Remember when the impact world revolved around glossy reports, printed out and hauled in our luggage to hand out at conferences? Today, you can end a day full of panels and meetings without much more than a stray business card. And while the reports keep coming, now they are interactive digital experiences, accessible by QR code. But otherwise, once a holdout, the impact industry has now fully entered the attention economy.

The annual circuit of events like Davos, UNGA, and COP now has a digital twin, in the form of hybrid “moments” comprised of panel soundbites, selfies, personal reflections, content marketing that circulates alongside old-school media jockeying. To get heard (and invited), execs increasingly need their own, complementary but differentiated brands. LinkedIn is now a place for 24/7 influencing, more and more dominated by video.

Anyone who has worked in this space, from international organizations and NGOs to even corporate sustainability, can tell you that’s a tall order for most comms teams. It’s already a function that is often stretched thin and seen as separate from the “real” work of the organization, e.g., running projects or moving capital. The work is considered downstream, more execution than strategy, part of the “overhead” that donors don’t want to fund.

A perfect candidate, then, for AI-outsourcing. Sure enough, comms is one of the frontline applications of AI in the impact space – the Center for Effective Philanthropy found that marketing and communications is among the top uses across foundations and nonprofits. And adoption has raced far ahead of internal policy: a 2026 benchmark study (a vendor survey) found 92% of nonprofits now use AI in some capacity, but most use it individually and ad hoc.

Perhaps marketers are racing ahead of management because they are first to see the tidal wave of slop heading toward us. Even the best or flashiest branded content now competes with AI generated, clickbait-y posts, often accompanied by uncanny or garish AI images. Insights and news are increasingly hard to find as AI floods channels, including the comments section, with nearly a quarter of LinkedIn replies now flagged as AI-written. LinkedIn overall ranks as the top platform for fully generated AI content. SEO is dead as we know it.

This information overflow mirrors the AI-transformation of social media and the internet writ large. But there’s something unsettling about (obvious?) AI content from mission-driven organizations and companies. We’re being asked to put our trust in these institutions to solve some of our greatest challenges, often with public money, and there’s an implicit expectation that the information they share reflects their integrity and dedication to the mission. That trust has been broken before, many times, but from a “brand promise” standpoint, there’s still a higher bar for transparency and authenticity.

Others might say it’s in the best interest of the organization to be as lean and efficient as possible, and that AI opens the door to far less intermediation between donors and communities, and to bridging comms and marketing skill gaps between major Western institutions and locally-based organizations. It’s a serious, perhaps rational argument that I intend to dive into in later posts.

What comes next? Organizations and their marketing and communications leaders will have to grapple with messy, sometimes philosophical questions around how they promote and portray their work. I see four buckets:

• What is “comms” for now: What does an AI-enabled comms function actually look like? Is it faster content in more formats, fact and brand voice checking, or something more strategic: like shaping how the organization is represented inside AI systems, owning direct audience relationships, and deploying capabilities (hyper-localization, interactive content, personalized campaigns and briefings) once out of reach for even the best-resourced teams?

• AI ethics: Among many controversies, AI is driving resource extraction and cascading community-level harms that sit uneasily with organizational missions. Data centers are on track to consume nearly as much electricity as Japan by 2030, and private AI investment exceeds total annual climate finance flows to developing countries. How do practitioners square these reputational and moral questions while still taking advantage of tools that may help advance positive aims?

• Usage policies: How organizations use images of “beneficiaries”, often those with the least say in how they’re portrayed, has long been controversial. Now, that representation is being automated with cheap synthetic subjects that require no consent. Researchers have documented over 100 AI-generated images of extreme poverty used in NGO campaigns dubbed ‘poverty porn 2.0,‘ in one Lancet Global Health commentary. Where’s the line, and what should be labeled? Beyond images, what about reporting, research, and thought leadership? It’s no longer rhetorical; from August 2026, the EU AI Act requires labeling of deepfakes and AI-generated text published on matters of public interest.

• Talent and teams: Institutions from the World Bank to UNDP have framed AI as both a chance for developing countries to leapfrog and a risk of new divergences. What does that debate look like in the markcomms office pod? Could AI enable truly decentralized teams, closer to the work and less dependent on designers and writers sitting in headquarters? And how will the next generation of talent be trained and structured, when there’s no need to pore over decks, write talking points, or analyze KPIs?

That’s what’s on my mind, and the remit of this series. Looking forward to thinking and writing about each of these in the coming weeks, and to hearing from others grappling with these upheavals.

