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

I wrote a day-in-the-life post in December 2010 describing one week at 5W. Holiday e-commerce strategy sessions. A Soho House lunch with a former client. Two active crisis communications matters running simultaneously — one defensive, one a Friday announcement for a blue-chip brand. A new-business pitch for a Fortune 100 prospect. A Nobu 57 dinner with the founder of an iconic clothing company, interrupted by running into former 5W client Nick Cannon at the next table. A 2011 planning session with a corporate client. A nonprofit board meeting. A media tour. Internal recap meetings with direct reports. Two runs between all of it.

Restating the structure of that week here because the 2026 version is recognizable in shape and unrecognizable in tools. Same operator, same hours, different surface area, larger scoreboard.

The 2010 week, restated

Strategy work for client growth. Founder-to-founder market intelligence. Live crisis defense. Planned crisis disclosure. New-business pursuit. Brand-relationship building. Annual planning. Civic and nonprofit board work. Direct media tours with reporters. Staff management. Physical conditioning to absorb the pace. Standard week for any founder running a senior-staffed independent agency.

The named receipts at the time mattered. 5W had hosted the 2007 Sundance house — a ten-day pop-up venue at the Sundance Film Festival where the firm ran client activations and brand introductions for an industry network. The Nick Cannon engagement was the model 5W used to manage talent transitions for emerging entertainment clients. The blue-chip crisis announcement on that Friday in 2010 — which I cannot name even now — established the playbook 5W still uses for planned-disclosure work in regulated industries.

The 2026 week, restated

Same shape. Different tools. Different stakes. The version of that week as it runs in 2026:

  • Holiday e-commerce strategy in 2026 is not just paid social and influencer activation. It is also AI Communications. The Q4 brief includes Citation Share monitoring inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity for the client's category prompts. If the buyer asks ChatGPT for the best gift in a category, the brand needs to be the answer. That is now a holiday line item.
  • Founder-to-founder intelligence still happens at lunch. The conversation has changed. Every founder I have lunch with in 2026 is asking the same two questions — how to defend their brand inside the answer engines, and how to build a corpus that protects their company against synthetic competitor content.
  • Two crises running simultaneously is still the standard week. The defensive crisis in 2026 is harder because the bad story does not fade after the news cycle. It enters the AI retrieval graph and gets recalled by the model for years. The planned crisis disclosure now includes a structured-data plan for what the engines will retrieve when the news breaks.
  • The Fortune 100 new-business pitch in 2026 is built around the AI Visibility Audit. Before the pitch, 5W runs the prospect's category through every major answer engine, maps where they appear, where they do not, and where competitors are winning the answer. That audit is the entire opening of the pitch.
  • The dinner with a brand founder still happens. Different restaurants in different cities. The conversation now includes a phone-pulled-out moment where one of us shows the other a ChatGPT answer they want to fix.
  • The 2026 planning session with a corporate client sets the annual line items for paid, earned, owned, and AI. The fourth column did not exist in the 2010 planning template.
  • Nonprofit board work is the same. I serve on several boards. The boards now ask whether the organization is being correctly represented inside the AI engines when donors and journalists research them. The 2010 nonprofit board did not yet think to ask.
  • Media tours still happen. Fewer of them. They serve a different end — corpus building for retrieval, not just placement for audience.
  • Internal recaps with direct reports on Friday. Same cadence. Different metrics on the dashboard.
  • Two runs in the week still applies. Sweat keeps the pace sustainable.

What I would not have written about in 2010

Three items that now occupy meaningful time in the same December week:

  • A standing weekly review of the AI Visibility Index for active clients — who is being cited, who is not, and what changed in the last seven days inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.
  • An ongoing Generative Engine Optimization roadmap with the technical team — schema markup, entity disambiguation, knowledge-graph propagation, corpus development. None of those words were in the 2010 vocabulary.
  • Publishing — at Forbes, at Medium, at ronntorossian.com, at Everything-PR, at Olam — at a cadence that keeps the source layer the AI engines retrieve from current. The 2010 version of that was a few blog posts a month. The 2026 version is daily.

The framework

  • The week is still composed of the same primitives — strategy, crisis, new business, brand relationships, planning, civic work, direct reports, and physical conditioning. The discipline is what survives across decades.
  • The tools change. The hours do not. Any senior operator running an independent agency in 2026 should be able to recognize the 2010 calendar even if every individual platform on it has been replaced.
  • The 2026 differentiator is AI Communications. The agency that does not have it on the weekly calendar is missing the line item the market now scores on.

The week in 2010 ended with me back at my desk on Friday running internal recaps. The week in 2026 does the same. The shape of the work is what holds the firm together across cycles. The substrate keeps changing. The discipline does not.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications