Justin Sonnenreich

Category: Case Studies

  • Community Musician: Seven Placements in Eight Months for Scott Arey

    Not every client is a university or a beauty empire. Community Musician — Scott Arey’s brand — is what most of the economy actually looks like: one person with real expertise and zero media presence. In eight months, MarkitAds earned seven placements for him.

    Scott recorded a video testimonial about the engagement — one of two client videos we point to (the other is Emil Runge’s). We don’t paste text quotes onto case studies on this site; video, in the client’s own voice, or nothing.

    The playbook for a solo brand is the same one we use for founders: mine the real stories (Scott had years of them), match them to outlets that need exactly that story, and publish the proof so each placement makes the next one easier — the flywheel Dennis Yu teaches. Full case study: markitads.com/our-work/community-musician.

    Sources & mentions

  • Reputation Repair, Documented: Six Placements for KORR Value

    Reputation repair is the assignment agencies love to sell and hate to document, because the work is delicate and the client rarely wants attention on the “before.” KORR Value let us document it: six earned placements secured through MarkitAds‘ outreach engine. The case study is live at markitads.com/our-work/korr.

    The rules we follow on repair work

    • No astroturf. Every placement is real coverage in a real outlet, earned with a real story — no pay-for-praise, no fake reviews, ever.
    • Fix the substance first. If the underlying complaint is valid, PR without operational change is a delay, not a repair. We say so upfront.
    • Build the positive record, don’t fight the negative one. Search results improve when there’s more true, substantial, well-sourced material about the good work — the same verified-proof logic this site runs on.

    Why show this next to campus work? Because they’re the same product at different altitudes: a reputation is a supply chain of verifiable moments. For a brand on campus, every activation is a reputation event witnessed by hundreds of students. Run it honestly and it compounds; run it cynically and the group chats will do the repair assignment on you. We build for the first case.

    Sources & mentions

  • URBN Market: 0 to 10,000 Followers, a Washington Post Mention, and a Fox 5 Segment

    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.

    Sources & mentions

  • The Kylie Cosmetics UGC Pipeline: What We Built and What It Proves

    When people ask whether a young agency can work with big brands, I point at one logo: Kylie Cosmetics.

    The work

    MarkitAds built a user-generated content pipeline: sourcing creators, briefing them against brand guidelines, managing rights and usage, and delivering a steady flow of authentic content the brand could deploy across paid and organic. The full case study is at markitads.com/our-work/kylie-cosmetics.

    Why UGC and campus are the same muscle

    A UGC pipeline is a distribution system for authenticity: find real people, make it easy for them to say true things on camera, handle the logistics so quality stays high. That is exactly what a campus ambassador program is — the difference is where the content lands. The student who films a 30-second dorm-room review is the same student who staffs a tabling day; the brand that learns to work with one learns to work with both. It’s why our campus offer includes a content layer by default: every activation is also a shoot.

    What the Kylie engagement proves isn’t that we can send emails to famous brands. It’s that our systems survive contact with a marketing organization that has real standards — brand safety, usage rights, deadlines — at a scale where sloppiness gets you fired. Not bad for a company started in a bedroom.

    Sources & mentions

  • Inside the UNC Chapel Hill Campaign: 4–5 Intro Calls per Student, per Week

    Most of our campus work is brands trying to reach students. This one was the other direction: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — my own school — using MarkitAds‘ outreach system, MarkitOutreach, to connect its people with the outside world.

    The setup

    MarkitOutreach is our done-for-you outreach engine: list building, personalization, sending infrastructure, reply handling and booking, run as a managed service. For the UNC engagement, the goal was consistent, qualified introductory conversations — the kind that turn into partnerships, placements and pipeline — without the students doing the grinding themselves.

    The result

    4–5 introductory calls per participating student, per week, sustained across the engagement — a pipeline most professionals would be happy with, generated for students. The full write-up lives on the MarkitAds site: markitads.com/our-work/unc.

    Why this case matters more than its size

    First: the client is a university — the institution whose trust every campus marketer claims to deserve. Working for UNC, inside the rules, is a different credential than working around a campus. Second: it proves the general thesis I keep coming back to — students are an undervalued channel in both directions. Brands undervalue reaching them; institutions undervalue what systematic outreach can do for them.

    And it’s the reason our campus activation work (the pilot) starts from respect for the campus: we ran outreach for a university before we ever asked one to tolerate us.

    Sources & mentions