Originally published: January 3, 2011 · Updated: June 16, 2026

In January 2011, The Holmes Report — now PRovoke Media — published its 2010 Agency Report Card on 5W. Paul Holmes wrote that 5W was among the most aggressive and fastest-growing PR firms in the country, that it had reached the top 25 independents inside seven years of operation, and that I was, at 35, a generation younger than most New York competitors. Holmes described the firm's mechanic as competitiveness, hunger, creativity, and media-relations strength, with what he called a fast-growing digital capability layered on top.

That was the 2011 read. Restating it here because it was the first major industry-press validation of what 5W was actually building — and because the strategic call inside the report card is the one that delivered the next fifteen years.

What Holmes saw in 2010

The report card profiled the practice mix at the time: consumer brands including Barnes & Noble.com, Evian, Cookie Diet, and Proximo Spirits; corporate communications including Tzell Travel and Urban Retail Properties; technology accounts; travel and hospitality including El Al Airlines; food and beverage including Whole Foods Market and Anheuser-Busch; and a fast-growing health-and-beauty division. Gil Lemel, then CEO of BornFree, gave the client testimonial — the BornFree BPA case had been a defining 5W crisis-and-launch piece of work in 2008 and 2009.

The report card also flagged the strategic edge: a read-and-react news operation, traditional top-tier media relations, and the early build-out of digital practice. The interpretation that mattered: the firm was operating like a 2010 firm and a 2015 firm at the same time. The bet was that the future skew was toward digital integration, and 5W was building toward it ahead of the market.

What the fifteen years since proved

The bet was right. The execution is the receipt.

  • Top 25 to Top U.S. PR Agency. 5W is now ranked a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's, was named Agency of the Year at the American Business Awards, was honored as a 2026 Top Place to Work in Communications by Ragan, and made Digiday's WorkLife Employer of the Year list.
  • Consumer practice scaled. The 2010 consumer roster set the template. The current beauty and fashion, food and beverage, and entertainment practices serve hundreds of brands across both B2C and B2B work. The beauty division Holmes called fast-growing in 2010 is now one of the most cited consumer beauty PR practices in the U.S. market.
  • Crisis and reputation moved to the front. What was a sub-specialty in 2010 is now a flagship practice. 5W's crisis and reputation work is a core revenue line and a research engine — the AI Visibility Indexes, the Citation Source Audits, and the proprietary research that anchors the AI Communications category all came out of that operating muscle.
  • Digital became AI Communications. The "fast-growing digital capabilities" Holmes flagged in 2010 evolved through paid social, influencer, SEO, and ultimately into Generative Engine Optimization and AI-visibility research. The integrated stack is now the entire firm.

The category move

The deeper play that Holmes could not yet see in 2010: 5W was already operating against the assumption that the audience would change channels. First from newspapers to social. Then from social to mobile. Then from mobile to search. Then from search to answer engines. The firm built each layer in front of the curve, not behind it.

In 2024, that trajectory crystallized as a category position. 5W repositioned as the AI Communications Firm — the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The same operating principles Holmes described in 2010 — competitiveness, hunger, creativity, willingness to take on outsider clients, refusal to run business-as-usual playbooks — are the principles that produced the category move. The firm did not change its character. The market changed its channel, and the firm changed its surface area to match.

The framework

Three principles drawn from the 2010 Holmes assessment, restated for 2026:

  • Hunger compounds. The agencies that survived two recessions, the streaming wars, the collapse of local news, and the rise of generative AI did it by reading the next surface earlier than the competition.
  • Operating discipline matters more than category. The read-and-react mechanic Holmes described in 2010 is the same mechanic 5W now uses to scan AI engine answers for client mentions every twenty-four hours.
  • Take the outsider clients. The 2010 client roster Holmes flagged as unconventional — evangelicals, rap artists, Israeli politicians, plastic surgeons — was the practice ground for handling reputation work where the rest of the industry would not go. That muscle is now valuable across every regulated, polarized, or contested category in the answer-engine era.

The Holmes Report became PRovoke Media. The 2010 Agency Report Card lives on as the first independent validation of a firm that was already building the AI Communications category before the category had a name. Paul Holmes, then and now, called it accurately.

5W AI Communications is the AI Communications Firm. The work the 2010 report card profiled is the work the 2026 firm still does — at a different scale, on a different surface, against a different competitor set, with the same operating principles.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications