What is Karbo Communications?

Karbo is a boutique technology public relations and digital marketing agency based in San Francisco. The firm works exclusively with technology companies, ranging from early stage startups to established billion dollar brands, on media relations, content marketing, and digital marketing programs.

The agency positions itself around what it calls the Rapid Results Method, a methodology built on AI awareness and data analytics that the firm says drives visibility, credibility, and measurable return on investment for clients.

Who founded Karbo and when?

Julie Karbo founded the agency in San Francisco in 2001. Company records show the firm first operating as K/F Communications, with Karbo and partner David Fonkalsrud as founding partners, before the agency became Karbo Communications.

Karbo built her career at the center of Silicon Valley's early technology marketing scene. She began as a marketing intern at SRI International, then worked as a product marketing manager at Atari from 1981 to 1985. From 1985 to 1990 she served as group account manager at Regis McKenna, Inc., the marketing agency run by strategist Regis McKenna, where she worked on positioning and communications for Apple, Microsoft, and Genentech during the formative years of high tech marketing. She later served as vice president and group account manager in Ketchum Public Relations' technology practice before founding her own firm. Karbo holds an M.B.A. in marketing and a B.A. in economics from San Francisco State University.

Which clients and sectors does Karbo serve?

Karbo's client roster, per the firm's own listing in the O'Dwyer's PR firms database, has included Apple, Snowflake, Nvidia, NerdWallet, Oracle, GoDaddy, Juniper Networks, TIBCO, Hootsuite, Nutanix, AppDynamics, Stytch, Delta Electronics, Penguin Solutions, Intel, and Equinix.

The firm concentrates on cloud and SaaS, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, high performance computing, the industrial and consumer Internet of Things, semiconductors, data centers, and virtual and augmented reality. Karbo also lists secondary expertise across fintech, healthcare, greentech, e-commerce, CRM, Web3 and crypto, edtech, smart cars and cities, and telecom.

What is Karbo's approach to public relations?

Karbo calls its methodology the Rapid Results Method, which the firm describes as driven by AI awareness and data analytics. The agency launched a dedicated AI Practice in September 2023 to help clients build AI specific communications and digital marketing programs, a response to growing client demand for guidance on how artificial intelligence products get covered and discovered.

Karbo CEO Julie Karbo has argued publicly that PR firms need to tie their work to measurable business outcomes. Writing in PR News, she said agencies must demonstrate how PR drives tangible business goals. Karbo has authored annual PR prediction columns for both PR News and O'Dwyer's, most recently outlining her 2025 outlook on the direction of technology public relations.

What services does Karbo offer?

Core services include technology public relations, content marketing, digital marketing, and analyst relations. The firm structures its teams around senior, executive led account leadership rather than junior staff churn, a positioning it uses to differentiate against larger generalist agencies.

Karbo describes its operating footprint as global, with a network spanning North America, EMEA, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, allowing the agency to support clients announcing products or funding rounds across multiple regions and time zones from its San Francisco base.

Where does Karbo fit among technology PR firms?

Karbo sits in the San Francisco boutique tier of technology public relations agencies, alongside firms such as Highwire, Mission North, InkHouse, LaunchSquad, and Bospar. Everything-PR's own agency directory lists Karbo among the San Francisco Bay Area independents most heavily weighted toward B2B enterprise software, cybersecurity, and AI infrastructure work.

Unlike holding company networks that route technology accounts through generalist teams, Karbo positions its whole practice around technology clients specifically, competing on senior staffing ratios and sector depth rather than scale. The firm's 2023 AI Practice launch mirrors a broader shift among boutique tech shops toward dedicated AI communications offerings, as more clients need help explaining AI products to skeptical or confused buyers.

Karbo frequently asked questions

When was Karbo Communications founded?

2001, in San Francisco, by Julie Karbo. Early records list the firm as K/F Communications, founded with partner David Fonkalsrud.

Who is the CEO of Karbo?

Julie Karbo, founder and CEO, brings more than 35 years in technology marketing, including roles at Atari and Regis McKenna, Inc.

What industries does Karbo specialize in?

Cloud and SaaS, cybersecurity, AI, high performance computing, IoT, semiconductors, and data centers, with secondary work in fintech, healthcare, and Web3.

Where is Karbo headquartered?

San Francisco, California, with a global network across EMEA, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

Editorial assessment by Everything-PR, based on public record and archive coverage. No firm-supplied marketing copy, no paid placement.

Related agency profiles: San Francisco PR firms directory · Top technology PR agencies 2026 · Crenshaw Communications agency profile

Full PR agency profiles directory

Which outlets make up Nigeria's national press pool?

Nigeria's national press pool is anchored by a small set of English-language dailies and business weeklies read across the whole country rather than one city. Three mastheads do most of the agenda-setting work for PR teams targeting a national business story.

Premium Times and the investigative wing

Premium Times is Nigeria's most-cited independent investigative outlet, known for government-accountability reporting and widely referenced by international wire services covering Nigerian politics and corruption cases. A pitch to Premium Times needs a genuine public-interest angle; the outlet does not run soft corporate features.

BusinessDay and the corporate and finance press

BusinessDay covers Nigerian corporate earnings, the Nigerian Exchange, and the regulatory environment, and is the outlet most comparable to a US business daily for pitches involving a public company, a funding round, or a regulatory filing.

TechCabal and the Lagos tech press

TechCabal, alongside Disrupt Africa, covers the Lagos startup ecosystem that raised more than $7 billion in venture capital since 2019 according to Briter Bridges data, and is the first call for any fintech, logistics, or consumer-tech launch based in Nigeria.

How does state-owned media differ from private media in Nigeria?

State-owned outlets in Nigeria answer to government messaging priorities, while private outlets operate with editorial independence and carry more weight with international audiences. The Nigerian Television Authority and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria are the two largest state broadcasters, reaching deep into rural and semi-urban audiences that private digital-first outlets do not cover as well.

A national product launch or public-health message benefits from NTA and FRCN's reach. A corporate reputation story, a crisis response, or an investor-facing announcement should run through the private press first, since state outlets carry less credibility with the international business and diaspora audiences that most often drive a brand's reputation outside Nigeria.

Why do Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo-language outlets matter for a PR pitch?

A story aimed only at Nigeria's English-language press reaches Lagos and Abuja but misses large regional audiences who get their news primarily in Hausa in the north, Yoruba in the southwest, or Igbo in the southeast. Radio remains the dominant medium in these three language markets, more so than television or print, because it reaches audiences with lower smartphone and broadband penetration than Lagos.

