A county is an awkward thing to advertise. It has roads and tax rates, certainly, but also grudges, accents, high-school rivalries, a bakery everybody claims to have discovered first, and a committee that would like the blue in the new logo to be slightly less blue. A sneaker can promise speed. A county must persuade an employer, a tourist, a resident and an elected official - four people who may not even agree on what success looks like.
PPR Strategies built a business inside that awkwardness. The Frederick, Maryland, firm began in 2002 as Platinum PR, founded by Sandy Dubay after she had worked in county economic development in West Virginia and Maryland. That biography matters. Dubay did not arrive at place marketing from the glamour end of advertising. She arrived from the office that has to answer when a business asks about workforce, when a resident objects at a meeting, and when a campaign's beautiful promise meets a public procurement calendar.
Today PPR describes itself as an economic-development consulting agency specializing in communications, strategic planning and implementation. The final word is the tell. Plenty of consultants can leave a strategic plan in a PDF. Plenty of agencies can make a campaign after somebody else has settled the politics. PPR's pitch is to inhabit the troublesome distance between them.
The focus group before the font
The conventional place-branding mistake is to begin with adjectives. Vibrant. Connected. Thriving. The words are perfectly agreeable and almost useless; every community can borrow them. PPR's better projects begin further upstream, with the mildly dangerous act of asking people what is working and what is not.
In Sykesville, Maryland, the assignment was not simply to make an already photogenic Main Street more visible. PPR ran two candid focus groups, visited proprietors and turned the findings into a SWOT analysis. Consensus was the scarce resource. The eventual result included stronger local buy-in and a path toward Main Street America certification. In Rock Hall, the problem was smaller but familiar: independent businesses knew social media mattered and had no spare afternoon to decode it. PPR opened with an in-person session, asked attendees what they actually needed, then adapted four online workshops around Canva, content planning, Facebook and Instagram. At least 25 businesses attended one of the live online sessions.
This is the company's differentiation in plain clothes. A general agency sees content channels. PPR sees the operating conditions behind them: thin municipal capacity, public accountability, several audiences and an approval chain. Its customers are economic-development offices, tourism organizations, workforce programs, Main Street groups, schools, nonprofits and associations. They often need an extra department, not an extra slogan.
Eight accounts are not one audience
The clearest demonstration came in Howard County. Over 23 months, PPR managed eight social accounts belonging to the county's Economic Development Authority and its Maryland Innovation Center. The temptation would have been efficiency by sameness. Instead, the authority received practical material about business resources, visits, events and county news; the innovation center received a more motivational voice aimed at founders and emerging companies. The brands cross-promoted one another without pretending to be twins.
PPR produced six to ten distinct pieces a week across the two organizations, handled comments and messages, ran paid campaigns, and reviewed analytics monthly. An office-space campaign produced a waiting list. The authority gained 1,217 followers; its LinkedIn impressions rose 152.4 percent. The innovation center's Instagram following rose 364.3 percent, while its average LinkedIn engagement rate moved from 7.77 to 17.56 percent.
The numbers are useful, but the method is more transferable than the percentages. Do not begin by asking what to post. Begin by asking who must act, what each group values and which proof will feel credible to them. Then build a cadence the client can sustain. This sounds obvious. Most good operational advice does, immediately after somebody has done the difficult work of making it obvious.
“PPR functioned as a seamless extension of our team.”Brian Namey, International Economic Development Council
Reach is bought. Participation is recruited.
The difference appears neatly in two community gift-card programs. For Frostburg's Burg Bucks, PPR highlighted more than 20 participating businesses and reached over 47,000 people through advertising and organic content. Charles County's With Love From Charles required more machinery: business recruitment, onboarding, public relations, social media, digital ads, billboards and continuing program management. It produced more than 13 million impressions in eight months and recruited over 25 businesses.
Thirteen million is the number that fits in a press release. Twenty-five may be the more instructive one. Impressions can be purchased from a platform. A shopkeeper's participation must be explained, supported and earned. PPR's business model - project fees and continuing contracts for strategy plus execution - makes sense when a client needs both. A plan without staff time is stationery. Advertising without local participation is noise.
What $75,002.58 looks like under pressure
Public-sector marketing rarely publishes a menu. One unusually transparent Charles County project offers a reference point. PPR was asked to run a neutral information campaign about a ballot decision on the county's form of government. The total was $75,002.58, including a $45,002.58 media spend and PPR's contract.
Total reported campaign cost, including $45,002.58 in media and PPR's contract. It is an example, not a rate card.
The first thing to fail was the comforting idea that the creative could remain fixed. As Election Day approached, content restrictions tightened. The team had to pivot repeatedly while keeping the message neutral. That episode explains why implementation sits in PPR's description of itself. In regulated or politically sensitive work, the strategy is not the original plan. The strategy is the system that can change without losing the objective.
The same integrated logic scaled to the International Economic Development Council. From May 2025 through March 2026, PPR supported three major events with promotion, scripts, social coverage, visual assets, email and on-site communications. Around the 2026 Leadership Summit, LinkedIn clicks jumped 305 percent. Media work across the engagement produced coverage in more than 400 outlets. Here again, the value was not a single clever object. It was agreement among dozens of objects.
A name catches up with the company
By 2023, “Platinum PR” had become too small a container. Dubay explained in an interview that the name no longer did justice to the audience the firm served. The company worked on talent attraction, pilot programs, apprenticeships, tourism, investment, events and community strategy. Calling all of that PR was like calling a town its welcome sign.
The replacement, PPR Strategies, expands to People and Places Reimagined. It is broad, perhaps intentionally so. The rebrand marked a change in self-understanding: communications was no longer the category but one instrument in a place-based practice. More recently the company added a Strategic Advisor Network - experienced practitioners in research, development finance, incentives, policy and public affairs who can join complex assignments without becoming permanent overhead. It is a boutique's answer to a large consultancy's bench.
The useful parts to borrow
- Interview stakeholders before drafting the message.
- Give each audience a job, not merely a demographic label.
- Make research, creative, distribution and measurement one loop.
- Build an approval process that can survive a late rule change.
- Measure participation as well as attention.
The part the brochure cannot solve
There are conditions under which this approach will disappoint. If leaders want promotion but will not grant access to residents, businesses or internal data, listening becomes theater. If every small decision requires a month of approvals, integrated execution becomes an expensive waiting room. If a client treats impressions as proof of investment, job creation or civic trust, communications metrics will be asked to prove an economic outcome they cannot establish alone.
The method also depends on something less visible: a community must possess real assets and the willingness to confront gaps. Storytelling can clarify a place. It cannot manufacture workforce, infrastructure or consensus from copy. PPR's strongest work acknowledges this by starting with strategy and staying through implementation. Its weakest possible client would be one seeking a prettier version of a claim nobody locally believes.
That may be the durable lesson in PPR's two-decade evolution. Places do not need to sound more like brands. They need to become more legible - first to themselves, then to the particular people they hope will visit, invest, hire, enroll or remain. The agency's work is to find the honest sentence, build the machinery around it and keep adjusting when the county, as counties do, refuses to behave like a sneaker.