In 1989, the useful thing about hiring a journalist was obvious: she knew what made news. Julie Talenfeld had the nose, the contacts and, more importantly, the reflex to ask the irritating question that keeps a press release out of the trash - why should anybody care today? She founded BoardroomPR in South Florida and stocked it with other people who had lived inside deadlines: reporters, editors, television producers and news directors. The little trick was to understand the receiving end of a pitch before sending one.
That trick has lasted longer than the fax machine, the daily print deadline and the ten blue links. BoardroomPR is now a full-service public relations and integrated marketing agency with work spanning earned media, crisis communications, social media, video, digital marketing, search optimization, branding and websites. In 2026 it added Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, to help clients appear in responses produced by AI search tools. A company born before the public web now sells advice about how machines decide whom to quote.
This could look like an agency wandering into every profitable acronym. The more interesting reading is that BoardroomPR has kept chasing the same commodity through different pipes: authority. A newspaper quote, a useful LinkedIn post, a page-one search result and a citation inside an AI answer all tell a prospect some version of the same thing - this person may know what they are talking about.
A reputation is no longer in one room
BoardroomPR's customers are the sorts of organizations whose expertise is valuable but not naturally entertaining: law firms, developers, builders, accountants, financial institutions, healthcare groups, schools, associations and nonprofits. Its public client roster includes PulteGroup, Miller Construction, Minto Communities USA, Summit Broadband, Tropical Financial Credit Union and Florida's Children First. Their problem is rarely a total absence of knowledge. It is that knowledge arriving late, sounding technical or appearing in the wrong place.
The agency's answer is to behave like an outsourced newsroom with a marketing department attached. Find the timely angle. Prepare the executive. Pitch the reporter. Film the explanation. Cut it for social. Turn the idea into a bylined article. Make the web page searchable. When trouble arrives, invert the machine: assess the risk, establish the facts, draft the response, train the spokesperson and keep each channel from contradicting the others.
“Your audience doesn't separate PR, marketing and social media - they experience one brand.”
This is where BoardroomPR differs from a press-release shop or a performance agency. A specialist can buy clicks or place a story. BoardroomPR's pitch is that those actions should reinforce one another. Earned coverage becomes social proof. Social video humanizes the expert. Search captures the later question. A crisis plan protects the credibility that made any of it useful. The firm competes with other integrated Florida agencies, specialist boutiques and in-house teams, but its practical advantage is the overlap: old media judgment, sector familiarity and production under one roof.
The first thing to fail was the format
The cleanest example is not a glamorous product launch. It is banking content. Tropical Financial Credit Union wanted younger members, while its social audience leaned toward people aged 35 to 54. A louder version of conventional financial copy was unlikely to alter that composition. BoardroomPR changed the delivery: trend-aware Instagram Reels, employee-led video, approachable graphics, humor, educational posts and influencer partnerships. Checking accounts and financing did not become different products. They became less intimidating subjects.
Reported change versus the previous five-month period
After five months, BoardroomPR reported impressions up 86 percent, engagements up 40 percent and shares up 209 percent. The audience aged 25 to 34 grew 135 percent; the 18-to-24 group grew 308 percent. The campaign won a 2026 Bernays Award. The numbers do not prove that every Reel creates a customer. They do show that the audience moved in the intended direction, and that changing the idiom did not require the credit union to abandon its identity.
What changed the mind here was visible behavior. Younger people did not need financial institutions to invent different facts. They needed those facts delivered by recognizable humans, in familiar formats, with enough levity to earn the next second of attention. The old content failed first; the institutional message survived.
From being quoted by people to being quoted by machines
BoardroomPR's AEO service is the latest extension of that logic. It combines AI-focused content, media relations, reputation signals, local relevance, digital-footprint audits and structured-data recommendations. The firm says its supporting Florida Authority Network includes more than 20 news and press-release sites, roughly 30 cross-linked domains and more than 1,500 indexed articles. The ambition is to make a client legible not just to a reporter or Google results page, but to an answer engine assembling a response.
Buyers should ask hard questions. Being available to an AI system is not the same as being selected by it, and being cited is not the same as winning business. A useful engagement needs a baseline, a defined set of commercial questions, monitoring across engines and a connection to qualified traffic or leads. It also needs actual expertise. No amount of schema can rescue a company with nothing distinct to say.
BoardroomPR publishes no rate card. Clutch lists a $1,000-plus minimum project, a reported hourly range of $150-$199 and $10,000-$49,999 as the most common project size in a small review sample. Those are marketplace indicators, not a quote from the agency.
That pricing points to a service business rather than software: clients buy senior judgment, specialist time and execution. The model works best when there is a credible expert, a meaningful stream of news or insight, and someone inside the client organization empowered to approve quickly. It works poorly when leadership expects guaranteed headlines, hides material facts during a crisis, measures only follower count or cannot supply an expert who will speak plainly.
The part worth stealing
A smaller company can copy the operating habit without hiring an entire agency. Once a week, list the questions customers are already asking. Add the day's external hook - a regulation, storm forecast, transaction, court ruling or platform change. Assign one credible person to answer in clean language. Produce one substantial piece, then adapt it deliberately: a reporter pitch emphasizes novelty; a short video emphasizes clarity; a search page resolves the durable question; a sales note explains the consequence.
BoardroomPR calls one version of this newsjacking. Its hurricane-season example is almost comically Floridian: attorneys can explain insurance claims, builders can discuss resilient construction, financial advisers can cover emergency cash and employers can outline workplace obligations. The weather supplies attention. The expert earns it by being useful before the rain arrives.
The discipline is restraint. A news hook without expertise looks opportunistic. Repurposing without editing produces the same dull paragraph in six places. Speed without facts turns a small crisis into a large one. The loop works when each channel receives the form it deserves and every claim can survive scrutiny.
BoardroomPR has received industry recognition, including a place on Forbes' America's Best PR Agencies list for 2021, regional agency rankings and two Bernays-winning social campaigns. But longevity is the more instructive achievement. The company did not preserve a 1989 product. It preserved a 1989 question: what makes this useful now? Everything after that - the camera, the search box, the social feed, the synthetic answer - is distribution.