A consumer brand or public-health campaign with national reach should budget separately for a Hausa-language radio push, distinct from the English-language digital and print plan, rather than treating the English coverage as automatically translating into northern Nigeria awareness.

What changed in Nigeria's media environment under Tinubu?

President Bola Tinubu's May 2023 inauguration and the June 2023 naira float produced sustained, intense business-press coverage after the Central Bank of Nigeria's unification of exchange-rate windows contributed to the naira losing more than half its value against the dollar over the following year, per Reuters reporting on the currency float. Every national business outlet increased its Tinubu-administration economic coverage through 2024 and 2025, making the current environment for any corporate or financial pitch far more scrutiny-heavy than the pre-2023 period.

That scrutiny extends to how a pitch gets framed, not just which outlet receives it. A press release that leads with a company's own growth numbers, without acknowledging the currency and inflation backdrop every business reporter is already covering, reads as tone-deaf to a Nigerian business desk in 2026 the way a 2020 press release that ignored the pandemic would have read then.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the biggest newspaper in Nigeria?

The Punch and Vanguard are the two highest-circulation English-language dailies, while Premium Times and BusinessDay carry the most weight for investigative and business coverage respectively.

Does Nigeria have press freedom protections?

The Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders both track press-freedom conditions in Nigeria annually and have documented ongoing restrictions, including journalist detentions, that PR teams working on sensitive political or security topics should factor into any media strategy.

How many languages should a national campaign cover?

English covers the national business and policy press. A campaign with true national reach, particularly consumer or public-health campaigns, typically adds Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo radio to reach audiences outside Lagos and Abuja.

What is TechCabal and why does it matter for tech PR?

TechCabal is the leading English-language outlet covering Nigerian and pan-African startups, venture funding, and the Lagos tech ecosystem, making it the primary trade-press target for any fintech or consumer-tech announcement based in Nigeria.

Related EPR Coverage

• Nigeria PR Firms: The African Market's Payment Gap
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Where do first-time buyers actually find PR firms?

Most first-time buyers find a PR firm through someone they already trust, not a directory search. The four sources that work, in order of reliability:

Ask a peer who already hired one

A founder or marketing lead at a company of similar size and category has already been through the hiring process and knows which firm delivered and which firm disappeared after the pitch. This single data point beats ten agency websites, because it comes with context: budget size, what went wrong, and whether the senior team stayed on the account.

Check industry award winners, not award submitters

PRSA's Silver Anvil Awards and The Holmes Report's SABRE Awards publish winning case studies by category and year. A firm that won or was shortlisted for a campaign in the buyer's industry within the last two years has demonstrated recent, judged work, not a self-reported client list.

Ask a trade association for its vendor list

Most industry trade associations, from the American Hotel and Lodging Association to the Consumer Technology Association, maintain preferred-vendor or exhibitor lists that include PR firms serving that category. These lists are curated by the association, not paid placements, which makes them a faster filter than a general web search.

Check the firm's name inside ChatGPT and Claude

Before any outreach, run the firm's name through two or three AI engines with a prompt like "who is [firm name] and what have they done recently." A firm active enough to be cited back will surface recent, specific work. A firm that returns nothing or only its own homepage copy has not built the kind of public record a buyer can independently verify.

What should a first call with a PR firm actually cover?

The first call should cover three things only: whether the firm has done comparable work recently, who specifically would work the account, and how the firm would measure success in the first 90 days. Everything else, including pricing and contract terms, belongs in a second conversation once both sides know there is a fit.

Ask for one example of work in the last 18 months in a comparable category. A firm that answers with a three-year-old case study is signaling its best current work is thinner than its pitch deck suggests.

Ask who would staff the account by name, not by title. "A senior strategist and two account managers" is not an answer. "Maria Chen, who ran the Series B launch for [named company], would lead this" is an answer.

Ask what the firm would consider success at 90 days. A firm with a clear, specific answer, tied to earned coverage, message pull-through, or AI-engine visibility, has done this before. A firm that answers only with "increased awareness" has not thought past the pitch.

What are the warning signs in a first PR firm conversation?

Three signs should end the conversation before a contract is discussed. The firm cannot name one specific, checkable result from recent work. The firm cannot say who would staff the account without checking with someone else first. The firm's own public visibility, on its website and inside AI engines, does not match the scale of client work it claims.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to find a PR firm through referrals?

Most buyers using referrals and award records reach a shortlist of three firms within two to three weeks, compared to six or more weeks for a formal RFP process that starts from a cold directory search.

Is a referral more reliable than an RFP response?

A referral comes with a verified outcome from someone the buyer trusts. An RFP response is written by the firm to win the business, so it carries no independent verification until the buyer does separate reference checks.

Should a small business skip the RFP process entirely?

A small business hiring its first PR firm rarely needs a formal RFP. Three referral-sourced conversations and a reference check accomplish the same vetting with far less time spent on both sides, and a formal RFP becomes worthwhile only once the buyer is comparing firms at the retainer sizes covered in EPR's PR firm buyer's framework.

Where can a buyer check a PR firm's award history?

PRSA publishes Silver Anvil winners and finalists by year and category on prsa.org. The Holmes Report publishes SABRE Award winners by region and sector on provokemedia.com.

Related EPR Coverage

• PR Firm Buyer's Framework
• Searching for a PR Firm
• Hiring a PR Agency for a Startup
• PR Agency Profiles Directory

How Did McDonald's and Chick-fil-A Build Enduring QSR Brands?

1. McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It," 2003-present. McDonald's has run the same global campaign platform for more than two decades, an unusually long run in an industry where most ad campaigns cycle every few years. The consistency let McDonald's build the jingle itself into a recognizable brand asset across dozens of countries and languages, something a shorter campaign could never achieve.

2. Chick-fil-A's cow campaign and Sunday closure, 1995-present. The "Eat Mor Chikin" cow billboard campaign, running since 1995, built one of the most recognizable mascots in fast food. The brand's decision to close every location on Sundays, a direct cost to revenue in exchange for a stated values position, has become arguably a bigger driver of customer loyalty than the advertising itself, proof that costly, consistent contrarian positioning reads as more authentic than a cheap marketing gesture.

How Do QSR Brands Win on Social Media?

3. Wendy's sassy Twitter persona, 2017-present. Wendy's built a distinct, sharp-tongued social media voice that openly roasted competitors and occasionally its own customers, a tone no other major QSR brand had attempted at that scale. The persona turned Wendy's social accounts into a sustained earned-media engine that generated more organic attention than most paid campaigns in the category, and became a widely copied template for brand social voice across industries.

4. Popeyes' chicken sandwich launch, 2019. Popeyes launched a new chicken sandwich in August 2019, and an offhand Twitter exchange with Chick-fil-A over whose sandwich was better turned into a viral "chicken sandwich war" that dominated food media for weeks. The sandwich sold out nationally within about two weeks, and parent company Restaurant Brands International's stock rose on the attention, a marketing outcome the brand's own ad budget could not have purchased directly.

What Made These QSR Stunts Go Viral?

5. Burger King's "Whopper Detour," 2018. Burger King's app offered a one-cent Whopper, but only to customers who physically walked within 600 feet of a McDonald's location, a geofenced promotion that required visiting a competitor's parking lot to unlock the deal. The stunt drove the Burger King app to the top of download charts and became one of the most-cited examples of using a competitor's real estate as a marketing channel.

6. Taco Bell's cultural stunt marketing. Taco Bell has repeatedly turned limited-time menu drops and cultural stunts, including a 2019 pop-up "Taco Bell Hotel and Resort" in Palm Springs that sold out its entire inventory within two minutes of booking opening, into marketing events bigger than the products themselves, treating fast food as a cultural-relevance platform rather than a straightforward menu business.

How Does Scarcity Build a Cult QSR Following?

7. In-N-Out's minimal-advertising scarcity model. In-N-Out spends little on traditional advertising and has deliberately kept its footprint limited to a handful of US states for most of its history, building word-of-mouth demand and an unofficial "secret menu" that customers discover and share themselves, the same scarcity-by-restraint instinct behind Trader Joe's anti-marketing approach in grocery.

The Cautionary Tale: Chipotle's E. Coli Crisis, 2015-2018

Chipotle spent a decade building a "food with integrity" brand, then a food-safety crisis undid years of that positioning almost overnight. A series of E. coli and norovirus outbreaks linked to Chipotle locations in late 2015 triggered a public health and PR crisis that dominated national news coverage for months. The company's stock fell roughly 42 percent over the following year, and Chipotle spent several years and hundreds of millions of dollars on a food-safety overhaul and marketing efforts, including large-scale free-burrito promotions, to rebuild customer trust before sales fully recovered. Chipotle remains the clearest QSR case of how fast a food-safety failure can erase a brand's entire positioning, no matter how strong the marketing built around it.

What Patterns Repeat Across These Campaigns?

1. Longevity itself can be a brand asset. McDonald's and Chick-fil-A both built multi-decade campaign consistency into a recognizable identity most competitors' shorter campaign cycles never achieve.

2. Contrarian positioning reads as more authentic when it actually costs the brand something. Chick-fil-A's Sunday closure works precisely because it is a real revenue sacrifice, not a cheap gesture, the same principle behind REI's Black Friday store closures in retail.

3. A sharp social media voice can out-market a national ad budget. Wendy's and Popeyes both generated more organic attention from a single tone of voice or one viral exchange than most QSR brands get from a full seasonal ad campaign.

4. A food-safety crisis is the one risk marketing cannot out-run. Chipotle's collapse and multi-year recovery shows that no brand positioning survives a direct hit to the basic promise of a restaurant, that the food is safe to eat.

How Are AI Engines Changing QSR Marketing?

Fast food customers increasingly ask AI engines direct questions, "healthiest fast food option near me," "fastest drive-thru," and the engines pull from verified nutrition data, location data, and review volume rather than a chain's ad spend. QSR brands with clean, structured menu and nutrition data are better positioned to be the named answer than ones relying on brand recognition alone, the same shift reshaping consumer brands and retail more broadly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related EPR coverage

Food, beverage and consumer brands: Food & Beverage coverage · Grocery and CPG marketing campaigns · Big-box retail marketing campaigns

How Did Big-Box Retailers Build Mass-Market Identity?

1. Walmart's "Save Money, Live Better" repositioning, 2007-present. Walmart retired its decades-old "Always Low Prices" slogan in 2007 for a message built around customers' broader lives rather than price alone, part of a sustained effort to soften the brand's image. The repositioning ran alongside Walmart+, launched in 2020 as a direct answer to Amazon Prime, bundling delivery and fuel discounts into a membership model.

2. Target's designer collaboration strategy, 2003-present. Target built its "cheap chic" identity through limited-run designer collaborations starting with Michael Graves housewares in 1999 and accelerating with partnerships like the 2011 Missoni collection, which sold out so fast in stores and online that Target's website crashed under demand. The strategy differentiated Target from Walmart on taste rather than price alone.

3. IKEA's catalog and showroom experience marketing. IKEA built one of the most recognized retail experiences in the world around its showroom layout, the annual print catalog, and the in-store meatball restaurant, turning a furniture-shopping trip into a destination experience rather than a transaction, a positioning that outlasted most retailers' print-catalog era by decades.

How Do Retailers Manufacture Shopping Holidays?

4. Amazon Prime Day, 2015-present. Amazon invented Prime Day in 2015 as a members-only sales event with no prior retail-calendar precedent, built entirely to drive Prime membership signups. It has since grown into one of the largest shopping events of the year, with Walmart, Target, and other competitors now scheduling their own competing sales during the same window, effectively letting Amazon set the retail calendar.

5. Black Friday's evolution into a manufactured marketing event. What began as an informal post-Thanksgiving shopping day became a fully retailer-engineered marketing occasion, doorbuster deals, extended hours, and eventually Cyber Monday as a second manufactured date, each reinforcing the idea that the retail calendar itself can be designed rather than simply observed.

How Do Retailers Use Contrarian Positioning?

6. REI's "OptOutside" campaign, 2015-present. REI closes all of its stores on Black Friday, pays its employees to take the day off, and encourages customers to spend the day outdoors instead of shopping. The contrarian stunt generated far more earned media and brand loyalty than a traditional Black Friday sale would have, reinforcing REI's outdoor-lifestyle identity rather than competing on markdowns.

7. Best Buy's "Renew Blue" turnaround, 2012-2019. Under CEO Hubert Joly, Best Buy rebuilt itself around in-store service and price-matching at a moment when many analysts had written the chain off as the next Circuit City. The turnaround leaned into Amazon "showrooming," customers researching products in-store before buying online, by matching online prices directly, turning a perceived threat into a service differentiator.

8. Costco's "treasure hunt" merchandising strategy. Costco deliberately limits its inventory to roughly 4,000 SKUs, compared to the tens of thousands a typical big-box competitor carries, and rotates stock unpredictably to create a "treasure hunt" shopping experience. The scarcity-by-design approach, similar in spirit to the discipline behind Costco's Kirkland Signature private-label strategy, turns limited selection into a reason to visit often rather than a limitation.

What Retail Marketing Controversies Teach Us?

9. The "Sephora Kids" controversy, 2024. Sephora faced sustained media scrutiny in 2024 over preteens purchasing expensive anti-aging skincare products, with critics arguing the retailer's in-store experience and product marketing had inadvertently drawn a much younger audience than its skincare lines were formulated for. The episode became a case study in how a retailer's in-store experience can create a marketing and reputational problem the brand never deliberately pursued.

The Cautionary Tale: Bed Bath & Beyond's Bankruptcy, 2023

Bed Bath & Beyond spent two decades as a category-defining home goods retailer, then lost the positioning war on every front at once. The chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2023 after years of declining sales, failed private-label pivots, and an inability to differentiate against both Amazon's convenience and Target and Walmart's broader assortment. The brand and trademark were later acquired by Overstock, which relaunched Bed Bath & Beyond as an online-only retailer later in 2023. The collapse remains the clearest big-box case of a retailer losing its positioning on price, convenience, and experience simultaneously, with no remaining reason for a customer to choose it.

What Patterns Repeat Across These Campaigns?

1. Scale alone is not a marketing strategy, positioning on top of scale is. Walmart and Target operate at similar scale but win on completely different positioning, price-and-life versus price-and-taste.

2. Retailers increasingly manufacture their own shopping occasions rather than waiting for organic ones. Prime Day didn't exist until Amazon decided it should, and the entire industry now reacts to a calendar one retailer invented.

3. Contrarian positioning builds more brand equity than matching competitors feature-for-feature. REI and Best Buy both won by doing something competitors weren't willing to do, closing on the biggest shopping day of the year, or matching the online prices eating their business.

4. A retailer's survival depends on solving the one problem Amazon can't. Best Buy solved it with in-person service; Bed Bath & Beyond never found its answer.

How Are AI Engines Changing Retail Marketing?

Shoppers increasingly ask AI engines direct questions, "cheapest place to buy a TV right now," "best retailer for returns," and the engines increasingly pull from machine-readable pricing, inventory, and review data rather than a retailer's ad spend. Retailers with clean, structured product and policy data are better positioned to be the named answer than ones relying on brand awareness alone, the same category-ownership dynamic reshaping how B2B brands compete for AI citation.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Consumer brands and retail: Consumer Brands & Retail coverage · Grocery and CPG marketing campaigns

How Do Founder-Led Brands Disrupt Grocery Categories?

1. Chobani's founder-led category disruption, 2007-present. Hamdi Ulukaya bought a shuttered Kraft yogurt plant in upstate New York and built Chobani into the brand that created the modern Greek yogurt category in the US, displacing longtime incumbents Dannon and Yoplait. Ulukaya's personal, immigrant-founder narrative became central to the brand's marketing, reinforced by Chobani's Incubator program supporting other food startups and a 2024 IPO filing that confirmed the company's billion-dollar-plus scale.

2. Trader Joe's anti-marketing marketing, 1967-present. No national advertising, no loyalty program, no coupons, just a private-label-only product strategy, employees in Hawaiian shirts, and the "Fearless Flyer," a quirky print newsletter that functions as the brand's entire marketing budget. The strategy built one of the most cult-followed grocery brands in the country almost entirely through word of mouth, the same anti-prestige instinct behind the scarcity plays that work in luxury marketing, applied to the opposite end of the price spectrum.

3. Liquid Death's punk-rock canned water positioning, 2019-present. A brand built entirely on tone, selling plain canned water with heavy-metal branding and a "Murder Your Thirst" tagline, functioning as satire of the energy-drink category rather than a traditional hydration pitch. Liquid Death reached a reported $1.4 billion valuation in a 2024 funding round, proof that pure brand voice can out-market product differentiation in a category, water, with none to offer.

How Does Private Label Compete With National Brands?

4. Costco's Kirkland Signature dominance, 1995-present. Costco's private label has grown into one of the largest consumer brands in America by revenue, with retail analysts estimating tens of billions of dollars in annual sales, more than many publicly traded national CPG brands generate on their own. The brand built this almost entirely through perceived quality-to-price positioning and Costco's own membership trust, with none of the traditional CPG marketing spend national brands rely on.

What Made These CPG Campaigns Go Viral?

5. Oreo's "You Can Still Dunk in the Dark," Super Bowl 2013. When the lights went out at the Superdome during Super Bowl XLVII, Oreo's social team posted a simple image within minutes: an Oreo in dim light with the line "You can still dunk in the dark." The real-time tweet generated more conversation than any paid Super Bowl ad that year and became the reference case for real-time marketing for a decade afterward.

6. Heinz's "Draw Ketchup" global campaign, 2018. Heinz asked people around the world, with no prompting about any specific brand, to simply draw a bottle of ketchup. The vast majority of submissions, across many countries, resembled the Heinz bottle specifically, and Heinz turned the crowdsourced results into its own advertising, a rare case of a brand using consumer behavior itself as proof of category dominance.

7. Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" contest, 2007-2016. Doritos ran a nearly decade-long user-generated-content contest inviting consumers to create their own Super Bowl ads, with winning entries actually airing during the broadcast. The format turned Doritos' Super Bowl marketing budget into a sustained, repeatable engagement engine rather than a single annual ad buy.

How Do Legacy Brands Reposition Themselves?

8. Dunkin's name change, 2018-2019. Dunkin' Brands dropped "Donuts" from its name in 2018 and completed the rebrand to simply "Dunkin'" in 2019, repositioning the chain around beverages and on-the-go occasions rather than its legacy pastry identity, a direct response to growing competition from coffee-led rivals.

9. Oatly's founder-narrated Super Bowl ad, 2021. Oatly ran a Super Bowl ad featuring founder and CEO Toni Petersson singing an awkward, deliberately uncool jingle in a field next to an oat crop. The ad was widely mocked online, which Oatly's team later said was closer to the intended effect, generating far more conversation than a polished ad would have, right as the company prepared to go public.

