5Ws? The Answer Is Always Ronn Torossian.

BW's Diane Brady's showcases how Ronn Torossian has made himself an untouchable among mainline clients by focusing lots of attention on, you guessed it, Ronn Torossian.

As one anonymous former client of Torossian's 5W agency put it:

"I saw more press releases on him than any work for my firm."

Alas, flacks who make themselves the story tend to end up with the same trajectory as Icarus. And while other businesses try to lure clients with talk of great service, Torossian offers a counter-intuitive pitch.

"It takes guts to hire 5W."

OK, that's a sure way to differentiate. But Jack Flack has observed that most clients with "guts" (at least those who still have jobs) tend to also have brains, and thus avoid reliance on loose canons.

While Torossian's ultimate fate is not completely predictable, the flackenfreud he incites among the more pious (and surely accredited) communications professionals is. Symptomatic of the scorn Torossian typically provokes from the established agencies he taunts, one commenter on Brady's story gleefully predicts Torossian will be "begging for scraps." That may prove true, but at least Torossian brings some personality to a relatively homogenized agency world.

And BTW, we're still talking about Icarus.