1. No place at the table

There’s a common saying that PR deserves a seat at the decision-making table. Here, it clearly didn’t have one, because the company stuck its head in the sand until the very last minute. The exact same applies to risk management as a whole. Communications professionals, just like legal counsel, need to know every single risk threatening the business.

Every communication coming out of a company carries a risk management component. Every statement leaves a digital footprint, and any press release can be weaponized against you. Not to mention the company’s clumsy attempts to influence Bureau of Industry and Security investigating Megaspeed.

This is a case study for corporate leadership: every move must be backed by a clear stance from the head of comms. It doesn’t matter whether the company actually acts or stays on the sidelines—that position must exist. Today, comms gets brought in solely to put out four-alarm fires.

Communications must be integrated at every stage of any brewing conflict, and what happened at NVIDIA is a blatant conflict of interest.

2. Splitting News into “Good” and “Bad”

Some companies are hyperactive when cheering good news, but go dead silent the second things turn ugly. They rely on the tired assumption that everyone will forget in a week or a month. But people won’t forget this one. Whether Huang survives this as CEO is an open question. I’d bet they are quietly scouting his successor right now.

Give NVIDIA’s CEO credit: he’s a goldmine for reporters looking for headlines. But with the China situation, the silence dragged on far too long, and the PR team’s early statements don’t withstand basic scrutiny. “Routine meetings with the CEO” suddenly morphed into a full-blown admission of an affair.

This exposes a company with zero capability to manage a crisis and no framework to handle bad news, let alone conduct predictive risk analysis. If you put out a statement, you can’t afford to get caught lying later.

The press office must manage bad news with the exact same discipline as the good.

3. Being Hopelessly Late

Short-seller Culper dropped its report on NVIDIA’s ties to Megaspeed back in the spring. Yet only today did the press office claim that shipments stopped back in the summer of last year. Which only raises more damning questions: why on earth wasn’t that disclosed the moment the report came out?

An Nvidia spokesman said the company prohibited all sales and shipments to Megaspeed in June 2025, and that ban is still in place. Nvidia got permission from the Commerce Department unit overseeing export controls for parts and replacement components sent to the company since then, he said - WSJ

To see just how hopelessly late the company was, look no further than Culper’s website. Their investigation flew under the radar back in May, but today it reads like pure prophecy and is being quoted everywhere. And I suspect it's going to cause plenty more headaches down the road. Here are a few excerpts:

Why didn’t the company respond to these allegations? The answer is simple. Once companies reach a certain scale, they convince themselves they are above such trivial distractions. But these details are ticking time bombs, and ignoring them is plain amateurism. Then again, I am not surprised. When an entire corporate machine exists solely to churn out glowing PR, a reckoning is inevitable.

4. Indecision

After the company spent months pretending nothing was happening, Jensen put out an apologetic memo claiming he took full responsibility. But what does that responsibility actually mean? If you make a public statement confessing to an extramarital affair, that’s your personal business. That is between you and your family, and it concerns no one else. But it begs a very simple question: what are you doing next?

Are you stepping aside and scouting a successor? How does this change the company’s policies - the very ones business media are now tearing into every single day? Will the board of directors be overhauled? How will oversight be handled moving forward, and where does this leave your dealings with China?

A corporate statement must have a resolution. It needs a clear conclusion. Instead, this memo reads like: “I admit to the affair, now let’s wait and see how it plays out.” But that’s not how these things work - from here, scandals only snowball.

5. Dysfunctional Corporate Governance and the Echo Chamber

The Wall Street Journal recently detailed the internal mechanics of Nvidia’s leadership: Huang operates with over 60 direct reports, no designated second-in-command, and an unusually passive board where key independent directors have held their seats for over a quarter of a century. The company has no independent chairman, allowing Huang and a friendly lead director to control meeting agendas and dictate what information the board actually sees.

This is corporate governance built entirely on loyalists and rubber stamps. When an organization runs under unchecked autocratic rule, surround-sound “yes men” make catastrophic missteps inevitable. If no one in the room has the authority - or the spine- to challenge the CEO, fundamental risk management ceases to exist.

