M Booth Gives Familiar Brands Something New to Talk About

Eight hours is a long time to watch cheese. During the pandemic, M Booth helped Moe’s Southwest Grill turn its signature queso into an ASMR relaxation video: a slow spectacle of drips, swirls and whispered reassurance. Dining rooms were closing. Takeout and delivery remained. The brief was to remind people that Moe’s was still there, without pretending the world was having a normal week.

The agency describes the execution as low-cost and reports more than three billion impressions. That measures potential exposure, not three billion viewers or orders. Still, the idea is revealing. A familiar product supplied the raw material; an anxious public supplied the context. The creative work was finding a connection between them that someone might voluntarily watch, share or write about.

That is a useful introduction to M Booth, a New York communications agency whose client roster runs from Google and American Express to Brooks Running and The Macallan. Its business sits where publicity, advertising, social content and corporate reputation overlap. The output can be wonderfully silly. The underlying assignment is usually quite practical: give a business something worth saying, then help it reach the people who matter.

A founder with a two-word prop

On the agency’s website, founder Margaret “Margi” Booth holds a lightbox reading “RISK IT.” It is an unusually efficient executive portrait. There is a smile, a yellow background and a complete creative brief.

M Booth dates its beginnings to 1983. The consumer PR business later attracted Next Fifteen, which bought it in 2009. The deal put $4 million on the table immediately, with as much as $13.25 million more dependent on revenue and profit targets over four years. That made the maximum consideration $17.25 million. The structure tied much of the price to what happened next.

The strategic bargain was also explicit. M Booth brought consumer expertise to a group with substantial technology experience; its new parent offered digital knowledge and opportunities for international collaboration. It was an expansion of what the agency could bring to a client, as well as a change of ownership.

Dale Bornstein arrived as CEO in 2013 after a long career at Ketchum. Under her leadership, the firm expanded its creative, digital and analytical capabilities. That matters because an agency born in media relations can become trapped by the deliverables clients originally hired it to produce. M Booth’s response was to widen the work it could do around an existing relationship.

“The only way to expand into other parts of the company is on the back of already great work.”

Dale Bornstein, in PRWeek’s 2023 agency business report

The retainer behind the stunt

The business is substantial. PRovoke’s 2026 profile reports $77.6 million in 2025 fee income, a 9.6 percent increase, and two clients with annual retainers above $10 million. Those figures describe an agency paid for continuing work at scale. They are not a price list for a video, an influencer post or a launch.

Buyers are marketing and communications teams that need several kinds of expertise to work together. M Booth lists earned media, digital marketing, design, influencer programs, experiential work and analytics alongside corporate reputation, crisis management and media training. A brand can need an entertaining launch one week and a carefully prepared spokesperson the next. Housing those skills together is commercially useful.

Its position is easiest to understand as an integrated communications agency with strong consumer roots. The relevant comparison is with other agencies that combine reputation and brand work, rather than with a software subscription. A client is buying judgment, creative development, execution and coordination. The practical test is whether those people can solve the particular brief, not how many services appear on the menu.

When the destination cannot take visitors

Tourism New Zealand posed a different problem. During COVID restrictions, the normal invitation to visit had lost its immediate usefulness. M Booth’s Forest of Hope asked U.S. travelers to share pandemic heartbreaks, with a tree planted in New Zealand as a symbol of future hope.

The campaign gave a distant place a role in someone’s present life. It also changed the action being requested: participate now, keep the destination in mind for later. The lesson is the choice of a credible intermediate step when the eventual purchase is unavailable. A tree made the promise tangible without requiring an immediate flight.

For Grow with Google, the subject was closer to home. Camera Ready Kutz told the story of a small-business owner adapting her barbershop to the pandemic while supporting Black Lives Matter. M Booth used a graphic novel-inspired animation and unscripted interview audio. Google published the Instagram Story in October 2021.

The format made the owner’s voice central while giving the story a distinctive visual treatment. This is a more useful creative lesson than “make it animated.” Start with a person whose experience carries the point; choose a format that helps an audience stay with that experience. A corporate claim becomes easier to understand when there is an actual business and a recognizably human problem attached.

Sometimes the problem is the name

The work also reaches into less photogenic corners of business. Avery Dennison’s External Embellishments operation made apparel branding components, including labels, trims and patches. Its name did little to communicate that creative work. M Booth’s rebranding campaign won Best in Corporate Branding at the 2023 PRWeek US Awards.

It is an instructive counterweight to the cheese. Sometimes attention requires an entertaining event. Sometimes a company first needs language that helps people understand what it already does. A communications agency earns its place when it can tell which problem it has been handed.

Specialization matters, too. In 2019, Next Fifteen acquired Health Unlimited’s U.S. operations and established M Booth Health as a separate agency reporting to Bornstein. The transaction added expertise in pharmaceutical communications, public health, advocacy and issues management. Keeping a specialist health business alongside the broader agency reflects the different demands of those assignments.

Putting numbers around cultural instinct

M Booth’s newer offering, Culture Mark, attempts to make cultural strategy more systematic. Launched in July 2025, the AI-powered methodology scores six dimensions: audacity, approach, agility, appeal, arc and adoption. The resulting brand assessment is designed to support comparison and decisions about where to go next.

The useful promise is a shared basis for a difficult conversation. “We should be more relevant” is an ambition with plenty of room for disagreement. A structured assessment can force a team to specify what it means and examine competing explanations. M Booth presents the method as a way to understand why a brand holds attention, rather than merely identify a passing trend.

Another offering, GenIQ, addresses how brands appear in generative AI search. Team members describe work on the idea beginning in 2024 and client work from 2025. That extends a familiar reputation question: what account of a company reaches a potential customer before the company gets to speak for itself?

The people have to stay curious

M Booth calls its hybrid working philosophy Be IRL: Inspired Relevant Leaders. The point is to define useful behavior across working locations. Its published approach emphasizes relationships, empathy and boundaries. The agency’s current careers copy describes more than 300 people distributed across the United States.

Its Accelerate program, launched in 2023, connects diverse employees with mentors and senior sponsors. Employee resource groups support several communities within the business. Those details give the culture pitch some substance: a sponsor can help someone gain access to work and visibility that advice alone does not provide.

External recognition has followed. The agency’s 2025 awards recap includes PRWeek’s Outstanding Large Agency honor, while the Booth Group received PRovoke’s North American Agency of the Year award. Work with Brooks Running on Let’s Run There also collected creative recognition. Awards are evidence of industry approval; a prospective client still needs to examine the team and thinking proposed for its own assignment.

Borrow the question before the answer

For a marketer studying M Booth, the repeatable move is to identify the obstacle before choosing a format. Moe’s needed to remain present during restaurant closures. New Zealand needed a connection with people who could not visit. Avery Dennison needed its language to catch up with its work. Those are different problems, and they deserved different responses.

The conditions matter. An attention-getting campaign needs an appropriate relationship to the product and a next step the business can actually deliver. Borrowing a joke without that connection risks leaving people remembering the joke alone. Using publicity to compensate for an unresolved operational problem puts more eyes on the weakness.

M Booth’s own 2026 reputation outlook brings that sober side into view. Its issues and crisis specialists discuss deceptive AI, leadership decisions and the danger of assuming a controversy will simply disappear. Communications needs preparation and responsible conduct behind it. The same firm that can make queso soothing also has to help executives anticipate difficult questions.

That combination explains the company better than its appetite for boldness alone. There is room for the unexpected image, the careful diagnosis and the unglamorous follow-through. A brand becomes interesting when it gives people a reason to care. Keeping that reason believable is the continuing job.