Because the media moment and spectacle Madonna Inc. has built around the launch seem to be about more than a new album. We’re seeing her image, brand, and story being rebuilt and polished in real-time, tightly sequenced to use every platform available and seemingly cement her status and market power for generations to come.

It’s a fitting turn for a “performance artist“ whose true medium has always been PR, more than music or videos or tours. She and other, typically female, stars are often back-handedly praised for their ability to “market themselves,” with the implication that they’re somehow pulling the wool over our eyes.

But most of her critics miss that we’re living in the world that Madonna saw coming, with multi-hyphenate influencers as our biggest stars, brand relaunches and nostalgia built around “eras”, and a social feed economy that runs on rage-bait and provocation, a playbook she pioneered thirty years ago with Like a Prayer and Erotica.

Madonna as marketer: the case study

And now she’s giving us another glimpse of the future. She’s been everywhere for months: Coachella, Times Square, the World Cup, intimate club nights, a sit-down on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast and a rare old-school broadcast special with Graham Norton on the BBC, the Grindr grid, TikTok livestreams, the cover of Vogue Italia, the Met Gala, and a slew of brand partnerships — on top of the actual songs and videos, of course. All of it has landed in tight, sequenced drops, wrapped in a single visual language built by NYC design studio Special Offer, Inc. (which also did the visuals for her ABSOLUT “Icon” partnership), right down to recycling her original Confessions on a Dance Floor styling from 2005.

My first post in The Remit looked at London Climate Action Week and our stalled climate narrative. This piece swerves into pop culture, but the two aren’t as far apart as they look. Both are about what it takes to break through a fragmented, distracted public, about leaders as the public face of the brand, about reckoning with past missteps and fast-moving technology, and about the balance between cultivating fan loyalty and taking risks.

Of course, Madonna is a forty-plus-year household name. Record sales, streams, follower and like counts, radio play, and most of the other metrics that make or break modern stars are mostly irrelevant to her. She could sell out stadiums indefinitely with no new music and no marketing.

Yet Through the 2010s, she looked like she’d lost her grip on contemporary culture. Her later albums split critics and fans, disappointed on the charts, and the rollouts stopped feeling like events. This was the period where Beyoncé-inspired surprise drops replaced the decades-old cadence of singles, videos, interviews, TV spots, and tours that she had turned into its own art form. Meanwhile the media itself became more decentralized, and the provocation that once defined her translated badly onto a more reactive, outrage-powered social internet, where instead she was relentlessly hounded about her appearance and age.

The 2024 Celebration Tour, an unabashed, no-skips greatest-hits run, had the aura of a Farewell Tour, and who would blame her?

Thanks for coming (back)

But somewhere in the last few years, culminating in this Confessions II run, she took back the narrative and her own star (and market) power in a way that had mostly eluded her since 2008’s Hard Candy.

How? Maybe a record-breaking 1.6 million people showing up for her free concert in Rio gave her a boost of confidence, or watching younger artists sample and remix her catalog on streaming and TikTok helped her see what was possible, or that the nostalgia for the first Confessions on a Dance Floor runs deeper than I’d realized. Perhaps I’m just a gay millennial getting perfectly targeted by the algorithm during Pride season.

But I think it goes beyond any one variable, and instead demonstrates her team’s command of the actual levers of today’s entertainment and attention economy. It’s a blueprint not just for pop stars but for anyone trying to build a story or a brand inside information overload and snap judgment. And it’s a reminder that old-media formats, like broadcast TV, print covers, physical vinyl, still work, but as the foundation and activation points for the digital, social, and possibly AI-assisted campaign layered on top.

Confessions in the boardroom

In 2021, she returned to the Warner Music Group after her 2007 Live Nation deal shifted her recording career to Interscope, bringing her entire catalogue back under one label. That opened the door to a steady flow of reissues, including Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, curated with Mike Dean and Honey Dijon, the first remix album to crack the Billboard 200 top ten since 2014, and possibly commercial proof of concept for returning to dance music. That bet would be cemented by re-signing with Warner for new music and reuniting with Confessions I producer Stuart Price. Notably, there’s been almost no turnover of key staff: Guy Oseary, her manager since 2005, and his Maverick co-manager Sara Zambreno are both still in place, negotiated the Warner deal themselves, and remain the ones fielding press questions about her plans today.

