Editor’s note – September 2025

September was a milestone month for Strategic – and October will be a month that takes us to a new level.

Our big event in September was the Communication Leadership Summit in Brussels, which brought together more than 70 communication leaders from Houston to Singapore with 28 countries in between, including many of our awesome columnists and contributors.  

In partnership with IABC EMENA, we demonstrated an appetite for a new type of conversation in our field: open, interactive, opinionated, and face-to-face.  I discuss this more deeply in my latest piece in Strategic. 

But our biggest move yet will be in early October, when we take down our registration gate and offer unrestricted access to our entire inventory of content.

It’s a bold choice, one that involved many internal discussions.  

Here’s why we’re going for it:

We’ve been publishing a lot on AI.  

But one piece struck me as particularly sharp, from Jack Richards, one of our friends at Onclusive. In it, Jack highlights the power of earned media as being the fuel for visibility and power as Generative AI progressively takes over search from the current mainstream search engines.

That got me thinking. Strategic has the opportunity to become the earned media powerhouse for communication leadership globally.  

It’s a risk for us – as we’ll have to come up with other ways to build our database and grow our known readership, and make us pitch ourselves to partners and sponsors more creatively.  

But we believe that’s outweighed by the opportunities the future of search presents for us.  

It gives us a much stronger platform to offer our contributors and columnists, with unlocked visibility that will give them global reach.

It makes our excellent content available to our profession and those who hire us – turbocharging our core mission of being a force multiplier for communication leadership.

And it makes us uniquely situated – compared to the paywalled players in our space – to rapidly become a destination resource for communication leaders globally.

We’re all-in.  

Written by: Editor