There is a peculiar scene that plays out inside a growing consumer brand. On Monday, the public-relations agency emails an editor with a lovely story about an olive oil, a vitamin or a washable rug. On Tuesday, the affiliate agency emails the same publication about commission rates, conversion and links. Both agencies work for the same client. They may not speak to one another. Sometimes they compete for credit. The editor, meanwhile, sees the whole thing.
Lauren Kleinman had a front-row seat to this choreography. Before starting Dreamday in 2019, she had been an early employee at StartEngine and Scopely, then joined Ritual’s founding team as vice president of marketing and growth. She hired and managed agencies. She liked the craft of a good story, but the reporting after a campaign often stopped at the clipping: where it ran, how many people theoretically saw it, perhaps a large number labeled “impressions.” The affiliate report arrived separately and talked about transactions.
The first thing that failed, in other words, was not publicity. It was the handoff. Traditional PR could create demand and struggle to claim it. Affiliate marketing could claim a sale and struggle to explain what created the desire. Kleinman’s change of mind came from watching publishers become commerce businesses. The review, the recommendation and the checkout path were no longer separate events. So why employ separate teams?
The useful trick was putting the rivals on one payroll
Dreamday calls its answer Performance PR. The phrase can sound like somebody bolted a dashboard onto a press release. The operating model is more consequential. PR strategists, affiliate managers, creator specialists and analysts work from the same story and the same publisher map. The pitch is meant to be editorially worthwhile and commercially legible. After publication, the team looks at coverage, clicks, conversion, affiliate revenue and search visibility, then carries those signals into the next round of ideas.
This is the difference between measurement as an autopsy and measurement as an ingredient. If a gift-guide placement sends high-intent shoppers but the product page leaks them, the next decision may concern conversion, not another pitch. If an outlet produces attention but no attributable revenue, it may still matter for authority, search or the founder’s reputation. The data does not replace judgment. It gives judgment something firmer than applause.
“The most valuable customers don’t just buy a product. They buy into a brand they trust.”Dreamday’s argument for measuring without flattening the story
That distinction matters because Dreamday sells trust, not links. Its customers include Ritual, Quince, AG1, Dieux, ILIA, Our Place, Seed, Ruggable, Bobbie, Ring Concierge and The Bouqs. These are visual, demonstrable consumer products with a plausible place in a recommendation story. The agency works across beauty, wellness, fashion, home, food, health and consumer technology. It says more than 40 brands have trusted it with strategy and growth.
Different measures, different clocks. Revenue attribution, output volume and company growth should not be mistaken for the same thing.
The clipping became a small piece of infrastructure
Dreamday’s services now stretch well beyond the original marriage. There is conventional consumer PR and corporate communications; full-funnel affiliate management; influencer campaigns; TikTok Shop and Amazon affiliate work; and a newer Generative Engine Optimization practice. The GEO pitch follows the same logic into AI answers: identify which trusted publications influence citations, earn credible mentions there, monitor whether the brand appears in recommendations and look for the orders that follow.
This expansion makes sense, though it brings a useful caution. Attribution gets murkier when a person reads a review on Tuesday, asks an AI assistant on Friday and buys through a different channel on Sunday. Affiliate links illuminate one path, not the entire landscape. Dreamday did not make reputation perfectly measurable. It made a valuable portion of it less mysterious.
The business itself is a private, contract-based services agency. There is no public menu of standard fees. A typical engagement defines the scope, payment schedule, KPIs, deliverables and timeline. This is important: Dreamday’s product is not software that anyone can switch on. It is coordinated labor, publisher trust and accumulated category knowledge. The dashboard matters because the relationships came first.
What a smaller brand can steal
The copyable part costs less than the whole agency model. Begin with one shared brief for brand and performance. Audit the narrative, the product’s affiliate readiness and the search results a customer already sees. Build an angle that helps the editor do her job, rather than merely announcing that a product exists. Make strong photography and specific numbers available. Decide what commission economics the margin can tolerate. Then track not only the sale but which wording, outlet and moment produced useful attention.
Kleinman’s advice to young brands is stubbornly unglamorous: cultural relevance, good numbers and a pitch that makes the editor’s job easier. Press can then be reused in retailer conversations, paid creative, newsletters and product pages. The placement is not the campaign’s finish line. It is a credible asset that can keep working.
A growing agency tests its own premise
The market has rewarded the experiment. Dreamday appeared on the Inc. 5000 in 2024, 2025 and 2026; the latest listing reported 232 percent three-year growth. Fast Company named it one of 2024’s most innovative companies in public relations and brand strategy. Dreamday says it drove more than $700 million in client revenue and secured 12,616 pieces of press in 2025. Those last figures are the agency’s own, useful at scale but not audited here.
Growth created a second test. In 2026, Kleinman described teaching herself coding and trying to wire affiliate-platform data into an agency-wide client health dashboard. The experiment worked just well enough to become a problem. Late nights multiplied; the backend exceeded her expertise; the founder was drifting from the work only she could do. Dreamday first hired an AI consultant to train the team and clarify use cases. Only when the experiments became core infrastructure did it hire an AI engineer.
That sequence is perhaps the neatest expression of the company’s temperament: try the thing close to the work, learn what the signals mean, then build an integrated system around it. Performance PR began with the same move. Kleinman did not start by promising to quantify every human feeling about a brand. She noticed two vendors tripping over each other in an editor’s inbox. Dreamday’s growth came from removing the tripwire.