As of last spring, three of Nvidia’s 10 independent directors had held their seats for 25 years or more; two others had served more than a decade. Across the biggest U.S. companies, average board tenure is under eight years, with just 10% serving for more than a decade, a recent analysis by executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles found - WSJ

What we are witnessing with the China scandal is not an isolated communications breakdown; it is the direct byproduct of rotten governance. We have seen this movie many times before across corporate America: “independent” directors who are independent in name only, asleep at the wheel while a founder-king mistakes absolute power for infallibility.

The takeaway here is straightforward. A public company always needs a seasoned crisis communications lead in the room—someone read into every single critical move the business makes.

Because anything you say, and everything you hide, will be used against you.

The obligatory fine print: This analysis is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Do your own due diligence before signing anything.

Why does the press release sit at the very top of the corporate food chain? Because it’s a tangible, completed task. Once your department drafts a release and gets it signed off, you can already log it under your KPIs.

Whether it actually gets picked up no longer matters. When you show up to the executive meeting and they ask, “What have you done this quarter?”, you simply say: “We drafted the press release and distributed it.” Just like that, the internal KPI is checked off- and the agency’s nightmare begins.

It’s an industry-wide pain point. Here is how to fix it:

1. Manage Expectations Early

When that many people have a hand in drafting a single piece of paper, expectations go through the roof. Early-stage founders start daydreaming about Bloomberg or the WSJ - to say nothing of large corporates.

The second the release is finally cleared after days of redlining, the heat turns squarely on the agency: Why isn’t it out? Where are the pickups? Who dropped the ball? Why is the reporter ghosting us?

In the scramble to lock down a retainer, agencies promise front-page ink while clients burn money on useless media training. In the end, the release drops and nobody cares. PR people need to stop being timid and stop lying about a minor banking feature capturing the attention of Tier-1 financial desks.

Be blunt from day one: “You aren’t JPMorgan. Nobody cares. Nobody is reading this release; the best you can hope for is niche trade press, and even then, probably only if you buy a sponsored package.”

Tell the truth early, because sugarcoating and unhinged promises always blow up when the client starts asking hard questions. The exact same rule applies in-house. Instead of honesty, the industry defaults to self-deception.

2. Stop Being a Yes-Man and Tell the Client the Truth

I understand colleagues who tell prospective clients, “Of course we have the contacts, and your news will land in a top-tier outlet.” They do it to kick off the relationship on a positive note. But what’s the point if the story has no legs? The lie eventually unravels, and instead of providing strategic advisory, the PR professional gets reduced to a simple yes-man.

That gives the client all the leverage to manipulate the dynamic, demanding to know where all those promised placements went and why nothing is getting published. It quickly becomes a crushing psychological burden for the practitioner. I’ve been there myself; I used to make those promises, and I stopped. What matters first is building a relationship of trust with the client, not indulging in the corporate theater of chasing the “perfect press release.”

LinkedIn is drowning in tens of thousands of performative posts about “how to build rapport with a reporter” just to land a piece that had zero news value to begin with. People unironically brag that this takes them months. What’s there to brag about, when you could have simply told the client upfront that the pitch has no legs?

Now there’s an entire micro-genre on “how to dial a reporter”. What are you even doing in PR if picking up the phone and punching in ten digits feels like an existential hurdle? If you have no exclusive, if your draft is pure internal corporate trivia, and if you read it yourself and realize no one gives a damn - why hit send?

3. The Forgotten Playbook: Value and Access

Meanwhile, the actual solution is embarrassingly simple: cultivate real relationships with journalists instead of obsessing over open rates and sending emails at 9:00 AM sharp.

Newspaper columns aren’t built purely on world-shaking exclusives; they rely on daily filler, context, and secondary quotes. Your announcement doesn’t need a standalone headline - getting named or quoted in a broader sector story is often cleaner, easier, and carries far more credibility.

