nine, regardless of performance.

The AI-leadership versus communications split. By 2024, most large brands had hired a Chief AI Officer or equivalent — Walmart, Estée Lauder, Mastercard, Coca-Cola, JPMorgan among them. The CAIO has a perspective on the AI Communications work that is often different from the CMO's. When the two are not aligned on Citation Share priorities, scope, or measurement, the agency caught between them is the 2010 international-versus-U.S. story repeating in a new costume.

The board-versus-management split on AI visibility. Boards started asking CEOs in 2024 and 2025 why the company was not the answer in ChatGPT for its category. CEOs pushed the question to CMOs. CMOs pushed it to agencies. Boards then asked agencies directly. The agency that performs against the CMO's brief and gets undercut by the board's separate inquiry is in the same trap the 2010 piece described. Two clients in one logo, with no shared language for what good looks like.

The framework for the agency side

Three rules drawn from the 2010 lesson, reapplied for 2026:

  • Get the governance memo signed before the work starts. Names, decision rights, escalation paths, and meeting cadence — across all stakeholders, not just the signing one. The 2010 client failure happened because nobody insisted on this. 5W now insists.
  • Walk away from the misaligned engagement early. The 2010 termination came after months of internal conflict. The cost of staying past month two — staff morale, opportunity cost, the case study that never publishes — is always higher than the cost of resigning the account.
  • Document the metrics, then leave. Even a relationship that ends badly produces a portfolio asset if the performance data is captured. The 2010 engagement, restated honestly here, is a stronger reference for what 5W did than for what the client did. The work survives the relationship.

The framework for the client side

One rule, for any CMO or founder hiring an agency in 2026: get your house aligned before you hire the firm. The agency cannot solve internal governance disputes inside the client. Trying to do so eats budget, time, and credibility for everyone involved. Resolve the internal mandate first. Then hire.

I was happy to lose that client in December 2010. The receipt: 5W's roster a year later was stronger because the slot the misaligned client occupied was freed for an aligned one. That math has held every year since. Some client losses are P&L losses. Some are P&L gains arriving in a confusing wrapper.

AI Communications is the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The work requires aligned client-side decision making more than any prior generation of PR work. The two-headed client is more expensive in 2026 than it was in 2010. The lesson is the same. The stakes are larger.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications