Priscila Martinez, Vicaria: Multicultural PR for Beauty, Fashion, and Entertainment

Originally published April 2021. Updated September 2026 — now includes the agency's origin story as The Brand Agency.

Part of PR Agency Q&A Profiles · See also: V2 Communications · Pamela Zapata, Society Eighteen

Priscila Martinez is the CEO and founder of three award-winning global creative communications agencies: The Brand Agency, Vicaria Multicultural Agency, and 1795 Communications. She is an expert in entertainment, fashion, beauty, and lifestyle, with clients ranging from household-name brands to international pop icons. Awards include Best Branding and Communications Firm, the CES Innovation Award, and Best PR Firm on the West Coast. Martinez has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and AdWeek.

From The Brand Agency to Vicaria Multicultural

Martinez founded The Brand Agency around 2015 as a female-only, minority-certified PR firm operating across fashion, beauty, entertainment, and tech. Its original roster included Motorola, Amazon Studios, and Playboy. The firm was among the first PR shops to recognize the severity of COVID — cancelling all SXSW client travel and three major Los Angeles activations in the first week of March 2020, and later helping a client's virtual escape-room launch draw over 3,700 sign-ups at a time when most brands struggled to fill a Zoom call. The Brand Agency later rebranded as Vicaria Multicultural, expanding its positioning around multicultural PR for beauty, fashion, and entertainment brands.

The Interview

Q: What is Vicaria Multicultural Agency's mission?

A: Vicaria was born out of observations that multicultural talent and consumers were being significantly underserved. The lack of diversity in decision-making rooms meant niche media outlets and audiences were overlooked in campaign planning. Vicaria acts as a turnkey solution for general market brands hoping to reach niche audiences — plugging into existing strategies and amplifying them with multicultural media and talent, or ideating alongside clients to create campaigns from scratch.

Q: Why was a multicultural-dedicated agency important?

A: Multicultural audiences and talent are often treated as an afterthought in big campaigns. Demographics are changing. We recognized the need for an agency that provides turnkey solutions for larger brands that either don't have those sensibilities in-house or haven't yet entered the multicultural space. The U.S. multicultural population now represents the majority of population growth and substantial purchasing power in beauty, fashion, food, and entertainment — the sectors where Vicaria operates.

Q: What clients does Vicaria serve?

A: Our client list straddles a broad spectrum — household-name brands and publicly traded companies to international pop icons. The entertainment and fashion sectors are core.

Q: A standout project?

A: Natti Natasha was our mandate to present to general market media organically. We chose NYFW as the playground and executed a general market media campaign. Secured coverage in Forbes, Entertainment Tonight, Billboard Magazine, and WWD — which named her "fashion week's top celebrity with the highest media impact." That strategy developed her US brand and had major fashion houses approaching for collaborations.

Q: Company culture?

A: Incredibly buttoned up and corporate, but also scrappy. We value passion and collaboration and don't subscribe to the large-agency model of internal competition. Our team strives for the same goal: great work that touches underserved communities in an authentic way.

Q: The future of multicultural PR?

A: With a fast-growing multicultural demographic throughout the U.S., brands must adapt quickly. They risk their livelihood if they don't seek out diverse audiences with authentic strategies. And in the AI era, authenticity compounds differently than broadcast messaging. Community-sourced content from multicultural audiences — discussion threads, community media, creator content, reviews — is the kind of independently-produced signal that AI engines weight heavily in citation decisions.