Nobody is going to run outright garbage, and you shouldn’t pitch it. But if you regularly feed a reporter solid, exclusive industry color, they’ll actually take your call when you have a borderline story down the road. You don’t even need your client’s news for this: offer them unvarnished sector color, an off-the-record take on an M&A deal, or introduce an expert who can explain why a competitor’s margins just collapsed.

The takeaway is straightforward: stop wasting days agonizing over the release - no offense to the legal team. AI can draft the release in thirty seconds. Spend that time building actual access and commercial relationships instead.

That takes actual skill, but more on that next time.

If you’re done with corporate theater and want the actual playbook on how to work with financial desks, subscribe below. Next week, we’re breaking down what reporters actually want to hear when you pick up the phone.

The obligatory fine print: This analysis is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Do your own due diligence before signing anything.

Did he do anything about it? Absolutely not.

“Everyone will forget in two weeks anyway,” he shrugged.

Of course he didn’t care. It wasn’t his company. He had a massive paycheck, a golden parachute, and he knew that by the time this shit hit the fan, he’d already be sitting in another comfortable executive chair. If the shareholders didn’t give a damn, why should he?

If you are a corporate mercenary, fine. Play that game. But if you’re a founder running an early-stage startup, thinking like this is suicide.

Narrative debt is no different from financial debt. It leaves a permanent digital footprint and resurfaces at the absolute worst possible moment.

Here are the two ways founders dig this grave with their own hands:

The Pre-Seed Trap: Feature Fiction

Sachin Dev Duggal, founder of Engineer.ai, raised around $30 million, including backing from SoftBank, by claiming across media and pitch decks that their platform used cutting-edge AI to build mobile apps without developers.

It later surfaced that there was no autonomous intelligence under the hood; the heavy lifting was done manually by hundreds of outsourced programmers in India, and the actual AI stack hadn’t even entered development. Once The Wall Street Journal broke the story, a massive scandal erupted, blowing up their core narrative.

The “any press is good press” mindset belongs strictly to cheap show business or corporate mercenaries who couldn’t care less about long-term enterprise value because their bonuses hinge on short-term vanity metrics.

But when an early-stage founder desperately hypes up a half-baked product just to break through media indifference ahead of a Pre-Seed round, they are planting a landmine under their own business.

The real difference between inflating a bubble and running a powerful communication strategy comes down to three things:

1. Stop selling raw, buggy code as a “revolution.”

   Trade reporters aren’t ghosting you because your product is dull. They ghost you because your pitch reads like the 200 other spam releases landing in their inbox daily: “We built an innovative AI dashboard for logistics.” Nobody gives a damn about the feature set of a fragile MVP.

2. Pitch the market insight and the core problem, not the features.

   If the product isn’t mature yet, don’t sell technological perfection. Sell your domain expertise around a specific, painful industry bottleneck. Pitch something like: “Why logistics operators lose 18% of their margins on returns: hard data and analysis from a former industry engineer.” There is zero bullshit about an “autonomous platform” here — just the founder’s authority and actionable industry signal, which niche and trade publications actually want to publish.

3. Own your actual stage without cheap posturing.

   Sensible Pre-Seed and early Seed investors aren’t expecting Google-scale infrastructure. They want honest hypotheses. Grounded positioning sounds like: “We are validating hypothesis X across an initial cohort of 50 customers, and here are the early data anomalies.” That commands respect. Claiming you’ve “automated an entire industry” when you’re running on two scripts and a spreadsheet is precisely where toxic Narrative Debt begins.

The Live-Fire Phase: Facing the Heat on X

The second phase hits when your startup goes live and something inevitably breaks. The first public complaints roll in, and scathing teardown threads from early adopters start popping up on X.

“Why not just ignore it? Who’s gonna remember in a week anyway?” that same CEO friend once told me. Sure, why the hell not. Especially if by the time the bill arrives, you’re already warming a chair at another corporate job.

The CEOs of Snowflake and Databricks can afford to spar publicly on X over whose AI is bigger - they have billions in cash reserves to cushion the blow. For an early-stage founder staring down an upcoming funding round, leaving public criticism unanswered is suicide.