What this shows to me is that Confessions II isn’t just a “comeback”, and it isn’t organic virality riding Y2K nostalgia and Pride. It’s the final step in a five-year-long, carefully sequenced re-validation project, created by activating youth-culture, curating nostalgia, getting strategic proximity to today’s biggest names, a live victory lap, and only then a new record. It’s a lesson to companies or executives that try to relaunch their brand in one fell swoop. Good PR is always a moving target and an evolving story.

Here’s a closer look at the specific tactics:

Borrowed-audience bridging. Coachella with Sabrina Carpenter, the World Cup alongside Shakira and BTS. She’s using her own reputation to get onto the world’s biggest stages, each with a built-in audience distinct from her own fanbase, generating visibility that’s hard to scroll past..

Venue-as-media. Following pop-ups from Charli XCX and Gucci, Times Square has emerged as the final boss of brand activations, using the most legible, most-visited physical destination there is, repurposed to drive digital content in a way no concert clip could. Madonna’s pop-up performance there was effectively renting a piece of infrastructure built to function like a media channel, with the Square as New York’s answer to the Las Vegas Sphere. She also made a splash at the Met Gala and on fashion-week front rows.

Ultra-PESO. She premiered her Confessions II film part of the 2026 Tribeca Festival, sat for a rare Graham Norton special on the BBC, and gave Jay Shetty an hour on On Purpose, all earned wins, secured on reputation, running alongside big paid pushes: the Grindr takeover, a formal TikTok platform deal, ABSOLUT, and a Bilt Rewards tie-in that includes an exclusive vinyl pressing and a month of free rent for musicians at the Manhattan rehearsal building where she got her start. In PR terms, this is PESO: paid, earned, shared, owned, with almost no gap between categories, all staying true and circling back to a single narrative.

Pride newsjacking (done right). The LGBTQ+ community has always been core to her fanbase, and Confessions on a Dance Floor is loved specifically for embracing dance music’s queer roots. Confessions II keeps that thread going with queer cameos and collaborators, the Grindr activation, listening sessions at community fixtures like The Abbey, but without making the record about Pride. She strategically timed the release to match her audience’s calendar in a way that felt natural.

Narrative control in interviews. Her old persona was diva, even dominatrix, which is out of step with the vulnerability younger artists lead with now. This run has more personal disclosure than usual, sharing stories from her early New York years, reflections on aging, glimpses into how she actually makes music (she’s described the album as being partly about family trauma and healing). But it’s clear the interviews are tightly scoped, as she hasn’t addressed the appearance commentary or old controversies directly, the way a Diane Sawyer or Larry King sit-down might once have forced her to. It’s access on her own terms, not an open door.

Social reputation management. This one is more of a hunch, but a peek at any of her social posts or third-party accounts posting her new or archival material, and there’s barely a snarky comment in the replies. After years as an easy punchline, the internet now reads as sincerely pro-Madonna. That could be an unusually vigilant and prolific social team, or perhaps the work of one of the newer, more aggressive reputation management firms, some of which use AI-driven engagement and content-cleaning tools.

Madonna herself has publicly dismissed AI in the creative process and been critical of social media generally, but I imagine her team or label are at least exploring newer AI-assisted marketing and reputation tools. Anyone with a public profile, or paid to manage one, will have to reckon with it soon enough.

Madonna: the PR blueprint?

Not every beat has landed. The initial singles have performed well on dance charts but haven’t replicated the Billboard dominance that once felt automatic. Her Coachella performance got views but reportedly played to a flat audience, highlighting the risks of conflating digital and in-person moments. Getting plastered on the Grindr grid as “motha” treads dangerously close to pink washing, even for an established gay icon. Launch day for the album was greeted by a New York Times op-ed criticizing her cosmetic work for abandoning her once-feminist principles, showing she remains a polarizing figure.

Not every win here scales into a lesson for the rest of us, either. Most brand spokespeople and executives can’t count on sheer charisma to survive a misstep, or assume their personal history alone will move product. Few have simultaneous access to top-tier talent across PR, marketing, creative, and distribution, let alone the standing to set the terms of engagement with the press and the public the way she can.

But Confessions II should go down as one of the great turnarounds in a career full of them and maybe as both a preview and a warning of what it now takes to build a moment that generates visibility, engagement, loyalty, revenue, and top-tier partnerships, all at once.

A new bar just got set. Madonna, true to form, got there first.

For nearly 15 years, my job has been to study and shape the messaging of impact organizations, and I’ve put on countless panels and spent many sweaty days corralling higher-ups’ at sprawling convenings like LCAW. But this year, I attended simply as myself: an impact professional, writer, comms flack, and person who loves and increasingly worries about the natural world.