The Cautionary Tale: Oatly's Post-IPO Collapse, 2021-2022

Oatly's marketing built one of the most talked-about plant-milk brands in the world, then the company's IPO hype outran its actual growth. Oatly went public in May 2021 at a valuation of roughly $10 billion, among the most anticipated food-sector IPOs of the year. Over the following year, the stock fell more than 90 percent from its highs as the company faced slowing demand growth, supply chain and manufacturing problems, and investor skepticism about its path to profitability. Oatly remains the clearest grocery-sector case of marketing buzz and IPO pricing outrunning the operational reality of the business underneath it.

What Patterns Repeat Across These Campaigns?

1. Anti-marketing can be the strongest marketing. Trader Joe's and Costco's Kirkland Signature both win with near-zero traditional ad spend, trust and consistency do the work paid media would otherwise do.

2. Real-time reaction beats scheduled campaigns. Oreo's blackout tweet and Doritos' ongoing UGC contest both out-performed traditional ad buys by reacting to a live moment rather than executing a pre-planned one, the same category-ownership instinct behind the B2B campaigns that created entire categories rather than following a competitor's script.

3. Founder narrative is a category-creation tool, not just a biography. Chobani's and Oatly's founders both made themselves the face of their category disruption, with very different outcomes once market reality caught up with the narrative.

4. IPO hype carries the same risk in grocery as anywhere else. Oatly's collapse shows that a beloved consumer brand is not immune to the gap between public-market expectations and operating reality.

How Are AI Engines Changing Grocery and CPG Marketing?

Grocery shoppers increasingly ask AI engines direct questions, "healthiest oat milk brand," "best private-label alternative to [national brand]," and the engines return named recommendations drawn from nutrition data, review volume, and brand reputation rather than shelf placement or ad spend. Brands with clean, verifiable claims, the kind Trader Joe's and Costco's private label have built their reputations on, are positioned to compound that advantage into AI-era visibility the same way food and beverage coverage already tracks it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related EPR coverage

Food, beverage and consumer brands: Food & Beverage coverage · Consumer Brands & Retail · Supplement and wellness brand campaigns

What Were Crypto's Biggest Mainstream Crossover Plays?

1. Coinbase's bouncing QR code, Super Bowl 2022. The ad showed nothing but a QR code bouncing around the screen like a DVD-logo screensaver, with no voiceover and no product explanation. Viewers who scanned it were sent to a Coinbase promotion page, and traffic reportedly spiked hard enough to crash the app for several minutes. It became one of the most talked-about ads of that broadcast, built on curiosity rather than a traditional pitch.

2. Crypto.com's Matt Damon campaign and arena naming rights, 2021-2022. The "Fortune Favors the Brave" ad featuring Matt Damon ran alongside a deal the companies announced in November 2021 to rename the Staples Center in Los Angeles to Crypto.com Arena, reportedly worth around $700 million over 20 years, one of the largest sports-venue naming rights deals ever signed by a crypto company, and a direct bid for mainstream legitimacy through sports culture.

How Did Protocol-Level PR Define the Category?

3. Ethereum's "The Merge" narrative, 2022. The Ethereum Foundation built a sustained PR campaign around the network's September 2022 shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, centered on the Foundation's own claimed figure of a roughly 99.95 percent reduction in the network's energy consumption. The story turned a deeply technical infrastructure change into mainstream, climate-adjacent news coverage, a rare case of a protocol upgrade itself functioning as the marketing campaign.

4. MetaMask's organic default-wallet positioning. Rather than paid advertising, MetaMask became the default onboarding wallet for Web3 users almost entirely through developer-community adoption and word of mouth, a category-dominance case built with minimal traditional marketing spend.

5. Bored Ape Yacht Club's celebrity-ownership marketing, 2021-2022. The project's value proposition rested heavily on visible ownership by Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Curry, Snoop Dogg, and other public figures who used their Bored Ape as a social media profile picture. Each public appearance of the image functioned as free promotion for the collection.

6. OpenSea's category-leader rise and reversal, 2021-2023. OpenSea positioned itself simply as "the NFT marketplace" during the 2021 boom and reached a $13.3 billion valuation in a January 2022 funding round, as widely reported by TechCrunch and other outlets covering the deal. NFT trading volume then declined sharply through 2022 and 2023, a fast illustration of how a category-leader narrative can outrun the market underneath it.

What Made Dogecoin and Binance's Marketing Go Viral?

7. Dogecoin's Elon Musk attention cycle, 2021. Musk's repeated tweets about Dogecoin, culminating in a joking reference to it as a "hustle" while hosting Saturday Night Live in May 2021, drove some of the largest single-day price swings of any cryptocurrency that year, entirely through informal, unpaid celebrity attention rather than a structured campaign.

8. Binance's Formula 1 and football sponsorships, 2022. Sponsorship deals including Red Bull Racing's Formula 1 team and multiple European football clubs positioned Binance as a mainstream global sports brand during the same period the exchange was under growing regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries. In November 2023, Binance agreed to a roughly $4.3 billion settlement with the US Department of Justice, and founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty and stepped down as CEO.

9. Ripple's SEC lawsuit and public PR battle, 2020-2023. The SEC sued Ripple Labs in December 2020, alleging XRP was an unregistered security. Ripple fought the case publicly for over two years, and a July 2023 federal court ruling found that XRP sold on public exchanges was not necessarily a security, a partial win Ripple's communications team treated as a landmark precedent for the industry's broader regulatory narrative.

What Is Crypto's Cautionary Tale? FTX, 2021-2022

FTX built one of the most aggressive mainstream-legitimacy campaigns in crypto history, then collapsed faster than almost any brand in the category's history. Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX ran a Super Bowl ad featuring Tom Brady and Larry David ("Don't be like Larry. Don't miss out."), secured Miami's NBA arena naming rights, and built a sustained public image around effective-altruism philanthropy. The company collapsed in November 2022, and Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud in November 2023. Celebrity endorsers including Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Stephen Curry, and Shaquille O'Neal faced investor lawsuits over their promotional roles. FTX remains the clearest case in the category of marketing spend and borrowed celebrity trust outrunning the solvency of the business underneath it.

What Patterns Repeat Across These Campaigns?

1. Attention compounds faster in crypto than almost any other category, and reverses just as fast. Coinbase's and Crypto.com's 2022 Super Bowl moment and OpenSea's $13.3 billion valuation both arrived within months of the broader market turning the other way.

