Before Big Smile was a communications practice, it was a reason to go out. In the early 2000s, the name belonged to a roaming San Francisco party series that mixed rock bands with dance music. Years later, Maria Consuelo Gónima borrowed it for a business with a different kind of invitation: here is something unfamiliar, and here is why you might care.
She founded the practice in 2018. The party connection is more revealing than the usual agency origin story. Bringing people into a room requires a judgment about taste, timing and company. So does introducing a new entertainment format. The machinery changes. The question of who will show up remains.
“Fun is key!”
Maria Gónima, on the origins of Big Smile
A career in things people needed explained
Gónima’s professional biography moves through streaming at Hulu, creator media at Fullscreen and virtual reality at Survios. These are her career credits, spanning work before and alongside the agency. They establish a particular kind of experience: communicating about formats while audiences and businesses are still figuring out what those formats are for.
Her 2026 Texas Media+Entertainment Summit biography describes more than two decades in narrative strategy. Her Women of the Future profile adds the operating context: communications inside companies growing through mergers and acquisitions, as well as work around philanthropy. A new medium creates excitement. It also creates a considerable amount of explaining.
Big Smile now describes itself as a woman-founded, BIPOC-led communications studio. Its territory includes entertainment, technology, consumer goods and social impact. The company also promotes a speaker bureau. This is a services business: clients buy research, language, preparation and outreach. The AI and VR in its orbit describe markets it understands, rather than a software platform it sells.
The menu makes the invisible work visible
The most useful thing on Big Smile’s website may be its shop. Communications can be an awkward purchase because a buyer’s request for publicity can conceal several different problems. Perhaps the team disagrees about the message. Perhaps the announcement needs a sharper angle. Perhaps the executive knows the product but struggles when someone asks a hostile question.
Big Smile splits those jobs into six offerings. INSIGHT examines competitors and positioning. VOICE develops the language. SIGNAL handles announcements and outreach. MOMENTUM organizes continued visibility. PRESENCE works on decks and profiles. POWER prepares people for interviews and speaking. Each name corresponds to a task a buyer can recognize.
Find the language.
Keep communicating.
Prepare the person.
That division matters more than the naming. A founder can buy presentation help without pretending it is a press campaign. A marketing lead can commission market research before asking someone to write a slogan. For buyers, the practical move is to bring the troublesome artifact to the first conversation: the deck nobody finishes, the explanation that keeps changing, the announcement with no clear reader.
A $15 starting point, with labor sold separately
VOICE offers a particularly legible example. Its DIY workbook is listed at $15. Foundation is $3,500 and includes a messaging workshop, a positioning framework and draft language. Premium is $8,500, extending the work into website copy, pitch-deck messaging and other materials. The menu describes different amounts of help, from completing the exercises yourself to commissioning implementation.
Published VOICE package prices, reviewed September 12, 2026. These are offer prices, not reported client spending.
There is a useful buying principle here. Templates reduce the cost of getting started; they leave the thinking and execution with the buyer. Commissioned work transfers some of that labor. A team that already has a capable writer may value strategic drafts. A team preparing several channels at once may need finished copy. The sensible comparison is the work included and the capacity available inside the company.
When a sauce already has a medal
Tamarind Heads makes the positioning problem tangible. Its Medium BBQ Sauce won the Specialty Food Association’s 2024 sofi Gold Award in barbecue sauce. The product had already earned a piece of outside validation. The next question was how to turn that evidence into a story people would encounter beyond the award itself.
Big Smile’s account describes a campaign aimed at food journalists and broadcast producers, emphasizing the sauce’s culinary credentials through seasonal recipes and editorial coverage. The agency reports CNET recognition and broadcast placements. Read that as the studio’s account of its work, with the award as a separately established fact about the client.
The lesson is specific enough to borrow. Start with evidence a journalist can inspect. Choose people whose subject already includes your product. Give them an occasion to consider it. An award, a recipe and a seasonal hook perform different jobs in the same pitch. This example supports that sequence; it does not establish that an earlier campaign failed or that publicity alone drove purchases.
The other audience sits across a deal table
Reely supplies a different audience. The AI video company worked on sports and esports highlights. In 2021, it appointed Gónima chief operating officer, giving her responsibilities across growth, technology relationships, marketing and business development. Her involvement therefore extended beyond an outside publicist’s brief.
Big Smile’s PRESENCE case study describes investor decks, executive profiles and supporting content prepared for Reely’s acquisition story. VideoVerse announced its acquisition of Reely in April 2023. Those are related facts, but a transaction has many causes. The communications contribution described here is making the technology, team and business understandable in the materials used for deal conversations.
This is where the studio’s position becomes clearer. Buyers can also turn to entertainment publicists, technology PR agencies, freelancers or their own marketing teams. Big Smile’s combination is a founder with emerging-media and operating experience, plus services that stretch from public-facing stories to the documents an executive needs in a smaller room.
Give the audience somewhere to go
The company’s S.M.I.L.E.S. guide returns the story to outings. The acronym expands to “So Many Immersive & Live Events Simultaneously.” Its listings range across cities and countries, covering immersive art and live experiences. It gives the agency’s interest in culture a form people can use without buying a campaign.
There is a modest but useful idea in that choice: demonstrate your attention. A calendar lets a reader see what an organization considers interesting. It can also give that reader somewhere to spend a Saturday. For a communications studio working around entertainment, the editorial activity fits the subject of the business.
For a prospective client, the fit depends on the problem. A toolkit requires time to use it. Media outreach requires an announcement that can withstand questions. Executive preparation requires an executive willing to rehearse. A company seeking guaranteed coverage would be asking for an outcome that Big Smile’s SIGNAL materials explicitly decline to promise.
The most portable idea in Big Smile’s menu is to separate the moment from the work around it. Research comes before the words; preparation comes before the interview; continued communication comes after launch day. The party may supply the name. Getting people to care supplies the job.