Since I relocated to Amsterdam from New York City late last year and transitioned to remote consulting, London felt like the right place to take the pulse of the climate dialogue and get that jolt of the zeitgeist in real time, the kind of energy that doesn’t transmit through a screen.

The shift from climate movement to sustainability industry

What I found, and what others shared with me, wasn’t a shock of new ideas or a rousing call to action. It was a creeping sense of business as usual that only gestured at the disruption racking the energy transition. At least in public, talk of war, shocks, and the all out assaults taking place on climate action was often rendered in euphemisms, and conversations quickly steered toward sector or solution specific dynamics.

This is, perhaps, not surprising. Thirty years into the global circuit of climate convenings, these gatherings are more like industry conferences than activist platforms. To paraphrase dozens of panel titles, we’re moving from awareness-raising and ambition-setting toward execution, deployment, and action. Meaning, this is serious business, not a place for sign-waving and hand-wringing.

In many ways, this signals progress: environmental issues are now widely acknowledged as critical to companies’ bottom lines and the functioning of cities and states, and so panels and events hone in on technical, policy, and market issues, like in any other mature industry. And despite the heated geopolitical rhetoric, money is still moving: global energy-transition investment hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, up 8% on the year, with even US investment rising as Washington pulled back.

But as the world absorbs its largest-ever oil shock and the US becomes even more hostile to climate goals, I had hoped to see some shift in the narrative, in the public-facing posture of leaders and institutions that reflects the harrowing moment we’ve approached, where two decades of consensus building and collaboration are being quickly reversed, just as we approach tipping points. Instead, I felt an uneasy sense of deja vu.

Purpose-driven business loses its halo

We’re long past the last decade’s manifesto of “doing well by doing good.” In that optimistic, heady era, our job as impact and sustainability practitioners was to make, share, and refine the “business case” that social responsibility and climate action actually benefit financial performance. As the concept gained traction, it appeared that even acolytes of Milton Friedman’s gospel of shareholder value had finally come around to the notion that enterprise owed something to the environment and communities. If, even then, the rush of declarations had a whiff of PR grabs, there was a sense of the tide turning.

The business case thesis may still be compelling, even if new studies point to more ambiguous outcomes. But I think it’s grown stale as a story. It certainly doesn’t seem to be galvanizing business and political leaders anymore, much less consumers and voters. The number of S&P 500 companies mentioning “ESG” on earnings calls has dropped to its lowest in years, off a 2021 peak, and global media coverage of climate fell 14% in 2025, now well below its high. In the US, while public concern is high, climate ranks low as a priority.

And yet markets-focused thinking still dominated the panels, conversations, and the recaps I followed. Over and over, the message was to stop talking about farmers and trees, and tell stories in terms finance types understand: infrastructure, innovation, returns, profit. But if a decades worth of reports, solutions, and information campaigns hasn’t proven the business case to senior decision makers, what will?

Even the language of material risk is losing ground to a softer imperative: less negativity. I heard panelists push the environment as opportunity, revenue, efficiencies, and, tellingly, urged the audience to cut anything that sounded like last decade’s climate pitch, part of a broader trend toward greenhushing.

In many rooms we’d dropped the pretense that markets will solve this at all, pivoting to “resilience” as the impacts worsen. Resilience for people and communities is vital and vastly underfunded; developing countries face an adaptation gap of hundreds of billions a year. But too often “resilience” seemed to mean business continuity, not help for the those most exposed, and a convenient cover for easing off now-politically-tricky messaging on emissions.

Reading the room

These are, of course, the perception of someone focused on stories and communications, and not a climate scientist or tech CEO, and not someone sitting in the closed-door sessions where deals are made and off-the-record opinions voiced. But conversations with former colleagues, peers, and friends reaffirmed my take on the overall mood, even if most attendees I spoke with seemed encouraged by their own events and engagements.

An executive in carbon markets told me the quiet sentiment in his sector is that we’ve reached the limits of what voluntary commitments can accomplish. A corporate fundraisers’ private dinner apparently focused on how sustainability discussions with boards and the C-suite face the same reluctance as 2016. A senior investor relations leader recounted that financial engineering is still trotted out as the marquee solution to lack of capital flowing into developing markets, perhaps a reflection of the host city’s home industry. When I raised the dire state of sustainability in the US during Q&As, a few people sought me out afterward, relieved that someone had named it.

