The first thing Adriana Aristizabal does with a prospective client is not pitch. She listens. This sounds suspiciously modest for public relations, an industry whose artifacts tend to arrive in capital letters: the announcement, the launch, the exclusive. But Aristizabal came to PR by way of the old reporter's notebook. Before she became the founder of iVoice Communications in New York, she covered Colombia's armed conflict from the field. A reporter who arrives with a slogan misses the story. A reporter who arrives with questions might find it.
That distinction became the operating idea of iVoice. The agency builds communication strategies, handles media relations, writes content in English and Spanish, distributes press materials and advises organizations entering global markets. Its public client list ranges from NYC Tourism + Conventions and the Whitney Museum of American Art to Broadway productions, fintech company Sezzle, Napa winery Grgich Hills Estate and the landmine-clearing nonprofit Roots of Peace. It is a curious table plan. The museum sits beside the musical; the tourism bureau beside the vineyard. What joins them is not an industry. It is the need to make a story legible beyond the room where it began.
A career built from forced reinvention
Aristizabal did not leave reporting because she had discovered a more attractive business model. In 2004, after receiving death threats connected to her work, she left Colombia for New York. There she spent nine years at the Colombian Consulate, working in communications and cultural affairs. The move put a second discipline beside journalism. Reporting asks what happened and why. Diplomacy asks who must hear it, in what language, and with what consequences.
When the diplomatic appointment ended, public relations looked less like a pivot than a synthesis. She says she created iVoice in 2014. The agency marked its tenth anniversary in 2024. Its current public roster is a network of strategists, former journalists, regional PR specialists, filmmakers and corporate operators covering the United States and Latin America. René Mandeville, the partner and chief marketing officer, came from enterprise technology, operations and risk. Other advisers bring government, finance, broadcast and branded-entertainment backgrounds. The shop's small-company advantage is not an army of junior account executives. It is access to people who have already sat on several sides of the table.
“I'm a great listener because coming from journalism... the campaigns that we tailor for our customers are based in their stories that are compelling and that are newsworthy.”Adriana Aristizabal, founder and CEO
The product is not publicity. It is context
The easy description of iVoice is “bilingual PR.” The harder and more useful description is cultural interpretation. Translating a press release preserves its words. Translating a campaign preserves its reason for mattering. A Broadway production inviting Latino leaders into the theater needs more than Spanish copy. A New York tourism campaign speaking to overseas travelers must understand what New York represents in each market. A nonprofit converting minefields into farmland must make remote, technical work immediate without turning suffering into scenery.
iVoice's service stack follows that problem. Strategy establishes the audience and desired reputation. Media relations builds the path to editors, broadcasters and creators. Content turns the core idea into interviews, releases, features and social material. Distribution carries it domestically and internationally. Consulting is the connective tissue for corporate, nonprofit and government clients that do not merely want a burst of coverage but need judgment through a longer cycle.
AI arrived after the newsroom instinct
In 2023, iVoice began foregrounding artificial intelligence in its public positioning. The company says it uses AI to analyze large amounts of audience data and tailor campaigns. That can speed research, reveal patterns and help a compact team cover more ground. Yet the sensible reading of iVoice's offer is not that software replaced the reporter. It gave the reporter a larger contact sheet.
This is where the agency sits in the market. A global network can offer offices in dozens of countries. An in-house team can offer deep institutional memory. A self-serve publicity platform can offer cheap distribution. iVoice occupies the gap between them: senior, customized counsel for clients that need bilingual framing and cross-border reach without hiring a giant agency. Its alternatives include global firms such as Edelman, Weber Shandwick and Burson, Hispanic-market specialists, and the client's own communications department. The choice turns on whether the problem is volume or interpretation.
What buyers can copy - and what they must buy
The most portable part of the method costs nothing: interview before announcing. Ask what changed, who is affected, why the timing matters and which detail would survive an editor's skepticism. Then write for an audience, not for internal approval. A second useful rule is to separate translation from localization. The same fact may need a different entry point in Bogotá, New York or Madrid. A third is to keep communicating during a crisis. Aristizabal argues that silence allows the worst interpretation to become the default.
What a client pays iVoice is not public. There is no posted menu and no disclosed average retainer. The agency describes customized plans, which means cost will follow the number of markets, languages, deliverables, media targets and the intensity of counsel. That opacity is normal in bespoke PR, but buyers should insist on a defined scope: which senior people do the work, what counts as a deliverable, what can be measured, and what the agency cannot promise. Earned media is influenced, not purchased. No ethical firm can guarantee an editor's yes.
The model works when a client has a defensible story, gives the agency access to decision-makers and accepts that English-Spanish communications require adaptation. It works poorly when the brief is “make us famous,” the underlying product disappoints, approval takes weeks, or leadership expects AI and media contacts to manufacture news where none exists.
The first assumption iVoice appears to have discarded is that old mass-marketing habits work unchanged in fragmented media. Its answer was more targeted messages, wider networks and, later, AI-assisted analysis. But the company's most revealing projects remain stubbornly human. In 2022 it announced a partnership with Roots of Peace, whose work converts mined land into productive agriculture. Aristizabal later joined the nonprofit's board. In New York, the agency has worked around cultural moments for Moulin Rouge! The Musical, shared bilingual tourism news and contributed to communications work the Whitney says was recognized by the Public Relations Society of America.
Those assignments clarify the real business. iVoice is not selling a louder microphone. It is selling the judgment to know which voice belongs on it, which audience is listening, and what must be understood before anybody presses record. The technology may change. The interview comes first.