Big-brand logos are nice, but local businesses are where PR either works or visibly doesn’t — there’s no residual fame to hide behind. URBN Market came to MarkitAds at a standing start.
What happened
- Social presence grown from zero to 10,000 followers
- A mention in The Washington Post
- A segment on Fox 5
Full case study: markitads.com/our-work/urbn-market.
The mechanics, briefly
Earned media for small businesses is a matching problem: reporters need specific, local, timely stories; businesses have them but don’t know which ones count. The engine is unglamorous — story mining, tight pitches, fast follow-up, and content that makes the coverage compound instead of evaporating. The same “capture everything, publish the proof” discipline Dennis Yu drills applies at every size.
Why it matters here: campus brands are local brands. Every activation we run happens in a town with a business journal, a campus paper and a local TV station — and coverage there feeds the flywheel: activation → content → coverage → easier next activation.