Laura Tomasetti and the long way around

Laura Tomasetti once had her own Mobil 1 Racing fire suit. It is a wonderfully specific detail in a career now described with the sober vocabulary of executive communications and corporate reputation. Public relations can mean preparing a chief executive to speak. It can also mean learning enough about a client’s world that, somewhere along the way, the wardrobe becomes unexpectedly flame-resistant.

Her early work at global agencies in Washington, D.C., included Mobil, Dow, and P&G. Later came Hasbro, where she served as a vice president of communications for the company’s digital division, working alongside marketing and sales. She also spent time leading marketing for a nonprofit arts institution. The assignments changed; so did the position from which she saw them. She had worked for clients and inside a client organization before she became the person responsible for building an agency.

In 2001, she founded Laura Tomasetti & Associates Public Relations. A founder’s name is a sensible opening proposition: here is the person taking responsibility. Four years later, the business adopted 360. The shorter name carried a larger assignment. Tomasetti wanted public relations to power integrated campaigns, with several points of contact between a brand and the people it hoped to reach.

A founder’s name, then a circle

There is a quiet ambition in that change. The original name told a prospective client who was behind the work. The new one described how the work should behave. A story might begin in the media, continue in a conversation, and acquire a different life in content shared by someone a customer trusted. Thinking around that circle meant following the audience beyond a single publication.

By 2026, the agency was celebrating 25 years. In an anniversary post, Tomasetti thanked the people who had helped shape its early days and the colleagues who continued to contribute. She shared an archival team photograph. It is the kind of picture a company accumulates while everyone is busy getting through the week, then discovers years later has become a piece of history.

Agency anniversaries lend themselves to polished founding myths. A team picture complicates the tidy version in a useful way. A company may begin with one person’s decision, but its daily practice belongs to many people. The photograph makes room for that distinction without requiring a speech.

Her route to that point also explains why brand marketing and corporate communications sit close together in her thinking. In a 2018 conversation with Cheryl Gale, she discussed a career that began in advertising copywriting and moved through agency and in-house work. The conversation connected reputation, relationships, and the overlapping work of content, digital, social, advertising, and PR. Experience on both sides of the brief gives those overlaps a practical meaning: someone still has to make the pieces work together.

The school gate had something to teach the screen

One revealing example of Tomasetti’s approach predates much of today’s influencer vocabulary. In a 2013 article, she described research conducted the previous year by 360 Public Relations, Lindberg International Research, and Mom It Forward. The project examined how American mothers recommended brands. It included web-based interviews, in-home focus groups, and an online event.

The finding worth pausing over was thoroughly ordinary. In-person contact remained important, even while social networks were becoming part of everyday buying decisions. Among respondents, 83 percent rated in-person contact as a preferred way to recommend brands, compared with 53 percent for social media. These were findings from a particular 2012 study, rather than a forecast about every audience that would follow.

The focus groups described a journey that went offline, online, and offline again: ask other mothers, research, then return to the conversation before deciding. A marketing diagram could draw that neatly. Real life would put it among school bags and interrupted conversations. Tomasetti’s point was that the route deserved attention. A brand needed to understand how advice traveled through relationships.

Her later writing about creativity approached a related problem from another direction. What should a brand do when it wants to reach the people its existing marketing misses? In a 2019 essay, she described a marketing executive asking how to reach the remaining 20 percent of consumers. Her response began with questions: who were those people, what were they buying, which media did they use, and what might persuade them to try something different?

A percentage can make an assignment look reassuringly precise. It supplies a number before it supplies an understanding. Tomasetti’s account resisted skipping the understanding. A new audience could require a different message and a different experience. The creative work had to come after looking closely enough to know what was actually missing.

A larger agency, with particular appetites

Growth has added specialists to the business. In February 2022, 360PR+ acquired the New York lifestyle agency CRC, with founder Cindy Riccio joining its leadership team. The announcement described expertise in categories including apparel, footwear, beauty, personal care, and home goods. In January 2023, Powers Brand Communications joined, adding a Philadelphia presence and experience in retail and franchise businesses.

