Justin Sonnenreich

Tag: PR

  • 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