On a Saturday morning in the fall of 2009, Matt Cookson was at home considering a problem of professional direction when he noticed a more immediate problem: ants in the window sill. This is how the origin story of a communications agency begins - not with a pitch deck, a venture round or a garage, but with pest control and a man whose career had already passed through Congress, state government, higher education and technology.
The ants were dispatched. The idea kept moving. In 2010, Cookson launched in downtown Manchester with four people, roughly a dozen clients and a sentence that was almost comically plain: communications is hard. It was true when a press release and a newspaper could carry much of the load. It is truer now, when one campaign may have to survive a search engine, an AI answer, a six-second video, an anxious board member and somebody's thumb hovering over “skip.”
Cookson's answer was not to become the loudest agency. It was to become a connected one. Public relations remained the spine. Design, branding, websites, social media, paid advertising and consulting grew around it as clients asked for help with problems that refused to respect departmental boundaries. Today the firm works with colleges, nonprofits, healthcare organizations, technology companies, government agencies and local businesses. The common customer is not an industry. It is an organization with a complicated thing to explain.
The useful conversation starts after “end meeting”
Then came the great remote-work experiment. Cookson had an advantage: it already used Zoom and online files. At first, the team embraced going fully remote. Then, by the company's own account, they began to abhor it. One by one, people returned to the office in 2020. The loss was not productivity in the narrow, trackable sense. It was the “parking lot discussion” - the stray question after the formal agenda, when someone admits what is really bothering them and another person finally sees the shape of the solution.
“We’re learners and listeners who work together - yes, in the same room - to solve problems and explore opportunities.”Cookson's description of its team
The pandemic also changed Cookson's mind in the opposite direction. If everybody could meet through a screen, there was no obvious reason a New Hampshire agency could not support a client in Seattle or Los Angeles. The company says it has now worked across nearly 20 states and several countries. Geography became less important to the sale and more important to the culture.
That explains the house. In 2024, after 13 years downtown, Cookson moved half a mile into a restored three-story home built around 1870. Its seven bedrooms became offices. The building still has a granite foundation and, in the basement, an old lead-lined ice chest with a door weighing several hundred pounds. A law office, boarding house, family home and even an auto shop had occupied the address before the communicators arrived. Cookson calls it the “work house.” This is branding by real estate, but it is also an operating system: enough doors for concentration, enough stairs for collisions.
What integrated actually looks like
The agency's ApprenticeshipNH work offers a clean specimen. Apprenticeships are easy to admire and surprisingly difficult to explain: a learner is also a worker; an employer is also an educator; public funding, community colleges and industry all meet in one program. Cookson compressed the proposition into two words - “Earn/Learn” - then carried the same idea through a logo, website, video, animation, events, public relations and print materials. Apprenticeship USA later recognized the brand and site nationally.
Audit the organization, interview stakeholders and locate the actual communication problem.
Reduce the idea to a message people can repeat without a briefing document.
Give the message a visual identity, website, campaign and usable set of materials.
Let earned, owned and paid channels reinforce one another, then adjust from results.
The same pattern appears in longer relationships. From 2010 to 2019, Cookson helped the NH Tech Alliance manage and promote more than 500 events, ran its social media and implemented two rebrands. Since 2016, it has written more than 100 profiles about partnerships between New Hampshire's community colleges and employers; those stories produced hundreds of media pickups. For Waypoint, the state's long-running human-services nonprofit, the agency audited the marketing operation, helped rebuild internal capacity, redesigned the website and handed responsibilities back to new staff over roughly 18 months.
Selected outcomes · different units, indexed for comparison
Impressions/reach are shown separately from placements and events; the bars are visual indexes, not a shared unit of value.This breadth is Cookson's position in the market. A specialist may know one channel more deeply. A large integrated agency may bring more people and a larger media operation. An in-house team may know the institution better. Cookson occupies the space between them: senior, cross-discipline work from a compact team, with PRConsultants Group - an independent national network - available when a campaign needs local knowledge in other markets.
The price of clarity
Cookson does not publish a rate card, and the work ranges too widely for one to be very revealing. A logo system, a crisis plan and a statewide paid-media campaign are not three sizes of the same sandwich. Public contracts offer a glimpse of scale. In December 2022, New Hampshire approved a $467,000 contract with Cookson for the “No Safe Experience” campaign about the dangers of recreational substance use. Another state record shows an education-related communications contract rising from $255,000 to $355,000 after an amendment.
One public reference point, not a standard price.
The approved anti-fentanyl campaign contract covered rapid development of a comprehensive statewide awareness effort. Most commercial engagement prices remain private and depend on scope.
Those figures matter because “full service” can sound like a menu. Here, it sometimes means public responsibility, deadlines and enough media weight to reach a state. It also means the model has conditions. Integrated work requires access to decision-makers, agreement on the central message and enough time for channels to reinforce one another. A client seeking only the cheapest isolated deliverable, refusing stakeholder input or changing the goal every week will erase the advantage. Collaboration is not decorative in this model; it is the raw material.
The best idea to copy is smaller than hiring an agency. Start with the sentence that must survive every format. Audit the communications tools already in use. Interview the people closest to the audience. Decide what a result will look like before publishing. Then make the website, media outreach, design and advertising repeat one coherent thought. Cookson's college enrollment campaign used real student stories across direct mail, school displays, geo-targeting, email, Meta, TikTok and YouTube. It generated more than 2.2 million paid impressions while fall enrollment rose nearly 6 percent. The campaign cannot claim every new student, but it can show that each touchpoint pushed toward the same door.
“We don’t strive for growth, we strive for excellence.”Matt Cookson, after the agency's second Inc. 5000 ranking
Growth nevertheless arrived. Cookson doubled in size after 2020, reported 155.28 percent growth in its 2024 Inner City 100 profile and made the Inc. 5000 in 2024 and 2025. In 2026, it received a fourth consecutive Inner City 100 recognition and began promoting a “Clarity Review” as a diagnostic offer for organizations unsure where PR and marketing should go next. Search is now becoming answer-engine optimization; AI is another tool in the kit. Cookson says it uses the technology judiciously.
The more revealing technology may be the staircase. A writer passes a designer. Someone mentions a client question. The digital strategist overhears it. The scheduled meeting is over, but the useful meeting has begun. An agency that learned it could work anywhere decided it did its best thinking somewhere - in an old Manchester house, a few rooms away from the next idea.
Find Cookson
See the agency's work, current thinking and day-to-day studio life through its own channels.