We're back. And this week, we came with a lot to say!

Women at Work happened on Wednesday, and the room was full, over 70 communicators together at Fabric, in conversation with Kanessa Tixe, Melody Serafino, and Tiff Knighten. What they brought to that stage was not a highlight reel. It was honesty. About what it means to build something in this industry as a woman, to run your own agency, to set your own standards when no one else is setting them for you. The through line of the whole evening, and the thing we are still sitting with: you have to show up for yourself. The women who have made real, lasting impact in this space decided that early and never stopped acting on it.

That energy is in this edition. So is a lot of what is shifting in the industry right now, in how brands are showing up, in who we call influential, in what the brief actually needs to say in 2026. The definition of influence is being redrawn. Cultural entry is harder to fake than it used to be and the communicators who will be ahead of the game are the ones paying attention and already adjusting.

Let's get into it!

Every edition, we’ll share the articles, essays, and industry reads that have been living in our heads lately

PRGM has always been built around one idea: that PR and communications professionals deserve better resources, sharper analysis, and a community that takes the work seriously. The Inner Circle is how we plan on delivering on that fully!

Every issue of The PRGM Post will have two layers. Free content that's worth your time, and Inner Circle content that goes deeper: complete case studies, cultural analysis, strategic frameworks, in depth conversations with industry leaders, feature opportunities and first access to everything PRGM builds next.

The Inner Circle is $8/month. And this edition is a good place to see exactly what that gets you.

On Wednesday evening, over 70+ PR & Communications professionals filled the room at Fabric for our Women at Work panel and the energy in that space was something we are still thinking about.

The conversation was anchored by three women whose careers represent what longevity, integrity, and real impact look like in this industry: Kanessa Tixe of TS Collective, Melody Serafino of No. 29 Communications, and Tiff Knighten of Brand Curators. What they brought to the room was not a polished highlight reel. It was honesty: about what it actually means to build something as a woman in PR/Comms, to run your own agency, to set standards for yourself and your work in an industry that does not always make that easy.

The conversation went places that mattered. We talked about the ways women in this industry operate, the standards we hold ourselves to, the invisible labor we absorb, the ways in which we build and sustain relationships, and how rarely those things get named out loud in a professional setting.

The Conversation Continues

The networking was just as meaningful as the panel itself. There is something that happens when you put 70+ professionals who do this work in a room together and give them space to actually talk. We are grateful to everyone who joined us, and to our sponsors who made the evening possible: Live Tinted, HoneyBrains, Briogeo, Nioxin, Shea Yeleen, Wander + Ivy, Lyre's, Eaton Botanicals, and Fabrik Social Spaces.

If you missed it, we recorded the full panel and will be making it accessible soon. Keep an eye on our channels for the link.

This week, the Wall Street Journal put a name to something the industry has been circling for a while. The term is "alternatively influential", and it describes a category of people that many communicators have traditionally overlooked when building partnership and influencer lists: the academics, the newsletter writers, the niche tastemakers, the subculture experts who have real standing in specific communities but would never describe themselves as influencers and don't behave like them either.

A new representation firm called Figures is building the infrastructure to connect these people to brands. Their co-founders spent their careers at Vice, Refinery29, and Dazed, and they saw firsthand what happened when brands built their entire partnership strategy around scale. Figures is betting on the opposite: depth, specificity, and room quality over room size.

What this means for how you're thinking about partnership lists, measurement, and what influence actually looks like in 2026, that's in the Inner Circle section below.

SheaMoisture launched a new product last week and their launch campaign is the part worth paying attention to.

The brand introduced Silk Press in a Bottle Prep Cream, a styling prep cream designed to deliver salon-quality silk press results at home without compromising curl integrity, through a campaign called The Silk Press Conference. The concept is a mock press conference in which Law Roach, fashion's self-designated Image Architect and widely acknowledged King of the Silk Press, plays a skeptical investigator interrogating four women about how their hair looks that good. The women: Olympic gold medalist Masai Russell, Love Island winner Serena Page, lifestyle creator Kirah Ominique, and travel creator Clarke Peoples, each represent a different lifestyle context in which the silk press has to hold: humidity and long-haul travel, intense athletic performance, milestone moments, everyday wear. The reveal, naturally, is the product.

What makes this campaign worth examining is not the concept, which is genuinely clever and well-executed. It is the casting logic underneath it.

Why the Casting Matters

Law Roach is not your traditional brand spokesperson. He is a fashion stylist who has spent his career making other people iconic: Zendaya, Celine Dion, Hunter Schafer, and who has only recently begun stepping into his own public persona as talent. His signature is a sleek middle part that he has worn consistently enough that it has become a form of cultural shorthand. When he says in the campaign "if I'm the King of the Silk Press, I want to find out all the details about these girls who are coming for my spot," that line works because it is true. He is not performing credibility in this space. He has it.

In his own words, what made him want to participate was cultural specificity: "You have to be of the culture to understand the nuances. The memory of my grandmother rolling her hair on Saturday night. My sisters in the kitchen with the pressing comb for picture day. Those shared experiences are what made me want to be part of this campaign because, culturally, it means something."

That is the standard SheaMoisture met. They didn’t just hire someone famous to hold their product, they hired someone whose personal history, aesthetic identity, and cultural knowledge made him the correct person to help tell this specific story. The difference between those two things is the difference between a campaign that resonates and one that merely reaches.

Each edition, we spotlight a member of the PRGM community doing work worth knowing about: from agency founders to in-house leaders, independents, and everyone in between. If you'd like to nominate someone (or yourself), send us a note at [email protected].

Tess Finkle did not wait for the right moment to start her agency. She was 21, freelancing, juggling client email accounts, and at some point realized she had already started a business, she just needed to name it.

That is Metro Public Relations. What began as a one-person operation in Hollywood has grown, over nearly two decades, into a mid-sized communications agency representing talent, media companies, and brands at the intersection of entertainment and digital culture. Metro PR has worked with clients including The Walt Disney Company, YouTube, and VidCon, and built a reputation as one of the firms that understood the creator economy before most of the industry knew what to call it.

Finkle's early strategic insight, that traditional Hollywood publicity and digital media were converging, not competing, shaped everything about how Metro PR positioned itself. The agency became a bridge between legacy entertainment talent moving into digital platforms and emerging creators who needed mainstream media infrastructure. She saw it coming and built toward it, without outside investment, without a roadmap, and without waiting for permission.

She has also been intentional about building the kind of agency culture she did not experience early in her career, one that recognizes its people, rewards the team when the work lands, and treats sustainable growth as the goal rather than scale for its own sake.

In 2026, Finkle was named to the Campaign US Inspiring Women list, recognizing her two decades of building something real at the intersection of Hollywood and the creator economy.

Want to be featured in Community Corner? Nominate yourself or someone you know at [email protected].

Everything above is free. Every week.

But if you want to go deeper, the case studies, strategic breakdowns, and more intel you can actually use at work, that's what the Inner Circle is for.

Inside this week’s edition: a deep dive on Figures and Brigade and what the alternatively influential mean for your partnership strategy, the full Food For Thought on why the brief has changed, and a complete breakdown of Gap's entertainment-first communications model. 

All of it, every Sunday, for $8 a month. Less than your last coffee order.

Pitch Us: We are always looking for stories, campaigns, and perspectives worth covering. If you are working on something you think belongs in The PRGM Post, a campaign that got it right, an industry shift worth naming, a conversation the community should be having, we want to hear about it.

Pitch us at [email protected].