The Press Release Learned to Mix a Drink

There is a banana daiquiri sitting in a coupe against a black background. The banana rests across the rim with the self-confidence of a tiny yellow hammock. It is an amusing photograph, but also a diagram of how CURICH | WEISS thinks. The drink belongs to Cocktailmanac, an annual Phillips Distilling resource that began life as a printed booklet for a sales team. The agency helped turn it into an interactive site for bartenders, complete with trend reporting, original recipes, technique videos, and the voices of working mixologists.

This is a curious thing for a public-relations firm to make. Which is precisely the point. James Curich and John Weiss founded their agency in 2015. Its modern name, CURICH WEISS AMPLIFY, describes the distance traveled since then. Public relations remains at the center, but the spokes now include digital marketing, social media, affiliate programs, brand strategy, creative work, influencers, celebrity talent, and live experiences. The artifact may be a story, an event, a bartender's tool, or all three.

The campaign that refused to be collateral

A conventional communications brief might have treated Cocktailmanac as a press opportunity: announce the new edition, place a trade story, count the mentions. CURICH | WEISS helped reverse the equation. Instead of making publicity about the booklet, it made the booklet itself more useful. Bartenders could see demonstrations. Recipes made trends tangible. Experts supplied credibility. The old sales aid became a small piece of industry infrastructure.

That move reveals the practical difference between publicity and integrated communications. Publicity borrows someone else's audience for a moment. A useful product can earn its own audience, then give press, social posts, search, sales conversations, and video somewhere to point. The channels stop behaving like neighboring apartments whose occupants have never met.

“We focus on results that actually make a difference, not ‘publicity by the pound.’”CURICH | WEISS leadership statement

One objective, several jobs

The agency's sales proposition is not that every client needs every channel. It is that the channel should be chosen after the business objective. Earned media can confer legitimacy. Social can extend and remix a moment. An influencer can lend access to a particular community. A live event can create the raw material that all the others circulate. Digital advertising can keep that material moving after novelty fades.

This sounds obvious. In practice, the communications business has often been arranged by department: the PR people seek coverage, the social people fill a calendar, the event people book a room, the advertising people buy reach. Each can report activity. Nobody has to explain whether the activities joined up. CURICH | WEISS competes by putting them under one strategy, then applying specialist knowledge in categories where context matters - hotels, travel, real estate, restaurants, wine, and spirits.

Its customer list makes the niche plain: Nemacolin, Corinthia Hotels, Ritz-Carlton properties, W Aspen, La Maison du Chocolat, Verlasso Salmon, Delola, Brother's Bond Bourbon, Keeper's Heart, Coldwell Banker Commercial, and North America's 50 Best Bars. These are things people taste, visit, pour, or inhabit. They present a shared problem: atmosphere does not travel easily. Communications must make a person feel a place or product before that person can experience it.

What do you do with Gaga, golf, and a chateau?

For the 2024 reopening of The Chateau at Nemacolin, the answer was a three-day Summer Solstice celebration. CURICH | WEISS says it helped coordinate talent and ran influencer and media outreach. Lady Gaga, Michael Bublé, and Lionel Richie performed. PGA professionals offered golf tips. Jean-Georges Vongerichten prepared a dinner. On one stage, Jimmy Fallon and Richie sang toward a sea of phones.

The event did several jobs at once. It rewarded invited guests, dramatized an expensive property transformation, created celebrity imagery, gave lifestyle reporters a scene, and supplied social media with material more vivid than a renovated-room checklist. This is the integrated model in evening clothes. The occasion is both the thing itself and the factory that makes the campaign.

It also exposes the model's limits without requiring a gloomy appendix. Spectacle works when the experience deserves attention, access is credible, and distribution has been planned. A famous guest cannot repair an ordinary product. Nor can a beautifully connected campaign compensate for vague objectives. Integration multiplies what is there - coherence as readily as confusion.

Move the agency closer to the shelf

The cleverest piece of the business may be quieter than the celebrity weekend. CURICH | WEISS worked with Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits to develop Top Shelf PR, a service for suppliers in the distributor's network. It offers content planning, press tours, event support, trade audits, strategic planning, and integrated campaigns. Instead of waiting for every beverage brand to search for an agency, the agency appears inside a system those brands already use to reach the market.

This is partnership as distribution. Southern Glazer's contributes category access and supplier relationships. CURICH | WEISS contributes communications experience, media ties, and execution. For an emerging spirits label, the pitch becomes less abstract: the people helping the bottle move through the trade can connect it to people who explain why the bottle matters.

Specialization without staying small-minded

With 24 employees listed on LinkedIn at the time of research, CURICH | WEISS is not a holding-company network. It has offices in New York and Los Angeles and says global partners extend its reach to London, Toronto, and Hong Kong. Its advantage is meant to be senior attention and category fluency rather than sheer headcount. Leaders bring journalists, influencers, and marketing specialists into team training. In fields full of obscure trade rules and long relationships, knowing how the category talks can matter as much as knowing how to talk.

The recognition has followed: Hospitality Agency of the Year from The PR Net in 2024, repeated PR Net 100 inclusion, Adrian Awards recognition for Nemacolin work, and PR Agency of the Year at the 2026 Icons of Whisky America awards. Awards are not business outcomes, either. But they map the territory the firm wants to own.

A decade in, the agency's most useful idea is almost modest. Modern communications do not need more pieces. They need the pieces to acknowledge one another. A cocktail guide can be research, content, product, sales support, and publicity. A reopening can be hospitality, performance, imagery, access, and news. The press release did not disappear. It simply discovered that it was never supposed to drink alone.