There is a peculiar machine in Sunny Isles Beach. You drive into it, stay in your car, and rise through the middle of a 60-story tower until both you and the automobile arrive at a private garage in the sky. A sensible engineer calls this a lift. A good publicist sees a sentence that writes itself.
The machine belongs to Porsche Design Tower, a branded condominium developed by Dezer Development. When Kreps PR + Marketing worked on the project, the agency did not ask the press to admire another expensive building in a city crowded with expensive buildings. It put the strange, concrete thing at the center: an automobile elevator that made the engineering visible. There were tours, customized press experiences and, at the opening, a surprise Alicia Keys performance. The tower traveled because its story could fit in your head.
This is the useful way to understand Kreps. The Miami-area firm sells public relations, social media, search, paid advertising, production, events and crisis advice. But those are departments. The craft beneath them is translation - finding the detail that lets an outsider care about a developer, a bank or a hotel without first earning a degree in the client's industry.
A retention number disguised as a history
Israel Kreps founded the agency in 1988. Its first client was EWM Realty, now Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices EWM Realty. More than 30 years later, the relationship remained. Agency websites often lead with awards because awards are tidy. Client tenure is messier and more revealing. It says the work survived new executives, new owners, the collapse of print monopolies, the arrival of Google, the rise of social feeds and the moment every brand decided it was a publisher.
Kreps's public client roster reads like a compact economic history of South Florida: condo towers, hotels, banks, investment firms, cultural events and community institutions. There are names built for glossy pages - Ritz-Carlton Residences, Armani/Casa, Porsche Design Tower - beside affordable-housing developers and financial firms whose work arrives in spreadsheets. The agency's job is to make both legible.
The staff mix helps. Kreps describes a team of former journalists, career publicists and former in-house Fortune 500 communicators. One knows what a newsroom needs by 4 p.m. Another knows what a client is permitted to say at 4:01. The productive friction lives between them.
“The best public relations strategy isn't asking, ‘How do we get press?’ It's asking, ‘Why should anyone care?’”Kreps PR + Marketing
The boat show changed genres overnight
The Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show offers a cleaner experiment. In 2019, Kreps worked as Informa Markets' agency of record for five American boat shows. For Fort Lauderdale's 60th anniversary and the launch of Superyacht Village, the agency brought in more than 600 media members and reported more than 1.3 billion impressions. Lifestyle influencers helped move the event beyond the marine trade. The brief was expansion: take a specialist gathering and teach a broader audience how to look at it.
Then came 2020. Events across South Florida were being cancelled. The show was still considering a path forward, and the attention that had once been an asset threatened to become the first thing to fail. The story had changed genres - from spectacle to judgment.
Kreps prepared multiple crisis statements and a plan for the possible outcomes. That detail matters more than any heroic account of improvisation. Crisis communications is mostly the unglamorous work of writing tomorrow's sentences today. The show proceeded with safety measures and the agency later reported a 33 percent increase in media expressions from the previous year. The audience's pent-up interest in boating helped, but only after the organizers addressed the question hanging over the event: should this be happening at all?
The full-service promise, divided properly
As media fragmented, Kreps did not claim that a publicist automatically becomes a search marketer by opening another browser tab. The firm expanded through specialists. It merged with BrandStar in 2021, gaining access to television, film and virtual-production capability. In 2022, Miami Social Marketing - a firm Kreps already used - merged into the company and became KrepsSocial. Its founder, Liza Gallardo Walton, remained in charge.
“This is an absolute hand-in-glove situation,” Kreps said of that deal. It is a small quote with a practical acquisition thesis inside it: buy the team whose work you already trust. Kreps Digital, led by Seth Rand, adds SEO, paid search and social advertising, websites, e-commerce, email and automation. Rand's group reports work with more than 1,800 businesses and over $50 million in managed Google advertising.
The business model is the familiar agency one: ongoing relationships and project campaigns, now spread across more services. The positioning is less familiar. Kreps presents itself as a boutique with senior attention and regional fluency, but with production and performance-marketing depth that usually sends a client to several shops. Its offices and teams in Miami, New York, Charleston and Palm Beach extend the map; membership in the Public Relations Global Network extends it further.
That structure suits clients with genuine subject matter and several audiences - a developer speaking to buyers, investors, neighbors and planning officials, or a bank linking sports sponsorships to community standing. It is less magical when the underlying offer is ordinary, access is withheld or leadership expects coverage to substitute for a working business. Publicity can amplify a reason to care. It cannot manufacture one indefinitely.
The part worth stealing
The Kreps playbook does not require a yacht, a celebrity or a nine-figure home. It requires editorial discipline. The agency's work around the $106.9 million Arsht Estate sale included exclusives, interviews, shoots, events and social media. Yet all of it orbited one plain fact: this was the first residential transaction in Miami-Dade County to cross $100 million. The channels multiplied the fact; they did not replace it.
The amusing thing about a modern integrated agency is how much of its value still depends on an old social skill: knowing whom to call, what that person needs and when not to call them. Technology changes the number of places a story can appear. It does not change the threshold question.
Kreps has spent nearly four decades asking it. Why should anyone care about this tower, this hotel renovation, this bank partnership, this boat show? When the answer is a vivid elevator, a record-setting sale or a well-prepared decision made under pressure, the work becomes easier to repeat. And repeatability, more than attention alone, is what turns a fact into a story.