The first thing the future did was fail. In August 2000, Lisa Vallee-Smith started Airfoil with five people, laptops and a place inside a plug-and-play incubator in Detroit's Penobscot Building. Her premise was that the internet was going to change everything. This was correct in the long run and exquisitely inconvenient in the short one. The dot-com blowout arrived in 2001.
This is the origin story that makes Airfoil interesting. Plenty of communications firms were born during the web boom. Fewer made the boom's promise their specialty, met its collapse before the office furniture had settled, and still reached a 25th anniversary. The firm later endured the Great Recession and a pandemic. Survival did not come from abandoning the original insight. It came from repeatedly changing what that insight required.
Today, Airfoil Group is a roughly 32-person independent agency in Farmington Hills, Michigan. It works mostly with B2B technology, advanced manufacturing, automotive and mobility businesses, with a second orbit of healthcare, government, education and nonprofit clients. PR is still in the building. So are paid search, websites, brand strategy, podcasts, video, sales materials, social campaigns, crisis counsel and lead generation.
“We’ve always been a tech-focused PR agency, but the definition of ‘tech-focused’ means something much different than when our doors first opened in 2000.”Keith Donovan, CEO
The product is comprehension
The agency's work becomes easiest to grasp when the subject becomes hardest to explain. EOS makes industrial 3D-printing systems. Transient Plasma Systems develops pulsed-power technology for cleaner combustion. Physna built geometric search for 3D models. These are not products that surrender themselves to a jaunty slogan. They require an interpreter who can understand the machine, identify the human consequence and then find an audience that cares.
For EOS, the misconception was that additive manufacturing was narrower and less capable than it really was. Airfoil built an integrated program around that gap: brand messaging, national and trade media, a North American website, paid LinkedIn and Google campaigns, sales content and a podcast called Additive Snack. The work produced more than 200 media placements, including appearances in The New York Times, WardsAuto and specialist manufacturing outlets. The podcast entered a fourth season. The dull version of this story is that Airfoil “created content.” The useful version is that it gave one technical argument enough forms to travel.
A press hit is a means, not a receipt
Agency case studies love enormous impression counts because enormous numbers look well fed. Airfoil's better examples follow the number downstream. For applied-AI company Quantiphi, it defined the buyer, mapped content to search demand, and produced e-guides, email, social and blog material. In 90 days, the program drew 12,000 site visitors, 3,000 engaged new users and 300 net-new leads.
For senior-living operator American House, the original campaigns were producing too few leads at too high a price. Airfoil rebuilt landing pages, sharpened calls to action, ran targeted ads and added call ads for seniors who preferred a phone conversation. Conversions rose 113 percent, the conversion rate climbed 438 percent, incoming calls increased 85 percent and cost per conversion fell 59 percent. Something failed first here, and it was refreshingly mundane: the path from an ad to an inquiry was harder than it needed to be.
The most consequential result came from a public program. Working with the Michigan State Housing Development Authority and Perich Advertising + Design, Airfoil helped explain first-time-homebuyer assistance to people who assumed ownership was beyond them. Over 12 months, the campaign generated more than 250,000 microsite visits and 51,000 eligibility-tool completions. Annual loan production rose 38 percent - 27 points beyond the original goal - and the work won a 2018 PRSA Silver Anvil.
The day “tech PR” became too small
By 2020, Airfoil had a naming problem. “Tech PR agency,” its old elevator pitch, remained true in the way that calling a smartphone a telephone remains true. The firm had launched Airfoil Digital, expanded social strategy, moved into podcasts and video, and begun building sites and demand-generation systems. The old label hid too much of the work.
That changed the sales proposition. A client could arrive with a product launch and stay for the website, sales enablement and paid campaign. Or it could arrive with a conversion problem and discover a reputation problem beneath it. This integrated model competes with specialist agencies, internal teams and the large global networks. Airfoil's advantage is not infinite scale. It is fewer handoffs around subjects that already require a great deal of explaining.
The public price signal is modest by agency standards: Clutch lists projects beginning at $5,000 and an hourly range of $150 to $199. A University Liggett School campaign gives a more illuminating cost. Airfoil built audience personas and targeted high-net-worth parents near the school, reaching 32,300 prospects and producing nearly 9,000 video views at 17 cents each. Cost mattered because the geography was tight and the audience finite. Waste could not hide inside national reach.
Airfoil stayed independent but did not pretend independence solved geography. In 2019 it joined the Worldcom Public Relations Group as the network's exclusive Detroit partner. The arrangement supplies local expertise across six continents without turning Airfoil into a branch of a holding company. It is a neat organizational answer: keep decisions close to the work, borrow reach when the work travels.
What another company can steal
The transferable lesson is not to hire a podcast producer and wait for enlightenment. It is to begin with friction. What does the audience misunderstand? What behavior should change? Which expert inside the company can say something competitors cannot? Airfoil's Shopify work followed this sequence. The stale idea was that retail was dead. Research, media analysis and executive interviews produced a counter-narrative about retail's future. A two-day New York media tour put executives in front of reporters. Within six months, competitive share of voice for “the future of retail” rose 50 percent, every earned story carried at least one priority message, and 92 percent quoted a Shopify spokesperson.
Copy the sequence: diagnose a belief, develop evidence, train an available human, choose channels, and decide in advance what success looks like. It works when the company possesses real expertise and permits its experts to be specific. It struggles when leaders want thought leadership without a point of view, when a product cannot support its claims, or when nobody will accept a metric closer to revenue than applause.
In 2022, Vallee-Smith handed the chief executive role to Keith Donovan, an Airfoil veteran of more than 15 years, with a gradual ownership transfer planned. It was another version of the same move the company had made since 2001: preserve the premise, change the mechanism. PR Daily later cited 30 percent growth in Airfoil's client roster and 20 percent top-line growth from the first quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024. In 2026, Inspiring Workplaces ranked it 37th in North America.
A company that sells stories has lasted because it kept editing its own.
There is an appealing modesty in the result. Airfoil did not become a global advertising conglomerate. It became a more complete version of the local wager made in 2000: technology changes quickly, people understand slowly, and somebody has to close the distance.