Everett Hamilton was running an event-planning business when he noticed that the chairs, lights and guest lists were not the real work. The real work was getting people to feel connected to an idea. “What I found was that a lot of the work I was doing on the events side intersected with communications,” he later said. The observation sounds obvious only after someone else has made it. Hamilton followed it out of events and into public relations, founding Octane in Washington in 2000.
A quarter-century later, Octane Public Relations and Advertising is still in the connection business. Its clients include health agencies, insurers, city government, utilities and institutions with a public purpose. Its inventory includes research, strategy, branding, video, websites, paid media, community outreach and events. But the most accurate description is narrower: Octane works on the awkward distance between telling people something and getting them to do something.
That distance is where most public-health campaigns go to die. Information is released. A poster is approved. A media buy delivers impressions. Then everybody discovers that knowing about PrEP is not the same as asking a provider for it, and knowing that 988 exists is not the same as making the call. Octane's method begins by refusing to confuse the message with the outcome.
The first draft is the first suspect
When Hamilton started, campaigns were planned on paper. Now an audience may encounter the same institution through a bus shelter, an Instagram post, a community organizer, a search result and a video watched at midnight. The first casualty of that change was the universal audience. Octane's public description of its practice is almost stubbornly specific: research the behavior, the policy context, the cultural reality and the channels people actually use; then ask the intended audience to help develop the program.
The long relationship with DC Health shows what that looks like over time. Early work around HIV leaned on direct calls to get informed, use condoms and get tested. As medicine and the culture changed, the brief changed too. The Sexual + Being platform adopted a broader, sex-positive voice and addressed treatment, PrEP, viral-load suppression and distinct communities in distinct language. The portfolio now covers more than 40 campaigns, including work for transgender and Latinx residents. Octane reports 18,000 monthly website visits, more than 100,000 monthly YouTube views and 5,700 monthly social engagements around the platform.
“We want to make sure that the clients we have are truly committed to communicating to diverse audiences - not dictating them, but bringing them along through empowerment.”Everett Hamilton, CEO
This is the firm's clearest competitive position. A large network can offer scale. A public-affairs shop can offer proximity to power. A niche multicultural agency can offer cultural fluency. Octane combines a little of each, then adds the procurement credentials and patient-language discipline required to work inside government and healthcare. It is Black- and LGBTQ-owned, rooted in DC, and old enough to remember how the same health conversation sounded before social media, modern HIV prevention and the 988 Lifeline.
A campaign with a door handle
The BeMindfulDC work for Aetna makes the method unusually visible. The original problem was not a shortage of mental-health resources. It was that young people, seniors and underserved residents either did not know the free help existed or hesitated to seek it. Octane built platform-specific content around local voices, stigma reduction, mindfulness practices and direct routes to resources such as 988. It boosted posts, reviewed performance and adjusted. The campaign delivered 1,784,876 impressions against a target of 100,000 to 150,000 and gained more than 4,300 followers in three months. One resource post generated 98 direct link clicks.
That last number may be the most interesting. An impression says the campaign passed through the room. A resource click says someone found the door handle.
Events work the same way. For Aetna's Older Adults Thriving in Baltimore City Summit, Octane coordinated with city government and senior centers, mixed targeted media with useful local resources, and turned a branded gathering into an annual one. More than 2,200 people attended across three events. Aetna-member attendance rose from 13 percent to 32 percent, and more than 65 percent of attendees said their view of the insurer improved. For Mayor Bowser's Maternal and Infant Health Summit, Octane handled six years of event coordination, registration, creative, vendors, budget and multilingual materials. The company reports more than 10,000 participants over five years and 28.97 million social impressions.
The rare PR firm with prices in public
What did this work cost? The exact budgets of those case studies are not all public, but government records provide something better than an agency estimate: a set of real purchasing signals. In 2017, DC records listed an Octane purchase order of $797,692.50 for a HAHSTA contract option, $515,948 for an opioid media campaign and $495,000 for health-literacy work. Those figures are historical purchase-order values, not current menu prices or proof that every dollar went to agency fees; media, production and pass-through costs can live inside a campaign budget.
The firm's federal schedule is more precise. Its 2025-2026 ceiling rates turn the black box of agency pricing into a row of hourly labor categories:
This explains the business model. Octane is not selling software seats or a standardized campaign in a box. It sells teams and judgment by project, contract or government task order. Research creates the map; strategists and creatives make the campaign; media buyers, digital specialists and event staff distribute it; measurement sends the work back around the loop. The broad service list is useful because public-interest assignments rarely stay inside one medium.
The six moves worth stealing
The copyable part of Octane is not its color palette or a clever line. It is the operating sequence underneath the artifacts:
This sequence works best when the desired action is concrete, the client can provide a useful resource, and the agency has time and access to learn from the community. It is a weaker fit for a client seeking only a splashy announcement, refusing audience input or treating impressions as the finish line. Inclusive engagement also cannot repair a service that is hard to access, unaffordable or distrusted for good reason. Communications can make the door visible. It cannot pretend the room is sound.
Octane's case studies report campaign reach and broader health trends, but communications usually contributes to public outcomes alongside treatment, policy, funding and frontline care. The responsible claim is influence, not sole causation.
The company behind the campaigns
Hamilton describes running an agency as three simultaneous jobs: get the business, run the company that does the business, and attract the talent that implements it. Early on, he and a business partner wore nearly every hat. By 2023, COO Marcelle Brawner and an operations team were handling payroll, bills and daily functions, leaving Hamilton more room for client relationships and strategic direction. That division is mundane, which is exactly why it matters. A values statement does not process payroll.
The firm's survival was tested during the pandemic-era volatility that knocked many small businesses sideways. Hamilton credited expanded Pepco and PHI work with helping Octane keep its footing in 2021. The assignments were not merely publicity: Octane helped bind scattered diversity and inclusion efforts into “Grow Together,” developed the “What Drives Us?” community-impact program and supported corporate-responsibility reporting. The client needed a single voice for work that already existed. Octane's role was to find it.
Its newest emphasis, Octane Health Insight, tightens the same thesis around patient education. The center is aimed at pharmaceutical manufacturers, health systems and insurers dealing with medication adherence, discharge instructions, chronic conditions and care transitions. The bet is that many expensive health failures begin as comprehension failures. Plain language, provider alignment and reinforcement across the care journey are positioned not as niceties but as cost-control tools.
That brings Octane back to Hamilton's first observation. Events and public relations looked like different businesses until he found the shared mechanism: connection. Public relations and patient education look different too. So do a transit ad and a summit, an HIV test and a corporate-impact report. Octane keeps finding the same assignment hiding underneath them. Someone knows something. Someone else needs a reason to act. The work in between is not louder language. It is trust, made practical.