MELISSA MARASCO

For most of my career, a product launch was a date on the calendar. We built toward it for months. We locked the embargo, briefed the reporters, polished the press release and staged the keynote. Then launch day came, the coverage landed, and we moved on to the next one. That model is fading fast. The companies setting the pace today, especially in AI, ship constantly. Model releases, new features, pricing changes, safety updates and deprecations arrive weekly, sometimes dail

Every PR conversation I'm in right now sounds the same. AI answer engines. Creators. Going direct. Community. The vocabulary has caught up with the moment. The practice mostly hasn't. The shift is real. This year's Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that social and video platforms are now the most used news sources worldwide, ahead of TV and publishers' own sites. AI chatbots are a growing, if still small, part of how people find news. And trust in news is at its low

A few years ago, a purchase decision that looked completely irrational on paper started making perfect sense once you stopped asking "is this the best product?" and started asking "who else has this?" A slightly pricier sneaker. A phone case everyone in a friend group has despite better options existing. A creator's merch line that sells out not because it's well-made, but because owning it says something. Classic economics assumes people optimize for utility — best price, be

Every communications team eventually runs into the same wall: you can write the most accurate, well-sourced statement in the world, and a meaningful share of your audience will still assume you're spinning them. That's not a failure of writing. It's a predictable feature of how people process institutional messaging in the first place. Source credibility is judged before content is. Psychologists have long studied what's called the credibility heuristic - the tendency for peo

A reflection for Mother's Day and Father's Day — and every ordinary day in between There's a question I've been sitting with lately, one that hits differently when you're both someone's child and someone else's parent: What did the work your parents did teach you about the world before you ever understood it was a lesson? Not the explicit lectures. Not the "here's what I want you to learn from this" moments. I mean the quieter curriculum — the worldview baked into their insti

It's graduation season. Which means two things are happening simultaneously: a fresh wave of communications graduates is walking across a stage wondering if they chose the right field, and a generation of mid-to-senior professionals is quietly asking themselves a version of the same question. I see you both. And I want to be direct with you. The instinct to chase the tools is the wrong instinct. Every new grad I talk to right now wants to know which AI platforms to master. Ev

There's a concept in psychology called the illusory truth effect — the phenomenon where repeated exposure to a statement makes it feel true, regardless of its accuracy. Advertisers have exploited it for decades. Now, without meaning to, so have large language models. Here's what every modern communicator needs to understand: AI doesn't just find information about you or your brand. It synthesizes it. And synthesis is where reputation lives or dies. The Search Paradigm Has

Have you ever scrolled past a product with perfect 5-star reviews and kept looking until you found the 4.3-star option with 2,000+ reviews? Your brain just did something fascinating: it rejected perfection as fake and sought authenticity through imperfection. Your instinct was right. The 4.2-4.5 Star Sweet Spot Northwestern University's Spiegel Research Center partnered with PowerReviews to analyze millions of product purchases. The findings contradict everything traditional

Writing is table stakes. If you're skilled with words, you've met the minimum requirement for a communications role. But the professionals who will define the next era of this industry understand something deeper: modern communications is fundamentally about human psychology. Strong communications professionals weave behavioral economics and psychological principles into every campaign, every narrative, every strategic decision. They recognize that their work isn't about tran

Two powerful forces are colliding in the modern workplace, and the timing couldn't be more striking: a generation socialized on instantaneous feedback is meeting an AI revolution that's fundamentally reshaping how we evaluate performance. The Performance Distribution Problem Traditional performance reviews operated on a bell curve - some employees excelled, most performed adequately, some struggled. AI is compressing that distribution in unexpected ways. Research from MIT and

The psychology of power is undergoing a fundamental transformation. For decades, executive presence meant projecting certainty, commanding rooms, and demonstrating unilateral authority. But a new leadership paradigm is emerging—one that distributes power, acknowledges uncertainty, and treats influence as a shared resource rather than a zero-sum game. For executive communicators, this shift demands we completely rethink how our leaders show up. The Shifting Power Dynamic Resea

For too long, communications has been misunderstood as a transactional discipline—a simple game of pitching stories and collecting press clips. But that narrow view fundamentally misrepresents what great communicators actually do. Communications isn't just about earning media coverage; it's about playing reputational chess, where every move shapes how stakeholders perceive your organization, often three or four steps ahead of the immediate moment. David Ogilvy famously said,

In an age where consumers encounter thousands of marketing messages daily, something interesting is happening: the brands that resonate aren't just selling products—they're inviting us into fully realized worlds. World building, a concept borrowed from fantasy literature and film, is emerging as a powerful framework in brand communications. The underlying psychology is fascinating: our brains process narrative immersion in remarkably similar ways, whether we're exploring the

When a brand, public figure, or organization faces a crisis, traditional playbooks tend to default to legal reviews, tightly worded...

I recently returned from a trip to Japan — a country where tradition and modernity exist in a seamless, respectful balance. As I walked...

In the workplace, we all wear masks—adapting our behaviors, tone, and expressions depending on the environment. This concept is...

As we approach 2030, the communications landscape is set to undergo a profound transformation. The traditional pillars of media...

Stranded on a desert island with the task of building a modern, integrated communications team? While the challenge might seem daunting,...

The recent controversy surrounding the It Ends With Us movie has sparked conversations about the unseen tactics of PR, including smear...

The communications landscape is undergoing seismic shifts. The collapse of traditional media outlets, the rise of AI tools like...