Episodes

Try this at your next industry conference: ask a communicator when they last looked at a piece of work and said "that was good," and stopped there. No "but." Chances are you'll get a blank stare, because we spend our careers making CEOs, brands, and clients look great, and somewhere along the way we started grading ourselves on the same curve: great work, great campaigns, the trophy wall. And now that AI has turned "do more with less" into "do everything by end of day," nobody seems to have p...

Who handles generative engine optimization for you? Not for your company - for you. A brand has an answer to that question: a team, a vendor, a budget line, a dashboard somebody checks on Mondays. A person usually has nobody at all, and the tools that do exist were built to read websites, which turns out to be a thin substitute for a career. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with his own business partner, Erin Lanuti, co-founder and CEO of Lilypath and fo...

Somewhere along the way, PR research came to mean a survey reverse-engineered to confirm whatever the client had already decided to say. Real research, the slow and expensive kind, stayed with the academics, because nobody on the agency or client side had the hours. So what happens when the cost of doing it right collapses? In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Rich Gallagher, Head of Comms Innovation at Brands2Life, whose answer to that question was to ...

Can you build word of mouth on purpose? Few people are better equipped to answer it than Sarah Neely. She's spent two decades engineering the conversations most brands just hope will happen by accident, and she's now the founder of SignalSwell, built to make human word of mouth "audible" to AI. She also leads client strategy at Fizz, one of the few agencies built entirely around getting people to talk. Her premise runs against everything a virality-obsessed business wants to believe: advocate...

If AI writes a better prompt than you can now, what are you still being paid for? In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle is joined by two of his closest collaborators, Brian Piper, content and AI integration consultant and co-author of Epic Content Marketing Volume 2, and Dr. Matt Wilkinson, founder of UK agency Strivenn and author of the forthcoming Buyer in the Loop. A month earlier, the three shared a stage at Mark Schaefer's Uprising retreat, building one marketing ...

Plenty of companies have bolted AI onto how they already work and called it transformation. Far fewer have rebuilt the business around it. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle talks with Brian McHale, CEO and owner of Brandience, who bought a struggling traditional ad agency back in 2008 and spent the better part of two decades quietly rebuilding it around AI. His shop now runs eight AI agents for every human employee, cut prospect research from 45 minutes to under 10...

Authenticity might be the most abused word in business today. Every AI tool promises to preserve it. Every leadership guru sells it as a brand pillar. And the more it gets thrown around, the less it actually means. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Allison Shapira — founder and CEO of Global Public Speaking, Harvard Kennedy School lecturer, regular HBR contributor, and author of AI for the Authentic Leader: How to Communicate More Effectively Without...

Companies are racing to stuff AI into everything. They're also throwing away the only thing that would make their AI actually useful. Decades of institutional memory, hard-won lessons, the stories baked into the bones of the organization, all left in a box labeled "archive" and forgotten. Then everyone wonders why the LLM keeps hallucinating. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Jason Dressel, CEO of History Factory and host of the History Factory Podca...

The story you've been told about your aging brain is wrong. Strategic attention peaks in your late 50s. Innovative cognition in your early 60s. Integrative reasoning around 62. Meanwhile, AI keeps commoditizing the very capabilities younger workers were supposed to dominate — speed, information processing, rapid adaptation. The math has shifted. Human judgment, the thing the midlife brain actually does best, may be the last unfair advantage left. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, ...

AI transformation isn't a strategy problem. It's a leadership problem. And until CEOs and boards stop asking for an AI strategy and start asking for a change management strategy, most organizations are going to keep spinning their wheels. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Bo Breuklander, founder of Breuklander Communications, ProSci-certified change practitioner, and professor of PR and media writing at the University of Tampa. Bo spent 16 years in c...

You don't roll out AI. It's not an ERP system. And yet most organizations are still treating it like a procurement decision, reaching for governance frameworks and compliance checklists as if the real challenge is containment rather than comprehension. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Alec Crawford, founder and CEO of Artificial Intelligence Risk Incorporated and host of the AI Risk Reward podcast. Alec built neural networks at Harvard in 1987, spen...

People keep writing obituaries for organic content. And every time, communicators chase the paid shortcuts instead of doing the work. Now, as AI-generated content floods every platform, those who abandoned organic are realizing they have nothing to fall back on. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Dorien Morin-van Dam, owner of More in Media and host of the Strategy Talks podcast, to dig into whether an organic-first philosophy can survive the AI era. ...