That is pure Narrative Debt: a reputational loan with predatory interest. In a zero-interest bull market, investors overlook everything; in a bear market, you will pay dearly for every single ignored thread.

When the market dries up and liquidity drops, competition for capital turns vicious. Venture analysts don’t buy your pitch deck. They go straight to the search bar on X and Reddit to see what real engineers are saying about your stack.

And if they dig up an unresolved scandal that the founder casually chose to “forget,” the conversation about the round ends before it even begins.

You don’t fight back with generic canned responses from outsourced social media managers; you address it at the architectural level, through the founder’s own voice. Put out the fire with hard facts in the first few hours - or expect an audit bill on your due diligence that you simply can’t pay.

The Cost of Ignoring the Balance

Every dollar of Narrative Debt you accumulate will eventually be called in. And unlike a bank, the market doesn’t offer restructuring plans.

As a founder, your job is to build the product, close customers, and keep the company alive. You shouldn’t be spending your nights firefighting Reddit threads or agonizing over how to pitch an MVP without sounding like a fraud. Everyone needs to do what they actually know how to do.

Paying down this debt requires people with battle-tested experience - professionals who understand how narrative risk translates directly into valuation risk.

That doesn’t mean writing a $20,000 monthly retainer check to a bloated legacy agency with forty account managers who forward your emails to junior interns. In fact, that usually just accelerates the burn rate without moving the needle.

You need a lean, agile setup: small, battle-hardened, and strictly aligned with business outcomes. People who know how to protect your downside before due diligence starts, so you can focus on building what you actually promised to deliver.

The obligatory fine print: This analysis is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Do your own due diligence before signing anything.

Despite the differences in these cases, they share one glaring flaw: a total lack of a strong crisis management strategy.

The Novo Nordisk Soap Opera: A Masterclass in Strategic Inconsistency

How does a company that created a cultural phenomenon like Ozempic see its market cap plummet fourfold from its peak in June 2024? While most point to market conditions, evolving regulations, and new drug trials, a closer look reveals a man-made PR crisis. The issue isn’t just the product; it’s the erratic strategy that has turned professional distribution into a daytime soap opera

The Hims & Hers Saga: A Timeline of Confusion

The relationship between Novo Nordisk and Hims & Hers (HIMS) is the perfect example of how not to manage strategic alliances.

• April 2025: A high-profile partnership is announced.

• June 2025: Just two months later, Novo abruptly terminates the deal. Reuters reports a “war of words,” with HIMS accusing Novo of bullying and undue pressure.

• February 2026: HIMS strikes back, launching a $49 compounded alternative to Wegovy. Novo responds with a massive patent infringement lawsuit.

• March 9, 2026: In a stunning reversal, they “make up” again to sell obesity drugs together.

Mixed Signals and Market Anxiety. What does this tell the stakeholders? It screams that Novo Nordisk has lost control over its distribution channels. When a global leader flips from “strategic partner” to “legal executioner” and back to “partner” in less than a year, it sends a wave of uncertainty through the market. Consistency is the bedrock of big pharma. If you decide to go to war to protect your intellectual property, you go all the way. If you decide to embrace the telehealth revolution, you commit. Doing both simultaneously makes the company look reactive rather than proactive.

The “Eli Lilly” Contrast. Look at their closest rival, Eli Lilly. They faced the exact same challenges with compounders and patent trolls, yet they managed to avoid the public scandals and the messy “breakup-to-makeup” headlines. The result? Their stock price reflected market confidence, while Novo’s narrative crumbled. While drug efficacy is the engine, reputation is the steering wheel and right now, Novo is driving in circles.

The PR Vacuum. Perhaps the most telling detail is the lack of crisis management. In major Reuters reports where HIMS CEO was openly accusing Novo of pressure, Novo’s side was conspicuously absent “No comment.”

If you’re a multi-billion dollar entity picking a fight, you don’t leave the floor to your opponent. A “no comment” in the middle of a public feud isn’t “staying above the fray” - it’s a total absence of a crisis strategy.

