The first client was bad. Jennifer Baum has said this without dressing it up, which makes it a better founding story than most. The second client was good. Somewhere between those two engagements, in 2000, a collection of consulting jobs became a company. Baum gave it a name that nodded to her grandmother's fondness for frogs, then set about solving a problem peculiar to restaurants: how do you make a room feel essential before anyone has eaten there?
Restaurants were an unusually demanding place to learn communications. They are theater, retail, manufacturing and customer service compressed into one evening. A critic can judge the lighting and the lobster in the same paragraph. The product vanishes by midnight, then must be made again tomorrow. Bullfrog + Baum learned to coordinate chefs, openings, reporters, events and the hundreds of small sensory details that turn a meal into a story.
Baum did not arrive by the usual agency escalator. She studied French and mathematics, worked in beauty PR, moved to Philadelphia, worked in a restaurant, earned an accelerated MBA at NYU and detoured into finance. She hated the bank job. While at school she had answered phones for Danny Meyer; later, working with restaurateur Matthew Kenney, she handled development, marketing and PR. The sequence looks disorderly on a résumé and coherent in retrospect. It joined numbers, appetite and publicity in one person.
The bad first client mattered because service businesses can mistake any revenue for good revenue. A client who consumes attention, resists advice or lacks a credible product can make publicity more expensive than the fee it produces. Bullfrog + Baum's public record does not reveal what that mistake cost. It does reveal the lesson Baum kept repeating: the company was effectively a structured freelance business, and survival depended on choosing well while continually finding the next job.
A category becomes a point of view
The agency's smartest move was semantic. It stopped treating hospitality as a list of businesses and began treating it as a behavior. Hotels, restaurants and bars were the obvious cases. But a bottle of vodka can welcome someone. A tourism campaign can make a country feel navigable. A consumer brand can behave like a good host. “Hospitality is everywhere” widened a specialist niche without discarding the expertise that made the firm credible.
“I think you're more nimble the fewer people you have.”Jennifer Baum, speaking in 2014
That idea supported a broad menu: public and media relations, crisis work, digital strategy, paid social, influencers, content, design, partnerships and events. Digital Bullfrog operated as a distinct unit inside the wider shop, but its promise was integration. A client could hire the digital team alone, or have it move beside traditional media relations without visible seams.
The customers followed the widening lens. The public roster has included Bobby Flay, Laurent Tourondel, Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Katz's Delicatessen, Diageo brands, Margaritaville and the Singapore Tourism Board. These names have little in common operationally. They do share a need to translate an experience into something a reporter, guest or scrolling stranger can immediately understand.
The movie was the invitation
The neatest demonstration arrived in 2018 with Crazy Rich Asians. Singapore was already the setting of the film, but a setting is not automatically a destination campaign. Working for the Singapore Tourism Board, Bullfrog + Baum used the release as an invitation to reinterpret “rich.” The word could describe food, culture and travel experiences, not merely the eye-watering wealth on screen.
The work did not stop at attaching a tourism logo to a premiere. There were cast and tourism-board interviews, a Singapore week in Los Angeles with menus, art and music, a New York screening, a sweepstakes, a journalist and influencer trip, and outreach to Asian American media. In other words, the agency built things people could attend, taste, win and report.
The campaign produced 54 stories, including coverage in CNN Travel, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Forbes and USA Today. Singapore appeared in a dozen travel roundups. PR Daily gave the program first place for stunt or special event. The numbers matter because they show the difference between borrowing attention and converting it. The movie supplied heat; the agency supplied handles.
A smaller door into the agency
Bullfrog + Baum also recognized a less glamorous problem. A young restaurant may need publicity most when it can least afford an open-ended retainer. LEAP by B+B answered with a 45-day local program aimed at media, influencers and nearby consumers. The price was not published. The clever part was the container: fixed time, clear geography, defined audience.
LEAP served another purpose. It created a place for newer employees to learn and lead. That is a useful operating lesson to copy: a smaller product need not be the junior version of the main service. It can be a bounded laboratory, valuable to the client and developmental for the team. It works when the brief is local, the story is timely and expectations are concrete. It is a poor fit for a deep reputational crisis, a vague national ambition or a business hoping publicity will repair a weak product.
The constant next job
Baum once described the hardest part of the business as “the constant next job.” An agency can do excellent work and still wake up needing another engagement. Bullfrog + Baum survived the churn, 9/11, the 2008 recession, Hurricane Sandy and the pandemic. During the last of those shocks it embraced a hybrid team spread around the country. Adaptation was not an annual offsite topic. It was overhead.
In June 2023, ICR acquired Bullfrog + Baum. The price was not disclosed. The public logic was easier to see: Bullfrog + Baum brought hospitality, travel and consumer creativity; ICR brought a larger advisory platform, scale and adjacent expertise in health, wellness, restaurants and retail. The combined practice had about 60 people. That November it emerged as Blue Engine, led by Baum and ICR partner Seth Grugle.
This was the last big change of mind in the company's independent story. Baum had long prized the nimbleness of fewer people. The deal argued that boutique behavior and larger backing could coexist. Whether they always do is the interesting question. Scale adds pitches, specialists and reach. It also adds meetings. Blue Engine's task was to keep the former from swallowing the instinct that built the latter.
In 2026, Baum announced that she was stepping away after 26 years. Bullfrog + Baum's own channels remain visible, carrying the old language of hospitality and the old frog-name charm. The durable part is not a campaign statistic or an org chart. It is the reframing: begin with what you know narrowly, then ask what principle underneath it travels. Restaurants taught the firm about welcome. Welcome turned out to be a much larger market.