Everyone thinks they can name things. Toss some words around in a brainstorm, pick the one that sounds right, hope it passes trademark. But naming done right is storytelling compressed to its most essential form, and getting it wrong costs more than most organizations want to admit. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle reunites with Scott Milano, founder and managing director of Tanj, one of the world's top naming agencies, and the man who has named more than 1,000 br...

What if sustainable growth isn't about becoming the biggest player in the market? Agencies triple in size and lose their soul. They chase national footprints and abandon the community relationships that made them valuable. Meanwhile, regional firms with deep roots are building something holding companies can't replicate. In this episode, host Dan Nestle sits down with Jennifer Kaplan, founder and president of Evolve PR and Marketing—Arizona's largest PR firm. Since 2010, Jen has grown to 28 f...

Does PR have Stockholm syndrome? We're held captive by every disruption that promises to kill us—internet, social media, now AI—and what do we do? Fall in love with each threat, scramble to prove relevance, then wait for the next existential crisis. In this episode, Dan Nestle sits down with Barrie Cohen, founder of Barrie Cohen Public Relations. The real evolution isn't technical—it's structural. While holding companies lay off hundreds, boutique firms are landing top-tier placements and maj...

Authority-building has entered a new era—visibility hinges on context and credibility, and your expertise must be discoverable not just to humans but to machines. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle explores these seismic changes with Stephanie Grober, Marketing and PR Director at the Horowitz Agency and a true trailblazer in legal and professional services PR. Stephanie has mastered the art (and science) of making experts both visible and quotable, securing more ...

**NotebookLM HAS TAKEN OVER THE TRENDING COMMUNICATOR. AGAIN.** Generative AI is shaking up the world of communications—and the debate is on. In this special takeover episode of The Trending Communicator, Abel and Iris weigh the promise and pitfalls of AI adoption for comms professionals. Is AI truly a strategic superpower, or does it risk eroding hard-won wisdom and trust? Our hosts tackle big questions about originality, efficiency, brand voice, and the critical role of human judgment. F...

Companies love to talk about AI transformation. They've created policies, distributed tools, checked boxes. But behind closed doors, overwhelmed employees are phoning it in with AI slop, leaders can't tell the difference, and the workforce is too exhausted to learn anything new. That's not transformation. That's theater. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle welcomes back Anne Green, CEO of G&S Integrated Marketing Communications Group and host of the Building Brand Gr...

Companies keep approaching AI the way they approached every other tech rollout: install it, train on it, expect immediate returns. But AI isn't software. It's imperfect by design, doesn't follow a predictable implementation curve, and the gap between what leadership promised the board and what's actually happening is becoming a serious problem. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Chris Gee, founder of Chris Gee Consulting and strategic advisor to Ragan...

You can't communicate your way out of a values problem. Yet every day, communications leaders are expected to do precisely that. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with ⁠Emil Hill⁠, principal of The Creshiem Group and a public affairs strategist with 25+ years navigating the intersection of business, government, and communications. From guiding the W.K. Kellogg Foundation through Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation to helping Papa John's face their re...

Your customers are changing because of AI. But so are you—whether you realize it or not. Host Dan Nestle welcomes back Mark Schaefer, whose new book How AI Changes Your Customers reveals a transformation most people aren't prepared for. As one of 300 futurists who contributed to Elon University's Being Human in 2035 study, Mark brings insights beyond the usual AI hype. Mark and Dan explore the psychological rewiring that is happening as AI reshapes human agency, empathy, purpose, and trust...

You can be the smartest person in the room, but if no one knows you or your point of view, you don't have authority. This "authority gap" is why most professionals struggle to earn attention, build trust, and gain influence. In this episode, host Dan Nestle sits down with Amanda Russell, author of The Influencer Code, creator of the influence equation (Influence = Attention + Trust), founder of Amanda's Playbook, and architect of UCLA's first fully accredited influencer marketing program. Ama...

What happens when the communications function stops being about messaging and starts being about business transformation? When your stakeholders include 10,000 employees, 94,000 students, 350,000 alumni, plus investors, policymakers, and healthcare partners? In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle reconnects with Megan Noel, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Adtalem Global Education, to explore why the CCAO role is a fundamental reimagining of what communications does. ...

MIT just dropped a bomb: 95% of corporate AI initiatives are failing. Not struggling. Failing. And Sandy Carter knows exactly why. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, I sit down with Sandy, currently Chief Business Officer at Unstoppable Domains, former VP at Amazon Web Services, and the person who turned IBM's "social business" concept nobody understood into a $200 billion market. Sandy's written seven books, been named to every power list that matters (CNN's Top 10 Most Powerful W...