In Big Pharma, you can’t have it both ways. You either play the “Fortress” and defend your IP with consistent, unwavering legal force from day one, or you lean into the new ecosystem and build stable, long-term alliances. Trying to do both is exactly how you lose a massive chunk of your valuation. This strategic flip-flopping isn’t just a PR hiccup; it’s a red flag that leadership lacks a unified vision. If you’re going to pick a fight, finish it. If you’re going to partner up, stand by it. Anything in between is just expensive noise.

But Novo Nordisk isn’t the only giant fumbling its narrative. If you want to see what happens when a company ignores systemic “red flags” until they explode, look at Super Micro Computer (SMCI).

Just last week the US Department of Justice unsealed a massive indictment against SMCI’s co-founder, Wally Liaw, and other top executives. The charge? A sophisticated $2.5 billion scheme to smuggle restricted NVIDIA AI chips (including the high-end Blackwell and Hopper series) to China using “dummy” servers and hair dryers to swap serial numbers. The stock fell 33% after this news.

The Pattern of Toxicity For seasoned investors, the SMCI collapse wasn’t a “black swan” event, it was a predictable train wreck. It’s worth looking at the chronology, which has been surprisingly packed with events. As one of the standout phenomena of the AI trade, fueled by its deep partnership with NVIDIA, the stock consistently bounced off local lows, often propped up by fresh “Buy” ratings from analysts who ignored the rot underneath.

The Hindenburg Signal: In August 2024, Hindenburg Research exposed “accounting manipulation” and sanctions evasion

The Smoking Gun: Shortly after, also in August, 2024, SMCI did the unthinkable, they delayed their annual 10-K report. In the world of finance, a delayed annual report is the ultimate warning sign.

September 2024: The DOJ Enters the Room Following the Hindenburg report, the situation moved from “short-seller allegations” to a federal reality. On September 26, 2024, reports surfaced that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) had officially opened a probe into Super Micro. The investigation was in its initial phases, but the stock still plummeted 12% in a single afternoon. Investors realized this wasn’t just a PR headache, it was a formal inquiry by federal prosecutors.

October 2024: The Auditor’s Exit Strategy If the DOJ probe was a warning shot, October was the knockout blow. Ernst & Young , the company’s auditor, didn’t just resign, they issued a statement that should have sent every investor running for the exits. EY stated they were resigning due to information that led them to “no longer be able to rely on management’s and the Audit Committee’s representations” and were “unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management.”

The “Short Memory” Trap

The market has a notoriously short memory. Investors are quick to forget negative signals, especially when a stock that hit $20 looks like it could bounce back to $50, showing enviable strength. And why wouldn’t it? Very few companies have the privilege of selling NVIDIA servers, and Jensen Huang hasn’t officially turned his back on his partner. To my knowledge, Huang himself has remained silent on these allegations, letting the hardware do the talking.

But did SMCI actually try to flip the narrative? Not really. Beyond a few sparse, robotic official statements, there was no real crisis management. It seems the leadership decided that analyst upgrades and “Buy” ratings would do the heavy lifting for them.

This is a fatal mistake.

Reputation is a Leading Indicator

You cannot look at the numbers in a vacuum; you must look at the company’s reputation. When you see a field littered with red flags, you don’t keep running, you stop. The stock market is risky enough as it is. Taking on reputational risk on top of market volatility is simply unnecessary. The issue isn’t just the mountain of negativity, it’s the fact that the company made zero effort to fix it. Every company will eventually face a crisis; the only question is how they navigate it.

My advice is always the same: Have a crisis consultant in your corner before the storm hits. Because when the indictment is unsealed or the auditor resigns, it’s already too late to start looking for a parachute.

I promised to break down real-world cases, and I’m doing just that. Subscribe to my newsletter, and we’ll continue discussing not just how these disasters happen, but how to fix them before they burn everything down.

This analysis is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or legal advice.