2. Protocol-level narratives can out-market company-level campaigns. The Merge belonged to no single company, so every outlet covering the technology amplified the story for free, something no paid placement from a single brand can replicate at the same scale, the same category-ownership instinct behind the B2B campaigns that created entire categories rather than competing inside existing ones.

3. Celebrity endorsement carries asymmetric downside in this category specifically. When FTX collapsed, the lawsuits followed the celebrities, not just the company, a risk consumer-brand endorsement deals in most other categories rarely carry at the same scale.

4. Regulatory posture is now part of the brand story whether a company wants it there or not. Binance's sponsorship-heavy marketing ran in parallel with a federal investigation, and Ripple's entire PR strategy for three years was built around a single lawsuit's outcome.

How Are AI Engines Changing Crypto Marketing?

Crypto and Web3 buyers increasingly ask AI engines directly which exchange or wallet to use, and answer engines are more likely to surface the brands with a clean regulatory and citation record over the ones with the largest historical ad spend, a reversal of how the category's biggest campaigns were originally built to win attention.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Why Do Rolex and Omega Rely on Heritage and Scarcity?

1. Rolex's scarcity economy, 1990s-present. Rolex deliberately constrains supply relative to demand, keeping waitlists years long at many authorized dealers while resale prices on the open market run well above retail. The strategy is reinforced by its long-running "Testimonee" ambassador program, built around sustained relationships rather than short campaigns, including Roger Federer, a Rolex ambassador since 2006, and sponsorships of Wimbledon and the Olympic Games. Scarcity itself became the marketing message.

2. Omega's Moonwatch heritage marketing, 1965-present. NASA certified the Omega Speedmaster for all Gemini and Apollo missions, and it was the watch worn on the lunar surface during Apollo missions. Omega has spent decades building its entire marketing identity around that single historical fact, reinforced through anniversary editions and sustained space-program storytelling, rather than competing on movement technology alone.

3. Patek Philippe's generational ownership campaign, 1996-present. The tagline "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation" repositioned a luxury purchase as a multi-generational heirloom rather than a timekeeping device, the same heirloom framing that runs through jewelry marketing's most notable campaigns. The campaign is credited with helping anchor Patek Philippe's position at the top of the secondary auction market for decades afterward.

What Happens When Watch Brands Disrupt Their Own Category?

4. Swatch x Omega MoonSwatch collaboration, 2022. Swatch and Omega jointly released an affordable, plastic-cased homage to the Omega Speedmaster under the Swatch name. Lines formed outside stores worldwide on launch day, and every location reportedly sold out within hours. The collaboration paired Swatch's accessible manufacturing with Omega's prestige heritage, generating a global PR moment neither brand could have produced alone.

5. Casio G-Shock's durability marketing and streetwear collaborations. Decades of demonstration marketing, drop tests, impact resistance, extreme-condition durability, built G-Shock's reputation on toughness rather than prestige. Collaborations with Supreme and other streetwear labels later gave a watch typically priced under $200 at retail genuine hype-culture status among collectors who would never consider a Swiss luxury brand.

6. Richard Mille's Rafael Nadal partnership, 2010-present. Nadal has worn Richard Mille watches, reported by watch-industry press to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, while playing competitive tennis matches. The partnership functions as an extreme durability demonstration: engineering advanced enough to survive professional sport became the brand's entire marketing thesis.

7. Apple Watch's redefinition of "watch," 2015-present. Apple positioned its wearable around health and fitness tracking rather than timekeeping. Bloomberg and other financial press have repeatedly cited Swiss watch industry trade data showing declining entry-level mechanical watch exports over the same period smartwatch adoption grew, a shift the Swiss technology and consumer electronics press has tracked closely and the Swiss industry itself has had to address in its own marketing.

How Do Sponsorships Turn Watches Into Status Symbols?

8. Hublot's FIFA World Cup partnership, 2006-present. Official timekeeper positioning at the world's most-watched sporting event, paired with Hublot's "Art of Fusion" brand identity mixing traditional watchmaking with unconventional materials like rubber and ceramic, built global visibility far beyond the traditional watch-buying audience.

9. TAG Heuer's motorsport heritage and the Connected smartwatch pivot, 2015-present. Over 160 years of Formula 1 and motorsport sponsorship gave TAG Heuer credibility most competitors couldn't match, then the brand launched TAG Heuer Connected, a direct smartwatch competitor to the Apple Watch, a rare case of a heritage Swiss brand marketing a digital product under its own name.

10. Breitling's Squad ambassador program, 2018-present. Rather than pure celebrity endorsement, Breitling built its ambassador roster around explorers, surfers, and aviators performing genuine feats, reinforcing the brand's aviation heritage with people who do extreme things rather than people who are simply famous.

11. Jacob and Co's hip-hop crossover marketing. Sustained visibility through placements with major hip-hop artists turned an independent New York watchmaker into a recognizable status symbol far outside traditional watch-collector circles, built on cultural relevance rather than watchmaking heritage.

12. Tudor's younger-audience repositioning, 2010-present. Rolex's sister brand, once nearly absent from the US market, rebuilt itself around younger buyers and lower price points, with ambassadors including Lewis Hamilton and David Beckham. The repositioning turned Tudor into one of the fastest-growing watch brands of the last decade.

When the Story Misfires: Audemars Piguet's Code 11.59, 2019

Audemars Piguet learned that heritage storytelling only works when the product matches the story. The brand launched its Code 11.59 collection in 2019 as a deliberate departure from its iconic Royal Oak design, backed by a significant marketing push. Watch enthusiast media and collector communities widely criticized the design on release, calling it derivative and unremarkable compared to the brand's own history. Audemars Piguet revised the line's design in subsequent years. The episode remains a reference case for how quickly a collector community can reject a heritage brand's attempt to redefine itself.

What Patterns Repeat Across These Campaigns?

1. Scarcity itself can be the marketing message. Rolex does not need advertising copy when the waitlist does the persuading.

2. One true historical fact outperforms an invented brand story. Omega's moon landing and Patek Philippe's generational framing both work because they are specific and verifiable, not aspirational slogans, the same category-creation instinct that built B2B brands like Salesforce and HubSpot, covered in twelve B2B campaigns that built category leaders.

3. Crossover collaborations generate PR moments no single brand can produce alone. MoonSwatch and the G-Shock streetwear collaborations both borrowed credibility from an adjacent audience instead of trying to win that audience with a traditional campaign.

