A publicist lives with a small professional irony: the better the work, the more likely somebody else’s name appears in the headline. Chloe Licht has made a career inside that arrangement. She is the chief operating officer, executive vice president, and co-owner of Light Years Ahead, a boutique public-relations agency whose client list ranges across beauty, food, parenting, and consumer products. Her job is attention, but not chiefly attention for herself. She helps build the conditions under which a small company becomes relevant to a much larger audience.
That distinction matters. Attention is abundant when it is cheap and scarce when it is credible. A brand can buy an advertisement, post a video, or shout into a feed. Earned media asks for a different currency: a reason an editor, producer, or host should care now. Licht’s work sits between the product and that reason. It is part strategy, part translation, and part the unglamorous maintenance of relationships before anyone needs a favor.
The education of an operator
First, learn the other side of the pitch
Licht’s route into agency leadership began before the agency. She worked in mobile marketing at RCA and in integrated marketing and sales at Clear Channel New York. Those are useful rooms for a future publicist to have occupied. They reveal how media organizations package audiences, how commercial ideas meet programming, and how many proposals compete for a finite amount of space.
She also brought an education that looks broad until it looks exact. Licht earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania, then an M.S. in Public Relations and Corporate Communication from New York University in 2013. History is the study of context, motive, sequence, and the stories people tell about events. Public relations uses the same materials with a shorter deadline.
By 2009, she was in New York. By 2012, she had joined Light Years Ahead. The agency describes her as its direct liaison to the city’s editors, producers, and influencers. The phrasing is revealing. A liaison is not a megaphone. A liaison listens in two directions, understands different incentives, and keeps the connection useful after the immediate transaction ends.
“I love watching small brands gain the attention they deserve with placements in major media.”Chloe Licht
There is a neat modesty in Licht’s own description of the reward. She talks about watching smaller brands receive attention, seeing them grow, and being “a small part” of that success. Public relations is sometimes caricatured as decorative noise. Her preferred result is concrete: a business with little familiarity enters a major outlet and gains the chance to become familiar.
From employee to owner
Seven years of compound interest
Licht joined Light Years Ahead in 2012 and became an owning partner in 2019. There is no theatrical reinvention between those dates. The interest lies in the accumulation. She developed media relationships, contributed to the strategic and creative direction of client campaigns, and assumed operational responsibility. The title eventually caught up to the work.
Mobile marketing at RCA and integrated marketing and sales at Clear Channel New York.
Joined the Light Years Ahead team.
Completed her graduate degree in public relations and corporate communication at NYU.
Became an owning partner in the agency.
Leads as COO and executive vice president alongside CEO and president Megan Bennett.
The agency she helps run was established in 1995 and works with both emerging businesses and established consumer brands. Its roster has included names in personal care, food, lifestyle, parenting, and retail. That variety makes the operator’s role more demanding, not less. A credible story for a snack company cannot simply be repainted for a skincare label. The audience changes, the proof changes, and the calendar changes. The process still has to hold.
At a small agency, “operations” is not a distant department with a flowchart and a quarterly memo. It is the everyday joining of client expectations, creative judgment, media timing, and people’s available hours. Licht’s remit crosses those borders. She is described as playing a primary role in both strategic and creative campaign development while maintaining the New York relationships that help those campaigns move.
The agency’s visible work offers glimpses of the range: product introductions, retail rollouts, expert positioning, creator partnerships, reputation support, and press placements across broadcast, print, podcasts, and digital outlets. Its current services also include visibility in AI-driven search. The tools change because the routes to discovery change. The central question survives: why should anyone outside the company pay attention?
The small-brand arithmetic
A larger audience begins with a narrower idea
Light Years Ahead’s published client roster makes the operational puzzle tangible. It spans grooming products and skincare, food and drink, children’s products, pet care, shopping centers, and apps. Some names are established; others need a sentence of explanation before a reader knows what they sell. Every category has its own vocabulary and its own traps. A founder may be fascinated by formulation, a retailer by velocity, and an editor by what the product reveals about how people are living. The publicist has to recognize all three conversations without confusing them.
For a boutique firm, this is also a problem of focus. Large agencies can divide specialties among layers of departments. A smaller team gains intimacy and speed, then pays for those advantages with fewer places to hide a weak idea. The person handling strategy may also be close to execution, client communication, and the final decision about whether a pitch is ready. Licht’s combination of creative responsibility and an operations title belongs to that reality. The work needs imagination, but imagination must survive a calendar.
The campaign menu reflects how fragmented discovery has become. One story might begin with a producer planning a television segment. Another could come through a podcast booking, a creator relationship, an expert quotation, a retail debut, or a search result surfaced by an AI tool. These are not interchangeable channels. Each has a different threshold for proof and a different definition of useful. An operator’s job is to keep the brand coherent while its story changes shape.
This makes Licht’s enthusiasm for small brands more than a pleasant line on a biography. Smaller companies often have genuine novelty but little inherited authority. They cannot rely on a famous name to carry an ordinary pitch. Their advantage is specificity: an unusual founder, a new use, an unexpected ingredient, a timely behavior, a persuasive demonstration. The agency’s task is to locate that specificity and resist sanding it into generic promotion. A larger audience often starts with the narrowest true thing.
Built for distance
The remote office arrived early
One operating decision says more about Licht than a shelf of adjectives could. In a 2022 interview, she explained that Light Years Ahead had chosen an entirely work-from-home model roughly ten years earlier. When remote work suddenly became widespread, the agency did not have to improvise its basic systems. Licht was able to advise friends and colleagues who were making the transition under pressure.
The foresight was practical, though she did not romanticize it. Working from home can erase the natural edge of a workday. Licht said she had tried not to work around the clock or late into the night. It is a COO’s observation in plain clothes: continuity is valuable, but an operating model fails if it treats every available hour as company property.
“I have tried to ensure that I don’t simply work 24/7 or allow myself to work late into the night.”Chloe Licht
This is where the biography becomes coherent. The history degree trained attention on context. The RCA and Clear Channel roles exposed the machinery of media. New York supplied density: more outlets, more relationships, more chances to learn what gets ignored. Light Years Ahead supplied a place to compound that knowledge until responsibility became ownership. The remote model made the same argument in organizational form - prepare the system before the stress test.
Licht’s public footprint remains tied closely to the agency and its clients. That seems less like an omission than an occupational signature. Her work concerns other people’s announcements, launches, experts, and ideas. The publicist succeeds when the story travels without requiring her to stand in front of it.
The durable pitch
Make the brand interesting, then step aside
A small brand asking for national attention begins with an imbalance. It cares intensely about its product; the rest of the world does not yet have a reason to. The publicist cannot eliminate that gap with enthusiasm. She has to find the detail that converts private excitement into public relevance, then present it to someone whose trust is spent carefully.
Licht has spent more than a decade doing that work at Light Years Ahead. Her career does not hinge on a single viral campaign or a grand personal mythology. It is steadier and more instructive: learn how media functions, stay close to the people making it, understand the client’s actual ambition, and build an operation sturdy enough to repeat the process.
The headline is the glamorous object. The machinery behind it is calendars, judgment, relationships, restraint, and a surprising number of emails. Licht chose the machinery. Then, after seven years, she acquired a piece of it. For an operator, ownership may be the most honest headline of all.
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