These are useful details because they show growth in terms of people and subject knowledge. An acquisition announcement can be written almost entirely in square footage and opportunity. Here, the question is what the incoming team knows how to do. The business had also developed Three Cheers PR, an agency specializing in adult beverage brands.

The internal work mattered, too. In 2023, 360PR+ described its Professional Enrichment Programming, organized around diversity and inclusion, creativity and innovation, account management, and campaign measurement. It discussed investment in influencer tools and analytics, and bringing influencer and social specialists together. The underlying task was to connect the creative output with what happened afterward, including engagement and customer actions.

There is an unglamorous side to a creative business that deserves its paragraph. Training, measurement, and coordination rarely make the most photogenic part of an agency’s story. They determine whether an idea can survive the journey from a promising meeting to something a client can use.

“People know what advertising looks like”

Laura Tomasetti, in conversation with Doug Simon, 2021

In that conversation, Tomasetti described brands bringing marketing and reputation closer together, and executives taking a more central role in storytelling. The chief executive’s communications assignment was extending beyond familiar financial occasions. A leader could help explain the brand and address issues that mattered to the people around it. That made the person at the top part of the communications work, with all the scrutiny that implies.

The business value of a boundary

Helping other people tell their stories also raises a prior question: which stories should the agency agree to tell? Tomasetti has discussed declining a restaurant-chain assignment after its senior executive made anti-LGBTQ comments. The opportunity came through a respected partner agency. She said the work conflicted with the values of her own team.

“do not be afraid to say no.”

Laura Tomasetti, Ethical Voices interview, 2022

That decision gives values a business consequence. Turning down an assignment leaves a gap that another assignment must fill. It also gives employees an example they can compare with the organization’s stated principles. A boundary becomes easier to understand once somebody has used it.

In April 2025, 360PR+ became a certified B Corporation, announcing the certification the following month. B Lab’s public listing records an overall B Impact score of 80.4 under the assessment version used for its certification. The date matters: this is a documented milestone in the agency’s development, with a defined assessment behind it.

Tomasetti’s own account of the process gave credit to colleagues Jenni Brennan, Kara Armit, and Lucy Ferrante, as well as the wider team. She described detailed reporting and the usefulness of outside benchmarks. There is a pleasing circularity here. An agency that helps clients explain their commitments had put its own business through an external review.

Twenty-five years, still an apprentice

Outside the agency, Tomasetti has served on the board of PROI Worldwide. Her public professional profile lists service as vice chair of the Animal Rescue League of Boston board from 2020 to 2022, membership of the Women’s Lunch Place board from June 2024, and the Institute for Public Relations board of trustees from December 2024. These roles place her alongside local community organizations and the wider profession she works in.

In May 2026, she joined Anne Green and Beth Cleveland for a Building Brand Gravity conversation about leading agencies over the long haul. The three shared recognition on PRWeek’s Women of Distinction list. The episode covered mentors, listening, relationships, and the work of leading through change. An anniversary had provided a reason to look backward; the conversation also kept the next generation of leaders in view.

“curiosity is the most important thing.”

Laura Tomasetti, CommPRO interview, 2024

Tomasetti has described agency life as a place where she continues to learn. Her emphasis on curiosity makes sense beside the career’s assorted assignments, the audience research, and the changing business. It asks a senior person to remain interested in something she has not yet understood. Years of experience can help with that task, provided they do not become an excuse to stop.

The fire suit is a good detail to keep at the end. It reminds us that a professional life can contain things a job title never hints at. Tomasetti’s agency has changed its name, added teams, and reached its twenty-fifth year. Its founder still has the same practical challenge: find out enough about the people involved to tell a story worth their attention. The circle leaves room to keep going.