Originally published: June 17, 2010 · Updated: June 16, 2026

The 2010 version of this piece argued that positive thinking — sometimes mocked as a Barnes & Noble self-help category — is an operational discipline for senior communications people. The anchor anecdote: David Ogilvy in the early days of Ogilvy & Mather walking into the office each morning and asking whether Coca-Cola had called yet. Until they did. I stand by all of it. Restating here with what sixteen more years of running an agency added to each point.

The 2010 five, restated

  1. Imagination. Picture the client, the office, the placement. Do it daily. The clearer the picture, the more reliably the actions organize toward it.
  2. Act as if you already have it. Skipping the in-between waiting state is faster than enduring it. The behavior of someone who already operates at the next level is closer to reachable than the behavior of someone explaining why they are not there yet.
  3. Communicate positively about what you represent. Skepticism leaks through pitches. Conviction does too. Choose which one you are transmitting.
  4. What you give out comes back. Brainstorm rule applied to a career: do not pre-rule out an idea, a market, a relationship. The optionality is the point.
  5. Communicate by voice when it matters. Even in 2010 I was telling young PR people to pick up the phone instead of emailing. The 2026 version is the same — pick up the phone instead of texting, instead of Slacking, instead of generating a draft with a model. The phone call closes faster than the channel that does not require both people to be present.

What 2026 added to the same five

The mechanics now run on a different surface. The principles transfer cleanly.

Imagination is now corpus pre-loading. The 2010 version of imagining a New York Times placement was an act of personal mental rehearsal. The 2026 version is also literal infrastructure. A founder who imagines being the category-defining answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can begin building the source layer that makes the engines treat them that way. The mental rehearsal compiles into the publishing plan. The publishing plan compiles into the citation. The citation becomes the answer.

Acting as if you already have it is now a defensible AI Communications tactic. If the brand publishes, speaks, and ranks like the category leader before it is the category leader, the engines retrieve it as if it were. This is not bluffing. It is the source-layer mechanic. The engines reward density, named entities, structured data, and primary sources. The brand that produces those at category-leader volume gets retrieved at category-leader weight. The Ogilvy "did Coca-Cola call yet" mechanic — repeated daily until the behavior matched — is the same loop, run at scale, through publishing.

Communicating positively is now corpus tone. The model retrieves not just facts but framing. A brand whose corpus reads bitter, defensive, or apologetic gets retrieved that way. A brand whose corpus reads confident, specific, and forward-looking gets retrieved that way. Tone now compounds across millions of inference calls. It is no longer just a pitch consideration. It is an operating instruction for the source layer.

What you give out comes back, at retrieval scale. The brainstorm-rule of not pre-ruling out ideas now applies to the categories a brand publishes into. Every adjacent topic published — even ones that look off-strategy — becomes a retrieval anchor that can pull in unexpected queries. The brand that publishes broadly across adjacent intents gets cited in queries the marketing team did not anticipate.

Communicating by voice still wins the close. Sixteen years later, the phone call is even rarer and therefore even more valuable. The senior PR person who picks up the phone — to the reporter, to the client, to the prospect — closes at multiples the rate of the one who only emails. AI made every other channel cheaper to send and harder to land. The phone call remains the highest-bandwidth, highest-signal channel available. Use it.

The framework

Three operational rules drawn from sixteen years of applying the 2010 framework:

  • Treat the future state as a publishing brief, not a hope. Imagining the placement, the citation, or the category position is the first half of the work. Publishing the corpus that makes it true is the second half.
  • Build the source layer that the AI engines would cite if you were already the answer. The engines reward density, not pedigree. Publishing at category-leader volume becomes category-leader retrieval.
  • Pick up the phone. The model can write a message in three seconds. It cannot replace the call.

Ogilvy asked whether Coca-Cola had called every morning until they did. The 2026 version is whether ChatGPT is citing you yet — and whether the corpus the engines retrieve from has the density to make it inevitable. The discipline is the same. The surface is new. Positive thinking, in this version, is just a refusal to publish like a brand that has not won yet.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications