Your PR program is producing episodes. It should be building a franchise.
Most PR programs treat every placement as its own event. In an era where AI is building authority profiles from your organization’s entire body of work, that assumption is now dangerous.
Doyle Albee is co-founder and managing partner at Prolexity PR.
Every PR pro knows the feeling. You secure a feature in a top-tier publication, and for about 48 hours, it’s cake in the conference room and a very satisfied Slack channel. The client posts it on LinkedIn. The CEO forwards it to the board.
Then, sadly, often nothing. It just sits there.
Six months later, you’re pitching a different story to a different reporter, and the previous placement might as well have never happened. No narrative thread. No accumulated credibility. No compounding effect. Just another isolated data point in a growing spreadsheet of impressions.
This is a fundamental design flaw. Not the pitching. Not the targeting. Not the sequencing. Not even the individual results.
It’s missing the critical connective tissue.
The myth of the single placement
Too many PR programs are still built around the assumption that each placement is its own event: valuable in the moment, but not necessarily connected to anything before or after it.
That assumption was always short-sighted. In today’s environment, it’s genuinely dangerous.
Generative AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, whatever your clients are actually using to research vendors and validate decisions — don’t just pull from the most recent article. They build authority profiles. They look for consistency of narrative across sources over time. A single placement in a great outlet is one data point. A sequenced series of placements, each building on the last, starts to look like an authority signal.
One placement doesn’t compound. A strategy with connective tissue does.
Episodes vs. franchise
Think about how you watch a Marvel film. Or a prestige drama. Or honestly, any serialized story that you binged longer than you probably should have.
You don’t keep watching because each installment is a flawless, self-contained work. You keep watching because you’re invested in the characters and because each chapter advances a narrative that makes you curious about what happens next. New characters enter the story. Old ones leave. Plot threads planted two films ago suddenly pay off. By the time the next chapter drops, you’re not just aware of it. You’re already leaning in.
That’s not an accident. It’s why Marvel has built what’s now effectively an infinite franchise machine. Not because every movie is great (I’m looking at you, “Eternals”), but because the structure creates investment that carries across individual entries.
As PR pros, we shouldn’t produce data points that act like they don’t know the others exist. A founder profile here. A contributed piece there. A podcast appearance six months later with no connective tissue to what came before. Individually, they’re fine. Together, without planning, they’re dopamine hits that may never become a story. Humans are wired for story. Large language models are wired for patterns. A library of disconnected moments satisfies neither.
The opportunity is to build storylines instead of clips. When each placement extends the narrative threads from the last, you stop being a pop-up shop and become a source and a story people want to follow and AI understands.
That investment compounds. Each placement makes the next one more likely and more credible. AI systems indexing this content see a consistent narrative being validated across formats and sources over time.
Sequencing as a strategy
Sequencing isn’t just a content calendar or press release drip. It’s the deliberate architecture of who is presented with the story, in what order and with what narrative thread connecting them.
Three principles drive it:
- Start in the right vertical. The first placement isn’t necessarily the biggest one — it’s the one that establishes the foundational narrative your client owns. Trade and vertical press often do this better than general business press because the audience is more qualified and the credibility signal is more specific. Don’t lead with your swing for the fences. Lead with the pitch that sets everything else up.
- Build the bridge. The second and third placements shouldn’t be complete departures. They should be extensions, with the credibility of the first placement as the foundation. Reporters are more likely to interview someone who’s already been interviewed. AI systems are more likely to cite a voice that’s already been cited. Momentum is a real asset and, unlike impressions, it carries forward.
- Give the narrative a destination. Work backward from where you want your client to end up — a category leadership position, a product launch or a policy position. Design the sequence that gets them there with accumulated authority, not just accumulated clips.
The metric this requires
None of this works if you’re still measuring PR exclusively by impressions. Impressions measure reach at a given moment. They don’t tell you whether the right people encountered the story, whether the narrative is landing consistently or getting muddled, or whether your client is being recognized as a credible authority in the places that actually matter.
The metric that corresponds to compound authority is narrative adoption: Are the phrases, positions and ideas your client is putting into the world showing up in how others describe the space? Reporters. Analysts. Competitors. AI systems. That’s the signal that compounding is working.
It’s a harder metric to track. It’s also a much more honest reflection of what PR actually does when it’s working.
Your program doesn’t need more clips. It needs a sequence designed so each clip makes the next one more likely — and more valuable. “Captain America” leads to “The Avengers.” “Eternals,” by itself, leads to nothing.