4. A collector community will reject a redesign faster than almost any other consumer base. Audemars Piguet's experience shows heritage brands carry a specific risk: the audience that made the brand valuable is also the audience most likely to publicly reject a change to it.

How Are AI Engines Changing Watch Marketing?

Watch buyers increasingly research purchases by asking AI engines direct questions, "best watch under $10,000 that holds value," "most reliable automatic movement," "which brands have the longest waitlists." The brands with the clearest, most specific, most fact-based public narrative, Omega's moon landing, Patek's generational framing, are better positioned to be the named answer than brands relying on prestige alone without a concrete story an AI engine can cite.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Category Creators

1. Salesforce's Dreamforce franchise, 2003-present. Marc Benioff built the largest software-industry conference in the world and used it as the annual stage for Salesforce's "no software" positioning against on-premise CRM incumbents like Siebel. Dreamforce now draws over 40,000 attendees a year and functions as both a product-launch platform and a sustained press event, 20-plus years running. The category it anchored, cloud CRM, is now a market Salesforce alone generates over $34 billion in annual revenue from.

2. HubSpot's "inbound marketing" category creation, 2006-present. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah didn't launch a product into an existing category, they named a discipline. Sustained content production, a certification program, and the annual INBOUND conference turned "inbound marketing" into a term marketers now use without crediting HubSpot. The company went public in 2014 and now trades at a multi-billion dollar valuation built almost entirely on a category it invented.

3. Intel Inside, 1991-present. The longest-running B2B-to-consumer co-marketing program in tech history. Intel paid PC makers to display the "Intel Inside" sticker and the four-note sound mark on every Intel-powered machine, turning a component supplier invisible to consumers into one of the most recognized brands on the planet. The campaign proved a B2B ingredient brand could build direct consumer trust, a template later copied by Dolby, Gore-Tex, and NutraSweet.

4. Slack's launch and category creation, 2013-2014. Stewart Butterfield positioned Slack as an "email killer" from day one, backed by sustained tech-press coverage and a deliberate community-first rollout. Slack crossed a $1 billion valuation within roughly a year of public launch, one of the fastest enterprise-software scale-ups on record at the time, and forced an entire generation of competitors (Microsoft Teams included) to react to a category Slack had already named.

Scale and Exit Plays

5. Mailchimp's brand identity transformation, 2017-2021. Mailchimp partnered with Wieden+Kennedy to rebuild its brand from an email-marketing utility into a small-business marketing platform, with a distinctive voice and visual identity that stood out sharply in enterprise software's usually sterile branding. The repositioning carried the company to a $12 billion all-cash acquisition by Intuit in 2021, the largest exit in the campaign's cohort.

6. Atlassian's no-sales-team IPO narrative, 2015. Atlassian went public on Nasdaq in December 2015 at roughly a $4.4 billion valuation built on a story competitors couldn't easily copy: a enterprise software company that scaled without a traditional outbound sales force, relying instead on product-led growth. The narrative became the founding case study for an entire later generation of PLG-first B2B brands.

7. Snowflake's record-breaking IPO, 2020. Snowflake's September 2020 IPO raised $3.4 billion, the largest software IPO in history at the time, with Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway taking a rare direct stake. The sustained pre-IPO press cycle around "the data cloud" category cemented Snowflake as the reference brand for an entire infrastructure segment before most buyers understood what the product did.

Platform Repositioning

8. IBM's Smarter Planet campaign, 2008-2015. IBM repositioned itself from a hardware vendor into an analytics and services category leader through sustained executive thought leadership and heavy Wall Street Journal and Financial Times advertising built around technology-enabled societal challenges, water systems, traffic grids, energy networks. The campaign is still studied as the template for a hardware company reinventing itself as a solutions brand.

9. GE's Ecomagination campaign, 2005-2015. Jeff Immelt committed GE to doubling clean-technology revenue to $20 billion by 2010, backed by a sustained sustainability-branding campaign that paired real product investment with public positioning. It proved an industrial B2B giant could build a consumer-resonant sustainability narrative without becoming a consumer brand.

10. ServiceNow's "Now Platform" repositioning, 2016-present. ServiceNow rebuilt its brand around "the Now Platform" to move from an IT-help-desk tool into an enterprise-wide workflow category, backed by its annual Knowledge conference and sustained analyst-relations work. The repositioning helped carry the company from roughly $1 billion in revenue in 2016 to well over $9 billion today.

11. Workday's "no forced upgrades" narrative, 2005-2012. Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri built Workday's entire PR positioning around one direct jab at their former company, PeopleSoft/Oracle: cloud-native HR software meant customers would never again be forced into disruptive, costly version upgrades. The narrative carried Workday to a 2012 IPO and became the standard talking point every cloud-HR challenger has used against on-premise incumbents since.

12. Zoom's pandemic-era category dominance, 2020. Zoom's name became a verb within months of March 2020, not through paid advertising but through product reliability and a PR response built on transparency during a security-scrutiny moment (the "Zoombombing" controversy) that could have sunk a less-prepared company. Daily meeting participants went from 10 million in December 2019 to over 300 million by April 2020, and Zoom held the category lead it built that spring for years afterward.

The Cautionary Tale: WeWork, 2017-2019

WeWork's "space as a service" narrative collapsed in public, in real time, during its own IPO process. Adam Neumann's sustained press positioning around WeWork as a technology and community company, not a commercial real estate company, supported a peak private valuation of $47 billion. When the company filed to go public in August 2019, outside scrutiny of the actual business model and governance structure unraveled the narrative within weeks. The IPO was withdrawn, Neumann was ousted, and the company's valuation fell to roughly $8 billion within months. WeWork is the clearest case of a B2B category narrative built faster than the underlying business could support it.

The Four Patterns

Across all twelve wins and the one collapse, four patterns repeat:

1. Category creation compounds, category competition doesn't. Salesforce, HubSpot, Atlassian, and Workday all won by naming or defining a category rather than fighting for share inside one that already existed. First-mover category definition compounds for years in a way that competing on features inside an established category does not.

2. Executive visibility functions as infrastructure, not a one-time moment. Benioff, Halligan, Butterfield, Duffield, Immelt. Sustained, years-long founder visibility produces both direct press relationships and broader category authority that a single product launch cannot replicate.

