The curious thing about publicity is that the people who want it most often have the least to say. They have a ribbon, perhaps, but no reason to cut it. They have an executive, but no useful opinion. They have a launch date and mistake it for a story. O'Connell & Goldberg PR has spent 33 years in the awkward space between wanting attention and earning it. Its answer is almost suspiciously wholesome: begin with something worth noticing.
Barbara Goldberg co-founded the Fort Lauderdale firm in 1993 under a phrase that could have come from a neighborhood newspaper: “Good People Make Good News.” It is easy to hear only the cheerfulness. The more interesting part is commercial. The motto acts as a filter. Find organizations with credible work, locate the human consequence, then build enough context for a reporter, customer, donor or public official to care.
The agency is not a product company disguised as a consultancy. It sells judgment and execution: strategic counsel, media relations, digital marketing, social strategy, influencer programs, crisis communication, community outreach, content, design and events. Clients pay through retained or project work. Published fees reached $3 million in 2025, up 6.5 percent, in what Goldberg called the firm's best year to date. Client rate cards and individual campaign budgets are not public.
A press release cannot perform a card trick
Consider a condominium launch at the St. Regis Bal Harbour. The conventional program would involve cocktails, remarks and a scale model. O&G projected magicians Penn & Teller onto the middle hotel tower, where they executed an interactive card trick with the audience below. The building became the screen, the guests became participants, and the sales proposition - grand scale, theater, impossibility made plausible - became visible without anyone reciting it.
The same instinct appeared in different costumes. For the Diplomat's move from Westin to Hilton's Curio Collection, the agency organized the unveiling of a custom glass curio created by a live artist. For W Fort Lauderdale, an opening celebration featuring Cindy Crawford and Blake Lively helped produce more than 150 print, online and broadcast placements. During the $1 billion Fontainebleau Miami Beach renovation, a number attached to the property rather than the agency, O&G ran an 18-month Florida and hotel-trade campaign. When project delays threatened to become the first and only story, the team pushed early business coverage and managed access through the opening.
“The event is not decoration around the story. Done properly, the event is the story's working prototype.”YesPress analysis of O&G campaign work
The useful middle of the market
O&G lives between two familiar alternatives. A solo publicist can be nimble but narrow. A global agency network can summon specialists in several time zones but may struggle to know who actually matters at a county commission meeting. O&G's advantage is the middle: a full-service team with unusually deep South Florida context and enough national practice to place local expertise into a wider conversation.
That explains the client mix. Real estate and retail are central - GL Homes, Kimco Realty, developers, shopping districts and master-planned communities. But the roster also includes colleges, healthcare operators, restaurants, law firms and nonprofits. The common problem is not industry. It is translation. A dermatology network needs a coherent national voice. A college needs its faculty to become useful expert sources. A restaurant needs first-year foot traffic. A developer needs public trust before a vote.
Sometimes the first plan genuinely fails. After the Great Recession, developers behind Hollywood Circle could not secure conventional funding. Gold Coast Florida Regional Center turned to the then-obscure EB-5 program. O&G's assignment changed accordingly: educate audiences about the financing model, support campaigns in China and South Africa, stage a building implosion and topping-off, then carry the property through its 2018 opening. The public-relations work did not create the financing mechanism. It made a complicated pivot understandable.
Attention is only useful when it moves
The agency's strongest examples end somewhere more specific than “awareness.” For Bove Development's first multifamily application in Palm Beach County's Agricultural Reserve, O&G developed the narrative and community collateral, helping gather more than 130 letters and public-comment cards before a favorable vote. For TriVent Healthcare, content, video and search-oriented assets increased impressions by more than 400 percent and clicks by more than 170 percent, according to the agency. For an annual Fortis dental-care initiative spanning 19 campuses in 11 states, the work routinely produces more than 20 placements during event weeks.
Relative bar lengths use 400% as the visual maximum. Figures are reported by the agency for its client work.
This is also where the method has boundaries. Public relations can amplify evidence; it cannot permanently substitute for it. The play is weak when leadership withholds access, the product disappoints, the community benefit is merely asserted, or nobody with credibility can answer a difficult question. A giant projection may win a photograph, but it cannot rescue a building that does not open. The technique works best when communications enters early enough to influence the action, not when a publicist is handed a finished decision and told to decorate it.
The humans keep the last edit
In 2026, O&G published a restrained view of AI agents. Let machines monitor trends, research competitors, assemble performance data and remove repetitive labor. Keep people responsible for deciding whether a trend fits the brand, whether a story has cultural sense and whether an apparently efficient action could damage trust. Content strategist Carson Celio put it plainly: social professionals bring an eye for design, storytelling and culture that AI cannot replicate.
The position suits a firm whose chief operating officer began as a newspaper reporter, whose founder has taught communications, and whose internal practices include professional coaching and cross-level mentorship circles. The culture is not incidental to the product. If the business sells judgment in ambiguous moments, then curious and steady people are production infrastructure.
That idea has also changed how the agency presents itself. It expanded its Tampa Bay presence in 2024, moved further into integrated digital work, and entered 2026 with assignments ranging from a restaurant's first year to the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show. Yet its useful distinction remains old-fashioned: it knows the room. Not the demographic abstraction of the room, but the reporter, donor, commissioner, resident, broker, patient or prospective student sitting inside it.
The part worth borrowing
- Write the desired action before the headline: visit, approve, trust, donate, enroll or call.
- Find one piece of real-world proof that makes that action reasonable.
- Give the proof a credible human voice and a visual form people can remember.
- Adapt the same central fact for earned media, search, social and community channels.
- Measure the movement after attention: qualified clicks, attendance, support, coverage quality or decisions.
Tiffany & Co. was one of O&G's earliest clients. The agency introduced its Bal Harbour store through community and charity relationships, in-store events and local media, then represented the brand for more than eight years. The momentum contributed, by the agency's account, to Tiffany's decision to open another South Florida store in Boca Raton. That is the whole business in miniature. The press clipping was not the ending. The second store was.
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