Crowded out: what business case messaging misses

Of course, we need global business, capital, and policymakers on the side of the transition; they control and allocate the resources we need to reduce emissions and adapt to a warming planet. But the underlying message seems to be that the environment only matters if it can stand on its own as an asset, that there’s no place for awe, grief, reverence, or even human dignity in this more “serious” evolution of the climate movement. And that our best, perhaps only, option is to try (again and again) to appeal to the mercurial instincts of heavyweights of capital, production and political power, many of whom have shown themselves to be unreliable partners.

What do we lose when we reduce the climate crisis to a mere market failure?

First, this narrative forecloses a reckoning that feels overdue: that the systems we built aren’t working, or aren’t working at the scale we imagined, and that instruments and frameworks like the SDGs and the Paris pledges, along with these carbon-intensive gatherings themselves, may be outmoded against the pace of the crisis. Limits get breached and coalitions disintegrate, but the focus stays fixed on the perennial future, finding new tweaks to an otherwise unchanged economic model, hoping this time it will stick.

It also blurs out the faces of the people most affected, and pushes them out of decisions about their own futures. When the audience is global business, you have to speak in the scale they respond to, the tons and hectares and dollars of return that earn press and bring partners on board. There’s less and less room for the harder stories, communities erased, species lost, and nuanced trade-offs in front of us. Western, male, and traditionally credentialed voices remain overrepresented. And while women and youth climate champions are highlighted in PR campaigns, how many of them are also placed on panels with executives and politicians?

This thinking also builds an insular culture that speaks only to elites. Building new systems is complicated work that needs specialized expertise and funding, but complexity shouldn’t be an excuse for inaccessibility. Overreliance on jargon and buzzwords alienates the people we claim to serve and makes the whole subject feel irrelevant to everyone else. For example, I think carbon markets are easy to dismiss as greenwashing scams because practically the only legible public information about them has been investigative reporting into worthless or overstated credits.

Seeds of new climate narratives, with teeth

Fortunately, a few voices are breaking the holding pattern, meeting this volatile moment by connecting climate to the wider web of crises around it rather than retreating.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, opened the week by naming something that most still tiptoe around: that climate progress is under coordinated attack. His new City Climate Facts initiative treats disinformation as a frontline problem, armed with uncomfortable numbers, among them a finding that as much as 48% of online engagement on some cities’ air-quality policies is bot-driven. He framed it bluntly, as “an existential fight between the climate wreckers and the climate defenders.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres tied the oil shock from the war in Iran, and looming fears about AI, directly to the climate conversation, a reminder of how attached the world remains to fossil fuels. He pressed AI companies to be more transparent about how their data centers are powered, telling the industry it was “time to come clean.” I think this warning resonated because it came with an image rather than a metric: the planet’s tipping points, he said, are like objects in a car mirror, closer than they appear.

Michael Bloomberg also announced a $285 million commitment not simply to finance clean energy, but to strengthen the industry’s political muscles through industry associations, technical expertise, and the capacity to challenge the fossil fuel industry’s decades-old influence machine. It was a tacit acknowledgment that cheaper renewables alone won’t win the transition without comparable investments in power, persuasion, and public legitimacy, and perhaps that the climate movement has surrendered some of its campaigning instinct as it has professionalized.

Each named an antagonist, connected the crisis to things people already feel – like the price of energy or the integrity of what they read – and led with provocation instead of sanitized talking points. But these are globally-recognized leaders engaging with climate as part of wide-ranging platforms. Their titles and public positions enable them to take risks and name names in a way that fundraisers, entrepreneurs, and junior employees cannot, and also guarantee press coverage, social reach, and access to the most rarefied circles.

The Remit: crisis comms for the climate

How can we help others speak with clarity and candor, including and especially to those who control capital, power, and influence? How do we get more people to be not just more informed, but actually engaged and even excited about what’s still possible? And what does “crisis comms” look like for the climate, with campaigns and messaging that are immediately legible, actionable, and still rigorous, in a media environment built around virality, outrage, and shallow engagement?

That’s what I want to explore here: across development, sustainability, and climate, what storytelling, narrative, and brand actually mean now. Moments like LCAW are good for taking stock, but I also want to zoom out, to look at how media and image-making collide with questions of purpose, values, and impact, for people, organizations and their leaders, and at how these industries and movements might remake themselves in public for an era of AI, media fragmentation, and accelerating shocks. And maybe, along the way, rescue some of the spirit and hope that pulled a lot of us into this work in the first place.