For years, communicators wanted real-time visibility into how audiences talk about their companies, products and leaders. Now we have it.

• But greater visibility has exposed a harder truth: a single conversation to manage no longer exists.
• The message now splinters across platforms, algorithms and micro-communities, taking on different meanings as it moves. That's the fragmentation paradox.

Why it matters: Communicators can no longer measure success by volume alone — impressions, shares or even sentiment.

• The real question is whether your message is landing with the audience that matters most.

If you measure success by volume, it is easy to convince yourself you are winning.

• But the real question is simple — are you making a dent against the audience you care about, or are you just making noise?
• The key word is "audience," because the world today makes it hard to reach everyone, and even clarity of audience assumes they are no longer unified.

You must figure out how to have two conversations at once.

• The first is more ambient and always on, living on Discord servers, Reddit, X and Bluesky. You have to earn conversational permission and then do more than simply broadcast — you are joining a community and a discussion in progress. It's organic, unscripted and always authentic.
• The second is more intentional — a planned moment that creates a pause and sticks in people's minds. It might be a speech, a blog post or an op-ed. Here, the goal is clear: offer a point of view or news that you want your audience to absorb and react to.

Be smart: Both conversations are required. It is easy to over-index on the more ephemeral. Remember that not everyone sees everything. Everyone is seeing something.

Yes, but: More visibility is a blessing and a curse. Like Odin trading an eye for wisdom, seeing more comes with a cost: the burden of sorting a signal from noise. In a fragmented environment, judgment matters as much as access.

The big picture: Communicators need to treat ambient and intentional work as distinct work streams, not variations of the same one.

• That means investing in real-time monitoring and interpretation, not just dashboards, and building feedback loops that show what is actually landing, not just what is being said.
• It also means preparing leaders for unstructured environments so they can participate in unscripted, imperfect conversations with confidence.
• The goal is to create "surround-sound" moments: building momentum in ambient conversation, breaking through with intentional moments and then extending the message across channels.

Don't confuse reach with resonance. Don't try to win everywhere; win somewhere.

• Don't think that more content will always equal more impact.

The bottom line: Make fragmentation your friend. Participate in the right conversations, not all conversations, and pick a few moments and commit — leave a dent.

Jim O'Leary is departing Weber Shandwick to join corporate advisory firm Penta Group as CEO.

• Penta co-founder and current CEO Matt McDonald will continue to serve on the firm's board and will work closely with O'Leary as he steps into the role this summer.

Why it matters: O'Leary's departure from a large holding company to a smaller, private equity-backed advisory speaks to the shifting PR agency landscape.

Catch up quick: O'Leary served as Weber's North America CEO and global president since 2023 and helped guide the PR giant through the recent IPG-Omnicom merger.

• Before joining Weber, he spent more than 15 years at Edelman, where he most recently was U.S. chief operating officer and global corporate affairs practice chair.

What they're saying: "I've been advising CEOs and others across the C-suite for decades now," O'Leary told Axios. "And they are increasingly faced with consequential decisions across all of the risk domains — whether that's reputational risk, political risk, financial risk, cultural risk, technological risk — and I think that in the modern risk era, it requires a different approach."

• "If you sat down with a clean sheet of paper and you designed the modern corporate advisory of the firm of the future from scratch, it would look a lot like Penta."

State of play: Penta Group was originally founded as Hamilton Place Strategies in 2009 by President George W. Bush administration alums McDonald, Tony Fratto and Stuart Siciliano.

• In 2022, Ballast Research, Hamilton Place Strategies, Flag Media Analytics, Alva, Gotham Research Group and Decode M merged to create Penta.
• In 2025, Los Angeles-based investment firm Shamrock Capital acquired Penta Group for an undisclosed amount.
• "Legacy agencies built on geographic breadth and traditional marketing services models are giving way to something different: expertise-driven, technology-native advisory firms built to move at real-time speed," said Laura Held, partner and member of the executive committee of Shamrock Capital.
• Penta on Tuesday laid off 37 people, less than 10% of it's staff, according to a person familiar with the cuts. The news was earlier reported by Politico.

The big picture: The agency landscape is undergoing a rapid reset, as holding companies consolidate their PR offerings to drive scale and reevaluate those bets.

• Private equity deals in the space have surged, with money pouring into strategic comms advisory firms Penta, FGS Global, Teneo, Narrative Strategies and Bully Pulpit International.

What to watch: AI is likely to shake things up further.

• Penta previously told Axios it brought in over $100 million in revenue in 2025, half of which is attributed to its proprietary AI, data and predictive analytics work.
• With new leadership and a recent influx of private equity cash, the firm is expected to continue to scale across public affairs, financial communications and advisory services using an AI-enabled strategy.

Go deeper.

🇨🇳 President Trump is bringing several U.S. executives with him to Beijing for his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

• The delegation includes Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Tesla's Elon Musk, Apple's Tim Cook, Goldman Sachs' David Solomon, BlackRock's Larry Fink and Meta's Dina Powell McCormick. (New York Times)

🤖 The juicy personal texts, emails and digital diary entries of the biggest AI execs revealed in Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI highlight how the chats from these companies' own tools could become a new trove of courtroom evidence, Axios' Ina Fried writes. (Axios)

😡 Popular retail investing subreddit WallStreetBets filed a comment opposing the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposal for semiannual reporting.

• The group argued that quarterly reports "are the single most important leveling mechanism between retail and institutional investors in U.S. equity markets." (TechCrunch)

👏 Clapback culture is becoming a part of rapid-response political messaging playbooks. The internet rewards speed and personality, pushing campaigns to behave like always-on content studios, Axios' Kerry Flynn writes. (Axios)

✍️ People are adding typos and using "aggressively casual language" to sound human and avoid accusations of using AI to generate writing. (Wall Street Journal)