The most fundamental question you need to ask yourself is this: How much of your own time are you actually willing to sink into this to get results? If you don’t have that clarity - if you don’t realize that this is going to demand your personal time, honestly, don’t even bother starting. Sometimes this realization only hits during interviews with agencies or consultants. The founder suddenly realizes, in total shock, that they actually have to do the work. They lose interest immediately. But this is the cornerstone of the entire story.

Let’s be real: in most cases, you haven’t discovered a new cure for cancer, you didn’t invent a revolutionary smartphone, and you didn’t come up with some groundbreaking cooling system for data centers. Your product doesn’t just “explain itself” to the world. Lately, I’ve seen way too many stories where an agency bills tens of thousands of dollars over six months and doesn’t land a single placement. It’s pathetic. You can’t work like that - spending months writing a “strategy” that’s destined for the trash can.

But a huge chunk of the blame for that kind of failure lies with the founders. I once had a client, a medical company, that could have generated high-quality news hooks almost every single month. But they produced none. Why? Because the founders simply weren’t ready to put in the effort.

So, here’s my advice: Don’t rush to hire. First, ask yourself how much you’re willing to participate in the process. Even the most expensive agency won’t do the work for you. Even the highest-paid consultant doesn’t know the product better than you do.

The New Role: Chief Context Officer

This is where the founder’s first new role comes in: Chief Context Officer. An agency cannot manufacture insights, hard data, or those specific “battle stories” from the field that actually sell a story to a journalist. If you don’t respond to a request on time, you’ve effectively burned a month’s budget.

The agency must be deeply integrated into the life of the startup or company. There is no such thing as “useless detail” - every single piece of information has the potential to sell.

When I worked with a logistics startup, we built a “news factory” where we could pitch journalists multiple times using the same product. First, you “sell” the launch. A few months later, you tell the story of how much money customers actually saved using the new features.

That’s the ideal case. In reality, I’ve seen group chats with 10 people sitting in dead silence. These are people who walk down the hall checking their phones every minute, yet they ignore a question from a journalist who has a line of your competitors waiting at their door. This is how an agency shifts from being a “provider of strategy and meaning” to just a firefighter.

It shouldn’t be this way. This lack of engagement destroys the trust that the entire partnership is built on. As a founder, you have to accept a simple truth: you and your team must spend time on PR. It is a core business function, not an outsourced chore.

Personal Brand as an Icebreaker

Journalists write about people, not logos. If you aren’t ready to provide sharp, sometimes controversial quotes under your own name, your PR will turn into white noise that no one notices.

A founder is an Icebreaker. In the modern media landscape, “corporate news” is dead. No one cares about your new office opening or your “synergistic partnership” with another faceless entity.

Media outlets are looking for voices - people who are willing to take a stand, challenge the status quo, or provide a unique, human perspective on complex industry issues.

If you hide behind a corporate brand, you’re asking your agency to do the impossible: to sell a shadow. The moment you step forward and say, “The industry is moving in the wrong direction, and here is why,” you give the agency a weapon. Suddenly, they aren’t just pitching a product; they are pitching a visionary.

Being a “human icebreaker” means:

• Owning your opinion: You cannot be “neutral” and expect to be famous. If your quotes are so safe that even your legal team finds them boring, you have failed.

• Accessibility: You must be the one to pick up the phone when a top-tier journalist needs a 5-minute reactive comment. If you delegate this to a mid-level manager, the story dies instantly.

• Vulnerability and Truth: Real reputation is built on transparency. If you only talk when things are perfect, you aren’t a leader - you’re a PR brochure. Journalists value founders who can talk about market crashes, pivots, and the hard lessons learned in the trenches.

Stop Asking for “Forbes”: Setting the Right Objectives

Forget the phrase “I want to be in Forbes.” It’s the ultimate sign of a founder who doesn’t understand their own business goals. PR isn’t a vanity project; it’s a tool to solve specific business problems.

You must formulate your PR objectives in terms of business outcomes, not publication counts:

• Building Trust for Enterprise Sales: You need deep, technical op-eds in trade publications that potential CTO clients actually read.

• Visibility for Investors: A high-frequency strategy where you comment on every market trend to show momentum.