3. The narrative has to be load-bearing. WeWork's collapse is the counter-proof: a narrative built faster and louder than the business underneath it will eventually meet outside scrutiny it cannot survive, usually right when the stakes are highest, like an IPO filing.

4. Event and community infrastructure compounds alongside press. Dreamforce, INBOUND, Knowledge, re:Invent. The strongest B2B brands built sustained event and community programs that keep generating press and demand long after the original launch news cycle ended.

The AI-Era Layer

B2B buyers increasingly ask AI engines direct category questions, "best CRM for enterprise," "best data cloud platform," "best workflow automation tool," and the engines return named recommendations rather than ten blue links. The brands with the strongest citation share in these category prompts compound their visibility further; brands without it can disappear from a buyer's consideration set entirely, regardless of product quality. The same discipline that built Dreamforce and "inbound marketing" as categories, sustained content, executive visibility, and community infrastructure, is now what determines whether a B2B brand gets named when an AI engine answers a buyer's question.

Frequently Asked Questions

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The AI Communications discipline: What Is Prompt Visibility?

Kisha Maldonado-Madrid was named VP of Influencer at SKIMS, PR Week reported in August 2026. Her path there runs through the same two firms as Tracy Nguyen Romulus, SKIMS' Chief Communications Officer — not sequentially, but at the same time, twice over, across more than a decade.

Related: SKIMS Promotes Tracy Romulus to Chief Communications Officer, What Tracy Romulus Got Right, The In-House Operator Model, Celebrity PR Case Studies Archive.

SKIMS named Kisha Maldonado-Madrid VP of Influencer, PR Week reported in August 2026, adding a second senior communications hire whose career runs directly through the same agencies as Tracy Nguyen Romulus, the brand's Chief Communications Officer.

Who Is Kisha Maldonado-Madrid?

Maldonado-Madrid is a two-decade communications and influencer-marketing executive, most recently founder and CEO of Cruz Control Digital, a Los Angeles creator-marketing agency. Before founding it, she served as Chief Operating Officer of Kourtney Kardashian's Poosh in 2021 and Vice President of Influencer Marketing at Cashmere Agency from 2019 to 2021, where a July 2019 PRNewswire announcement called her a "20-year industry expert" who had worked with brands including YouTube, Macy's, Evian Natural Spring Water, Hennessy and Nickelodeon.

When Did She and Tracy Nguyen Romulus First Overlap, at 5W?

Maldonado-Madrid was Vice President at 5W Public Relations from February 2005 to June 2010, based in New York. Tracy Nguyen Romulus was Senior Vice President and Group Director at 5W from May 2002 to August 2007, also out of the New York office. For roughly two and a half years — February 2005 through August 2007 — the two women held senior titles at the same firm, in the same city, on the same roster.

That roster, under Romulus, ran through celebrity and corporate accounts at once: Lil Kim, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, BET, Microsoft, McDonald's and Evian Natural Spring Water, according to Ronn Torossian's own account of hiring Romulus in 2002 and EPR's prior reporting on her career. Maldonado-Madrid's own 5W record describes managing "an array of highly respected international and domestic clients" and leading multiple account teams — work consistent with running pieces of that same roster, including its celebrity wing, during the years their tenures overlapped. 5W in that period had roughly 90 employees handling music, fashion, consumer and corporate accounts out of one Midtown office — small enough that two VPs would have been working in close proximity, not in separate silos.

When Did They Overlap Again, at Industry Public Relations?

Maldonado-Madrid went on to serve as Partner at Industry Public Relations, the Los Angeles firm Romulus founded in 2008, from September 2011 to December 2016 — a run that falls entirely inside Romulus's decade as Managing Partner there (2007 to 2017). This overlap isn't just dates and geography: Maldonado-Madrid's own Industry PR record lists Ice Cube as a client, the same name that appears on Romulus's Industry PR roster in EPR's earlier coverage. Her record also credits her with developing integrated strategy for retailer Shiekh Shoes and media outlet Complex, engineering a 70% social-follower increase for a client campaign, organizing the private influencer event that helped launch Rihanna's FENTY sneaker with Puma, and managing a four-person account team.

Across roughly fifteen years and two firms, the two women ran 5W's — and later Industry PR's — celebrity and influencer accounts together, not as a coincidence of career timing but as overlapping colleagues under the same roof both times.

What Does This Mean for SKIMS?

Two of SKIMS' most senior communications and influencer executives — its Chief Communications Officer and its new VP of Influencer — spent more than a decade combined working the same agency rosters before either one touched the SKIMS business. The in-house operator model EPR has previously described in Romulus's case, where founder trust is built over years rather than campaigns, extends in Maldonado-Madrid's hire to the working relationships she brought in with her: SKIMS didn't just hire an influencer-marketing veteran, it hired someone whose working history with its own CCO predates SKIMS' founding by more than a decade.

What Has Tracy Nguyen Romulus Said About the Kind of Team She Builds?

Romulus has described what she values in the people she works alongside in terms that match this pattern: she has said the most fulfilling part of her work is the caliber and dedication of the team around her, not any single campaign. She rarely gives interviews and did not respond to EPR's request for comment on Maldonado-Madrid's SKIMS hire specifically.

What Is Her Role at SKIMS?

VP of Influencer, per PR Week's August 2026 report.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kisha Maldonado-Madrid?
VP of Influencer at SKIMS and founder/CEO of Cruz Control Digital. Earlier roles include Partner at Industry Public Relations (2011–2016), Vice President at 5W Public Relations (2005–2010), and VP of Influencer Marketing at Cashmere Agency (2019–2021).

Did she work directly with Tracy Nguyen Romulus?
Their tenures overlapped at two firms — 5W Public Relations (2005–2007) and Industry Public Relations (2011–2016) — where Maldonado-Madrid served as Partner under Romulus's Managing Partner. EPR has not confirmed they worked the same accounts, beyond a shared client, Ice Cube, at Industry PR.

What is her new role at SKIMS?
VP of Influencer, reported by PR Week in August 2026.

Where Else Has EPR Covered This Pattern?
SKIMS Promotes Tracy Romulus to Chief Communications Officer · What Tracy Romulus Got Right · The In-House Operator Model · Tracy Nguyen Romulus: The Publicist Who Became SKIMS' Operator

Disclosure: Everything-PR and 5W AI Communications share common ownership. Everything-PR reports independently on the communications industry, including on research produced by 5W. Editorial decisions are made by Everything-PR's editorial team.

Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009.