The Fort Lauderdale Agency That Merged Its Way Out of the Marketing Silo

There is a particular kind of power in being the person who can make three phone calls and change the temperature of a room. The trick has little to do with follower counts. It is accumulated slowly - at charity breakfasts, in newsroom inboxes, around board tables, and through the minor civic rituals by which a place decides whom it trusts. Kip Hunter Marketing built its business on that sort of power in Fort Lauderdale. Founded by Kip Hunter in 2007, the agency became a familiar hand behind South Florida launches, nonprofit campaigns, press coverage and public events. Its product was attention, but its raw material was relationship.

That description explains both KHM's advantage and its problem. A sharp story can earn a television segment. A carefully built partnership can fill a ballroom. Neither, by itself, rebuilds a website, tunes a paid-search campaign or proves which click became a customer. Clients increasingly expect one accountable system, not a relay race between specialists. In April 2026, KHM supplied its answer: a merger with Pittsburgh-based Sparq Designs.

The missing half of attention

The merger makes sense because the two firms did not arrive carrying identical luggage. KHM brought public relations, strategic communications, events and a mature South Florida network. Sparq brought strategy, branding, content, website design and development, SEO, paid media, video, performance marketing and experiential work. The public announcement described the goal in unusually practical terms: KHM clients would gain web, performance and experiential capabilities; Sparq clients would gain press outreach, event planning and community engagement.

The result is not a new app or a boxed product. KHM remains a service business. Clients hire it to define an audience, shape a message, build a visual identity, earn media, place advertising, run social and search, produce content, stage experiences and measure the response. The business model is the familiar agency mix of scoped projects and ongoing engagements. What changed is the distance the firm can cover before handing work to somebody else.

“Clients today need integrated solutions, not siloed services.”James Blundo, partner and co-founder of Sparq Designs

A sentence built to travel

KHM's work for United Way Broward is the cleanest example of its old strength. When the pandemic intensified mental-health strain, the agency launched a multilingual awareness campaign around the line “It's OK to not be OK.” The sentence is almost aggressively ordinary. That is precisely why it works. It asks no one to learn a slogan before understanding the message. It also points people toward help through United Way Broward, 211 Broward and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

The initial run, from June 2020 through December 2021, delivered millions of impressions. It was extended through 2023. That extension matters more than a trophy would. Public-health communication usually fails when it is treated as a burst of novelty. Here, the campaign behaved more like infrastructure: repeat the plain sentence, keep the routes to help visible, and let familiarity do its quiet work.

The portfolio ranges far beyond nonprofits. For IT'SUGAR, KHM combined public relations, influencer activation and digital campaigns to drive awareness and store traffic. For Coyote Outdoor Living, the work centers on social content, influencer relationships and targeted paid campaigns. CITY Furniture's 2024 “Designed for Love” campaign identified a primary audience called “Confident Curators,” then carried the idea across television, social, radio, billboards, direct mail and the retailer's website. Different clients, same operating belief: define the person first, then make the channels agree.

What does coordinated attention cost?

Agency price lists are usually hidden behind a contact form. A public procurement gives one useful, narrow answer. In 2022, Broward Behavioral Health Coalition selected KHM for communications and outreach consulting after considering two applications. The award was $80,000 through the fiscal year ending June 2023, with options to extend. The scope included public education, event planning for the coalition's tenth anniversary, and a comprehensive communications and outreach plan.

The same public record later notes that the coalition's communication plan was developed with KHM. It also records a separate piece of connective work: with Hunter's assistance, BBX Capital Foundation committed a $100,000 donation for providers helping children and young adults with mental-health needs. The distinction is revealing. KHM was not merely buying ads. It was helping money, organizations and public attention find one another.

The part worth copying

A small organization cannot copy KHM's Rolodex, and a national agency cannot manufacture 19 years of Broward history by opening a local office. But the method is portable. Begin with a named audience, not a channel. Give the campaign one sentence that survives translation. Assign each channel a job. Keep the message in market long enough to become familiar. Measure the result. Then look honestly at the capability you keep outsourcing and decide whether a durable partnership can close the gap.

That is also the merger's risk. Integration is easy to announce and hard to operate. KHM's edge is personal, regional and earned over time; Sparq's value lies partly in systems that can scale. If process flattens the local judgment, the combination loses what made it interesting. If the firms preserve specialist judgment while sharing data and execution, they can offer something many agencies promise and fewer deliver: a campaign that knows both whom to call and what happened after the call.

Kip Hunter Marketing occupies a useful middle of the market. It is more connected and hands-on than a remote performance shop, broader than a PR boutique, and smaller in posture than a global holding-company agency. Its customers are organizations for whom visibility must become behavior: a store visit, a call for help, an event registration, a donation, a lead. The company does not sell fame in the abstract. It sells a planned chain reaction.

The clever part of the merger is not what became bigger. It is what became continuous.