• Hiring Top Talent: Opening up your “kitchen” and letting the agency talk to your lead devs.

The Bottleneck: Why Your Strategy Might Still Fail

This looks like a perfect plan, right? You’ve accepted the “tax,” you’re acting as the Chief Context Officer, and you’re playing the Icebreaker. But even in this flawless setup, there is one fatal bottleneck.

That bottleneck is you.

When the entire reputation of a company rests on one person’s shoulders, it’s not an asset - it’s a liability. If the company cannot generate meaning without your direct involvement, its value drops. You haven’t built a business; you’ve built a prison.

The Demotivation of the “One-Man Show”

There is another hidden cost to being the sole voice of the company: the slow death of internal motivation.

When a founder monopolizes the spotlight, the rest of the team starts to see PR as “the boss’s hobby.” They stop seeing the value in helping the agency.

Why should a busy CTO spend two hours explaining a complex architecture to a PR manager if the final article will only feature the founder’s face and a generic quote?

When only the founder is involved:

• Interest drops: Your top talent feels invisible. They stop feeding the “news factory” with insights because they don’t see themselves in the narrative.

• Zero incentive: There’s no drive for experts to stay sharp or develop their own public profiles, which ultimately weakens the company’s total intellectual authority.

Multi-Dimensional Media Exposure: The Power of the Bench

Imagine instead a culture where “being in the media” is seen as a badge of honor, a professional reward for those who are genuinely interested in it.

When you empower your team to become independent speakers, everything changes:

1. Recognition as a Perk: For a high-level engineer or an operations lead, being featured as an expert in a Tier-1 trade publication is a massive professional validation. It’s a way of saying, “We don’t just value your code; we value your mind.”

2. Expanding the Journalist Pool: A single founder usually appeals to one type of journalist - business or general tech. But when your CTO talks about infrastructure and your COO talks about logistics efficiency, you suddenly unlock multiple pools of journalists. You are no longer fighting for one spot in the morning news; you are present in the tech sections, the operational journals, and the niche industry newsletters simultaneously.

3. The Redundancy Shield: This is about “key man risk.” Investors and acquirers look for it. To build a sustainable brand, you need a “Council of Experts.” If you go on vacation or get tied up in a deal, the company fall silent.

True PR maturity is when your CTO is the go-to person for tech trends, your COO is the authority on scaling, and you are free to be the visionary or to simply be silent when needed.

Let me know what you think below!

Disclaimer: The information provided in this publication is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute professional PR, legal, or business advice. While we strive for accuracy, results may vary. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission.

This is the first edition of The Reputation Playbook. In this newsletter I’ll be writing about real cases from crisis comms, reputation management and, of course, traditional PR. I know exactly what you won’t find here. There will be no “33 tips” on how to get a journalist on the phone, no guides on writing press releases that get picked up without even being opened, and no advice on how to push CEOs to post on LinkedIn non-stop.

My goal is simple: to keep things practical – to look at real situations, examine the decisions companies make and try to understand what worked and what didn’t. Why do I talk so much about crisis comms? It’s where the profession shows what it’s really about. In a crisis you have to rely on judgment, creativity and the ability to make unconventional decisions under pressure.

PR pros often complain that it’s difficult to measure their work. In crisis comms that problem rarely exists – the outcome is usually very clear. Over the course of my career I’ve heard two completely opposite things. Some people told me I was too eager to jump into the fight. Later, those same people told me I was too cautious. The reason is simple: I’ve always tried to put the client’s interests first.

So today we’re going to talk about one of those situations – when the smartest move in PR is simply to stay silent. Let’s get started!

When silence is the best strategy

Saying nothing does not mean doing nothing. Behind that invisible touch there is usually a lot of internal work: discussions, pressure from management, and constant evaluation of different scenarios.

I once worked with a large retailer whose orders started to shift just before the holidays because of weather-related logistics problems. The first complaints were already appearing on social media, and I was facing a real dilemma: should we apologize and announce delays immediately, or should we take the risk and bet on the logistics team managing to catch up and keep the situation contained?

