About the Author

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David McInnis has spent more than three decades building tools that help small businesses be heard. His entrepreneurial streak started early, improbably enough, with a lollipop business he launched at thirteen.

That instinct never left him. Over time, it grew into a belief that would shape his career: visibility should not belong only to organizations with the biggest budgets.

At the time, that idea ran against the grain. The PR industry revolved around the pitch: the phone call, the relationship, the gatekeeper. McInnis was not interested in improving that system. He wanted to go around it entirely by putting news directly in front of the people who needed it. Inspired by the pharmaceutical industry's move toward direct-to-consumer advertising, he saw press releases not as private messages for journalists, but as public, searchable assets anyone could discover.

It worked. PRWeb helped launch countless startups and gave tens of thousands of small and midsize businesses their first real opportunity for online visibility, long before content marketing became a recognized discipline. In 2006, PRWeb was acquired by Vocus, Inc., which later merged into Cision, sitting alongside PR Newswire.

After PRWeb, McInnis kept building at the intersection of news, technology, and access. Through Cranberry.com, he launched content marketing platforms aimed at helping brands create and distribute content more effectively, experimenting with persona-based native content formats. He also founded PriorThings.com, a blockchain registration platform for content creators that today powers the content provenance engine within Newsworthy.ai, BoostifyPR and NewsRamp.

In 2021, he co-founded Newsworthy.ai with Mark Willaman, a long-time friend and integration partner at PRWeb, creating what became the internet's first News Marketing platform built for the AI era. Newsworthy.ai was the first newswire to register press releases on the blockchain, establishing cryptographic proof of content provenance and origin.

It was also the first newswire to let companies self-host their press releases and among the first to meaningfully integrate AI into press release distribution through tools such as Newswriter.ai.

He later launched NewsRamp, a companion software-as-a-service platform for press release newswires that expands a single press release into a full suite of AI-optimized content, including articles, blog posts, FAQs, audio briefings, podcasts, video summaries, and zero-click social content, then distributes it across hundreds of media endpoints. Together, Newsworthy.ai and NewsRamp form the foundation of the News Marketing system that feeds brand equity.

McInnis is widely credited with pioneering News Marketing as a discipline: the strategic use of news-format content as discoverable, multi-format assets designed to reach customers, AI systems, and media wherever they consume information. He has spent nearly thirty years studying how press releases move through each era of digital discovery, from early search engines to Google's dominance to today's AI retrieval systems.

He holds a BA in International Studies from Texas State University. He is a speaker, trainer, and mentor who regularly leads AI and digital marketing bootcamps. He is based in Boerne, Texas.

Over the course of his career, he has built three companies around one core belief: a well-structured press release, made public and preserved, is one of the most powerful marketing assets a business can own, and one of the fastest ways to compound brand equity in the AI era.

This book continues that work.

This Book Picks Up From News Marketing

Brand Equity continues the conversation started in News Marketing — available at NewsMarketingBook.com.

When I was writing News Marketing, I realized the manuscript had grown past 350 pages. That was not a badge of thoroughness. It was a problem. Most people do not finish a 400-page business book. I wanted them to finish this one.

So I broke the material into smaller books of about 150 pages each. Books you can read in an afternoon. Books you can put to work the same week. News Marketing is the first and is already published. This book, Brand Equity, is the second. It explores the tools and intangibles that go into building brand equity: measurement, AI, pillars, proof, culture, and the News Marketing engine that makes preference findable. Success Pillars will be the third book in the series. It will outline principles for success in business.

Each book stands alone. You do not need to read them in order. Start with whichever problem you are trying to solve.

You will forgive me in advance if each book keeps returning to News Marketing. That is my career lens. News Marketing is something I am proud to have pioneered in 1997, and it remains a passion. I write about brand equity, AI, and people because they matter. I write through News Marketing because that is the ground I have stood on for nearly thirty years.

I have expanded the early draft of Brand Equity to reflect conversations with my Newsworthy.ai partner, Mark Willaman, and with Tom Baker of ReportableNews.com. Newsworthy and ReportableNews compete in the same industry. We have also built an open working relationship. We meet once a week to share what is working and to celebrate our failures. Leading up to this book, we have been digging into reporting metrics with one hard question at the center: how do we properly convey to customers the value of everything a modern newswire does beyond distribution?

Brand equity has been part of that discussion from the start. This book is my attempt to put the wider frame on paper: the asset you are trying to grow, the system for growing it, and an honest way to measure what distributors, marketers, and operators can actually claim.

You will notice a theme throughout this book: consistency. Consistency is key to building brand equity. Take out your highlighter and play along. Mark every instance where I urge consistency and patience.

David A. McInnis
Newsworthy.ai