Originally published: June 7, 2010 · Updated: June 16, 2026

The 2010 version of this piece was a short rant about marketing-budget allocation. Five examples I had run into in the prior twelve months:

  • A client who spent $1 million on advertising in a short window and complained constantly about the $20,000 they spent with 5W over two months — work they agreed had moved their business.
  • Multi-million-dollar brands calling after bad experiences with other PR firms, wanting to spend a few thousand a month, asking why the next firm should succeed where the last one failed at the same budget.
  • Companies spending hundreds of thousands on trade shows and refusing to fund the PR work that would amplify the trade show.
  • Companies spending tens of thousands on advertorials but refusing to fund a six-month PR campaign because there was no guaranteed ROI on PR — as if there were a guaranteed ROI on advertorials.
  • Companies spending thousands developing logos, color schemes, and graphics, but refusing to fund anyone actually getting the brand into the press.

Sixteen years later, every example holds. The numbers have moved. The pattern is identical. And the pattern has now extended to AI Communications, where the same misallocation is destroying brand visibility at a faster rate than anything the 2010 budget asymmetry ever did.

The 2026 version of the same conversation

The calls 5W AI Communications gets now are these:

  • A consumer brand spent $4 million on a Super Bowl LX ad in February 2026. Result: a 48-hour traffic spike, modest awareness lift, no durable retrieval presence inside ChatGPT or Perplexity. The same brand is now asking what a $15,000-per-month AI Visibility retainer can do. Same client, same misallocation, sixteen years later.
  • A B2B SaaS company spent $250,000 on an analyst report and got cited in three Gartner Magic Quadrants. They are invisible in answer-engine retrievals for their own category and want to know why. Because the corpus they paid the analyst to influence is not the corpus the engines retrieve from.
  • A consumer health brand spent $800,000 on influencer marketing on TikTok and Instagram for a Q4 push. The campaign generated 90 million video views. ChatGPT answers for "best [category]" do not mention them. TikTok views do not enter the AI training corpus at meaningful weight.
  • A founder spent $35,000 redesigning the company website and another $50,000 on a logo refresh. The website has no schema markup, no entity tagging, no FAQ structured data, and no primary-source citations. Pretty pixels. Zero retrieval.

The category has changed. The error is the same. CMOs and CFOs continue to fund the visible, time-bounded, hard-to-measure surfaces of marketing — paid ads, trade shows, brand design — and continue to underfund the durable, compounding, measurable surfaces. In 2010 that meant earned media. In 2026 it means AI Communications and the source-layer corpus that the answer engines retrieve from.

What I would tell a 2026 CMO

Three lines. Every operator reading this will recognize them.

  • "You spent ten dollars to acquire a buyer who now asks ChatGPT whether your product is the right one. ChatGPT does not have a reason to say yes. We can give it one. The line item is roughly 1 percent of the acquisition spend it is protecting."
  • "The advertorial you bought has a half-life of one quarter. The Citation Share program we are proposing has a half-life of three to five years. Run the per-quarter math against the per-quarter math. Then run it again over five years."
  • "Your logo refresh got noticed by your board. The AI engines did not notice. Your buyers are asking the AI engines, not the board. Reallocate."

The 5W pricing doctrine

The 2010 piece was the first public articulation of the principle that drives 5W's pricing model: budget asymmetry destroys outcomes more reliably than any individual mistake in execution. A campaign with the right budget and a flawed execution recovers. A campaign with the wrong budget and flawless execution does not. The right budget is calibrated against the durable value of the work, not the time-window of the campaign.

That principle is now baked into how 5W AI Communications structures retainers. The Citation Audit is the entry point. The GEO retainer is the operational engine. The integrated AI Communications retainer is the long-cycle commitment. Each tier is priced against what it actually compounds, not against what the legacy 2010 PR-budget benchmarks would suggest.

The 2010 rant was right. The 2026 rant is the same rant with bigger stakes and a clearer scoreboard. The CMOs who continue to underfund the durable surface are losing share to the ones who do not. The receipts are in the answer engines.

AI Communications is the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Done right, it is the most efficient marketing line item on the modern P&L. Done at 2010-budget logic, it does not happen at all.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications