In 1990, Chris Robichaud was running out of money and running out of Los Angeles. Fresh out of college, he was considering a return to New Hampshire when Howard Bragman gave him an internship at his new publicity firm, Bragman & Co. A city that had almost become a failed experiment became the setting for his career.
Robichaud remembered that first chance more than thirty years later, calling Bragman a mentor and close friend. The memory is a useful place to begin with someone whose professional life has involved helping other people get noticed. Before the agency leadership, international clients and technology consultancy, somebody had to notice him.
Today, he runs 93-North, the business he founded after his years as co-CEO of PMK•BNC. The work has moved toward business strategy and emerging technology. The persistent question is recognizably the same: how does an idea acquire an audience, and what makes that audience care enough to act?
A merger needs a Monday meeting
Robichaud earned his business communications degree from Bentley University in 1989. His long run at BNC followed, leading eventually to the combination of BNC and PMK/HBH at the beginning of 2010. The new name, PMK•BNC, looked like a small traffic accident involving an alphabet. The commercial proposition was easier to read: bring consumer brands and entertainment talent into the same business.
Robichaud led the consumer brand operation. Cindi Berger led entertainment, while Michael Nyman oversaw the company. Their specialties were related, but a celebrity publicist’s working day and an automotive client’s communications brief were different creatures. Combining the letterheads could happen quickly. Combining what people knew required repetition.
The agency held Monday meetings at which twenty to thirty managers explained their work to one another. It is a pleasantly unglamorous detail in a Hollywood business story. Before a brand could benefit from an entertainment relationship, colleagues needed to understand what the other side actually did. The machinery included calendars, conversation and the occasional Monday morning.
The merged firm’s work included publicity, endorsements, appearances, events, sponsorships and product placement. Each offered a different route between a company and an audience. Managing those routes was part of Robichaud’s job.
The suspiciously convenient follower count
By 2011, Robichaud was writing about a temptation that has aged remarkably well: selecting a celebrity by counting followers. A large number has obvious appeal. It sits neatly in a presentation, travels well through a meeting and rarely asks an awkward question.
His argument was that social media totals gave marketers an incomplete picture. The useful questions concerned influence and engagement: which celebrity suited a particular brand, which audience would respond, and how a company could judge the return from a celebrity campaign.
He discussed fanDNA, an agency tool intended to examine celebrity influence beyond existing measures of fan affinity. The underlying concern was practical. A famous person could attract attention without creating the relationship the advertiser needed. Choosing well meant looking more closely at the people on the receiving end.
That emphasis gives his career a continuity that the changing job titles can obscure. The same problem survives the journey from celebrity spokesperson to online creator. Reach gets someone into the room. The harder work is understanding whether anyone in the room is listening, and why.
“You can’t be famous alone.”Chris Robichaud, writing in 2024
Audi kept coming back
Audi offers a concrete example of the agency’s relationships. In 2011, the automaker awarded its American public relations business to incumbent PMK•BNC after a review. Robichaud described that process as a chance to reassess the account and evolve its approach. Winning existing work again is a particular kind of compliment: the client has already seen the kitchen.
The relationship continued. In February 2016, Audi again retained the agency following a competitive review. The partnership had begun in 2006 with the Audi Forum in New York, then expanded through work involving the R8 and the brand’s introduction to Hollywood audiences. Over time it encompassed automotive and corporate communications, technology, content and influencer programs.
At the renewal, Audi communications chief Jeri Ward credited the agency with helping position the brand before the right audiences. The account was staffed across New York and Los Angeles. It combined the less photogenic work of corporate communications with the entertainment relationships that made the agency recognizable.
The creative work could be funny as well as strategic. PMK•BNC’s Audi film Barely Legal Pawn won a Cannes Lion and Best in Show at the In2 SABRE Awards. Another short, Kermit Gets Set Up, supported Audi’s Emmys sponsorship. These were agency achievements during Robichaud’s shared leadership, with teams doing the making.
The business numbers add useful perspective. In 2015, PMK•BNC recorded 16.5 percent growth, its fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth. Eighty percent of the increase came from existing clients. For a business associated with new faces and new stories, familiar clients were doing considerable work.
Popular culture travels; offices have to follow
In 2015, PMK•BNC expanded its London operation and appointed longtime executive Kevin Gessay managing director. Robichaud’s explanation linked the decision to the agency’s ambition in entertainment and popular culture: its reach needed to be international.
The London business had already been booking talent and providing consulting. Gessay’s expanded role included oversight of the office and work with global brands. The move gave geographic substance to the agency’s proposition. Knowing what moved an audience in one market was the beginning of a conversation, rather than a passport to every other one.
His interests also reached the conference stage. At Cannes Lions in 2012, he appeared with Beiersdorf marketing executive Nicolas Maurer. In 2016, he was among the participants announced for WORLDZ, the cultural marketing summit in Los Angeles. The subjects around his work were widening from publicity execution to the forces changing communication itself.
A new company, an old building lesson
Robichaud launched 93-North on April 22, 2018, choosing his father Maurice’s birthday. Maurice had founded Robichaud Masonry. His son connected that example to his own venture: build carefully, establish a sound base and pay attention to the surroundings.
The new company’s material was different. Its launch announcement named artificial intelligence, blockchain, autonomous and electric cars, video games and virtual worlds as areas of interest. Robichaud wanted to help build businesses around approaching technological change, as well as help established organizations respond to it.
It was a move from running an agency toward advising companies about what might come next. He described an interest in the future that had grown out of years working with brands and storytellers. The technology list could change. The ambition was to connect an approaching development with decisions a business could make in the present.
93-North describes its approach with the phrase “poetry and plumbing.” It is an unusually serviceable pairing. One half makes room for imagination; the other remembers that something must work when the meeting ends.
Aditya Rao, who handles strategy and operations at the consultancy, worked with Robichaud at PMK•BNC on the agency’s data analytics practice. Their work included identifying trends and possible future storylines for brands. The smaller company carried forward both that working relationship and the attempt to connect creative judgment with business planning.
Fame still needs other people
In February 2024, Robichaud used a very public collision of audiences to explain his thinking: Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce and the Super Bowl. He examined how celebrity could spread between communities, and how direct engagement had broadened the ways someone could become famous.
His examples extended to creators and brands. A reputation could grow through comments, subscriptions, streams and purchases as well as through traditional media. In his formulation, fame depended on what other people did with someone’s work. Admiration that never travelled had limits.
He set out three requirements: understand and engage an audience, give people something worth discussing, and find connections beyond the audience already assembled. It was a concise statement of a concern that had appeared in his earlier writing about celebrity selection. People remained the difficult variable.
That subject took him to Harvard’s Institute of Politics in November 2025 for a conversation with Poster Child founder James Brownstein, moderated by Marc Adelman. The discussion concerned creators, influence and the changing relationship between brands and digital culture.
Another 2025 appointment placed him in a different room. Crown Electrokinetics named him to its board and audit committee chairmanship in August. His work also includes service on the board of Heart of Los Angeles, whose programs span academics, athletics and the arts.
There is a quieter professional connection, too. Engine Shop’s Brian Gordon has called Robichaud his first mentor. The intern who nearly left Los Angeles became someone another executive remembered for helping him begin. For all the attention paid to reaching millions, a career can still turn on one person making room for another.