An early apology could have triggered a much bigger wave of frustration. Customers might have started cancelling orders, and competitors could easily have used the situation against the company. The costs would not only have been financial, but reputational as well. In the end, I decided that the best move was to say nothing and managed to convince the management team to go along with that decision.

The weather was on my side, the logistics team managed to catch up, and only a handful of orders arrived late. We never had to go public with a statement, and in the end we avoided a storm far bigger than the one outside.

Choosing to stay silent is not a passive decision. In many cases it requires more responsibility than speaking. Someone has to take ownership of that choice and convince the management team that waiting is the better strategy. Silence, when it is deliberate, can be a form of communication in itself.

However, silence is not always the right strategy.

Take the case of Peloton Interactive , which declined to comment on a Bloomberg story suggesting that even recruiters were uncertain about the company’s future. It’s hard to understand how a company can choose not to appear in a story like that, and it raises a fair question about what the communications team is there for.

Meanwhile, job candidates who have interviewed with the company over the past year say that the recruiters often didn’t seem confident in Peloton’s future. Some applicants worried that they would be joining the business for only a short period of time before they, too, would be laid off. Aside from the rank and file, Peloton has been losing top executives. Its chief financial officer, Liz Coddington, is leaving this month, while its marketing chief departed last year as part of a larger shake-up. Bloomberg

At the time the article was published, the stock was down nearly 40% year-to-date, and the story itself questioned confidence in the company’s future. In situations like that, the absence of a response says a lot about how decisions are made inside the company and, more broadly, about how it treats its own reputation. I covered the Peloton situation in more detail here

Smear Campaigns in the Algorithm Era

A PR agency can damage its own reputation as well. The Agency’s Group (TAG) has been accused of creating websites aimed at discrediting producer Amanda Ghost. She is quite a colorful figure: a former director at Epic Records and a co-writer of James Blunt’s song “You’re Beautiful.” She is now involved in a legal dispute with actress Rebel Wilson over a film.

I can’t say I had heard much about any of them before, except for Epic Records, but I would recommend reading the coverage in The Hollywood Reporter to understand how smear campaigns can work. Fake websites filled with allegations are not created so that major media outlets will quote them. They are created to influence search results.

If you are a public figure with a strong media presence and plenty of reputable coverage, it is very difficult for such sites to dominate search results. But if you are someone who usually works behind the scenes and very little has been written about you before a legal dispute, people who start searching your name may find something quite different.

For companies that run these kinds of campaigns, knowing journalists is not even necessary. It is enough to understand how SEO works. But there is an interesting twist here: when high-level officials constantly claim that the media spreads fake news, it raises an obvious question - who exactly are people supposed to trust?

This is where the rhetoric of politicians sometimes plays right into their hands. When we constantly hear claims that the media spreads “fake news,” the line between real reporting and fabricated content becomes blurred, and reach begins to matter more than credibility. Even completely absurd claims can start to gain traction.

The recording bolsters the appearance that Nathan’s The Agency Group — a top PR shop in the entertainment industry whose clients have included Drake and Johnny Depp, and has frequently worked with Freedman — deployed websites featuring character-assassinating claims about Ghost. The conversation was originally recorded in order to relay instructions from Wallace to former TAG vice president Katie Case, who was not on the call. THR

What is particularly striking in this case is that the voice instructions discussing the plan to discredit the producer were recorded and later entered into the court record. The next stage will likely be the discussion moving into social media. This case also highlights a broader shift in how smear campaigns work. It is often enough to influence an algorithm and shape what appears in search results.

There is also a certain irony here. Agencies that are hired to protect reputations can sometimes end up creating a reputational crisis of their own.

For today, that’s all. I’m glad I managed to finish my very first newsletter, and I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts - if anyone actually makes it to the end. Crisis communications is a fascinating field, and I’m glad that a small community around these topics is already starting to take shape.

See you next week,

Mark

Note: This analysis is based on publicly available information and represents my personal professional opinion. It is not financial or investment advice.