Priscila Martinez’s roommate had a persuasive argument for a career in public relations. She did not have to make it aloud. She simply came home from premieres carrying free clothes while Martinez came home from a job dominated by spreadsheets. For a business graduate considering the available futures, the comparison was difficult to ignore. An opening at the roommate’s firm led to an interview, then an assistant’s job. The person she assisted became her mentor. A profession that had barely appeared on her map suddenly offered a way in.
It is a pleasingly untidy beginning for someone who now helps companies explain themselves. Her account begins with another person’s working life making an unfamiliar possibility visible. Martinez followed it, then spent years learning what the attractive version of the job left outside the frame.
Her later career would turn on a more demanding question. Once she knew how an agency worked, what would she change if she could start one? In March 2015, she gave herself the opportunity to answer.
The roommate had premieres
The appeal of PR survived contact with its less photogenic duties. Martinez worked at I/D Public Relations before launching her own business, developing experience in the entertainment and consumer worlds. The names attached to her work eventually included fashion houses, publications and streaming entertainment. There was plenty to attract someone interested in how culture travels.
There was also the simple pleasure of having a job that could lead somewhere unexpected. It is easy to understand why the invitation mattered to a young graduate. An opening can change a career before the person stepping through it has developed an impressive explanation for the decision.
Ownership brought its own interruptions. She has recalled answering a client call in the middle of a modern art museum in Mexico City and handling conference calls from the beach. There is a certain efficiency in a job that allows travel and then accompanies you everywhere. The museum anecdote is funny because the promised escape contains a ringing phone.
She learned, too, that persuasion required preparation. Her approach to a prospective client included following its industry and passing along useful developments. A relevant piece of information gave her a reason to get in touch. It also gave the recipient a reason to welcome the message. The homework made the conversation possible.
A different name on the door
The Brand Agency began with two monthly retainer accounts. Guess was among the early clients. Martinez chose a name that directed attention toward brands rather than putting her own surname over the entrance. For someone whose work involves deciding what people notice first, the decision has a certain consistency.
She also wanted to change what it felt like to work inside a PR firm. The ambition was specific: keep the interesting clients and creative work while building a workplace with fewer of the interpersonal habits she had disliked. Founding a business gave her authority over hiring, expectations and everyday conduct. It also made those choices her responsibility.
By 2024, the agency described an all-female team working across corporate communications, media relations, events and strategic partnerships. Its roster had expanded into entertainment, technology, fashion and consumer work. Disney, Hulu, Paramount and ESPN were among the client names announced that year. These assignments involved the sort of large organizations a small firm might once have admired from a distance.
Outside recognition gives some shape to the intervening years. The agency received Inc. Best Workplaces recognition in 2022 and Best in Business honors in 2022 and 2024. Awards do not describe every working day, but the workplace recognition is relevant to the problem Martinez had set herself at the beginning. The interior of the business was supposed to matter.
Two sides of a border, another kind of agency
Martinez grew up around Mexicali and Calexico, with family homes on both sides of the Mexico-California border. Her parents were Mexican immigrants. She went on to Pepperdine University to study business. Public relations had not been among the conventional career possibilities presented to her while growing up.
That absence became a business question when she and longtime colleague Josie Sanchez compared experiences. Both recognized the distance between the opportunities they had discovered and the careers they had once imagined available. Their response was Vicaria Multicultural Agency, a sister business intended to work with clients and personalities who had been overlooked or poorly represented.
The name recalls Leona Vicario, a figure in Mexico’s independence movement. It gave the new agency a reference point beyond a conventional marketing label. The business grew out of a conversation between two women who understood something about being underrepresented in the room.
Representation, here, had a practical consequence: another firm, another set of potential clients, another place to direct their experience. Martinez and Sanchez were turning a shared observation into an offering. Their backgrounds became relevant to what they believed the market was missing.
Her business interests extended into another specialist field in 2020, when she founded 1795 Communications to focus on the cannabis industry. That firm sat alongside The Brand Agency and Vicaria in her subsequent account of her work. Rather than asking one agency name to explain every assignment, the businesses gave different kinds of clients a more specific point of entry.
There is a personal ambition inside that decision. Martinez has spoken about wanting girls to see careers they might otherwise never consider. Her own entry into PR makes the idea concrete. Seeing one person do an unfamiliar job had changed her choices. Making more such examples visible could change somebody else’s.
The homework before the headline
Her published advice is often briskly practical. Before asking for publicity, a business should work out what it wants to achieve, what distinguishes it and who is equipped to speak. She recommends assigning spokespeople subjects they understand and care about, then recording the organization’s messages in a guide people can actually use.
Those instructions put an obligation on the client. A publicist can refine a story, but the organization must first understand the direction it wants to take. Otherwise, every interview risks becoming a fresh negotiation over what the company means. A shared document can save an extraordinary amount of conversation.
Before the pitch / A working sequence
- Choose the goalDefine the direction and the specific strengths behind it.
- Match the voiceGive each spokesperson a subject they can explain well.
- Write it downKeep a shared guide to the messages and language.
She has experienced celebrity influence as a customer herself. Seeing Paris Hilton in a bright Juicy Couture tracksuit left her wanting one, despite a price that exceeded a month of her student expenses. The anecdote supplies a useful admission from someone who works on the other side of that desire. She understands the appeal without having to pretend she is immune.
Her advice on earning an unpaid placement begins with the people around a celebrity: stylists, makeup artists and other trusted intermediaries. Research the fit. Be selective about gifts. Pay attention to timing. If a placement happens, make it easy for entertainment journalists to identify the product and tell readers where to find it.
There is considerable patience in that sequence. Sending something is an opening move. The work continues through a network of people, their judgment and the possibility that a product will suit a particular moment. The photograph may appear sudden. The preparation has been accumulating elsewhere.
Permission to disagree
Martinez’s account of leadership leaves space for an employee to tell the founder she is wrong. She has argued that colleagues need the freedom to challenge an approach and offer another view. The person with the title can still be missing the useful idea. Listening gives that idea a chance to enter the conversation.
“We need to make extraordinary things seem attainable for young girls.”Priscila Martinez, 2021
Her working habits combine ambition with ordinary preferences. In 2020, she described starting at her desk with a worksheet for priorities, gratitude and the day’s wins. Microsoft To Do helped organize tasks. An Ember mug and coffee shipped from New York made the morning more agreeable. Even a communications executive must negotiate with a cooling cup.
In a later conversation, she described herself as a sociable student who liked making classmates laugh. Running a company required her to become more organized as competing demands multiplied. She estimated that maintaining relationships occupied more than half her time. In a project-based business, a useful connection might have a much longer life than any individual assignment.
By 2024, she was describing time away from work in familiar terms: traveling with her husband, reading with her son, seeing her parents and siblings, enjoying her dog’s company. Her chosen language for managing the demands was harmony. Some days favor work; others favor family. The adjustment continues.
She has taken those ideas into rooms beyond client meetings. Her speaking engagements have included UCLA’s Velocity Women’s Leadership Summit, a marketing series at USC Marshall and the International Trade Council’s Think Global Conference. The audiences differ from those at an entertainment launch, but the invitation gives her another way to make a communications career visible to people considering their own next move.
The recognition continued, too. Inc. included her on its Female Founders lists in 2024 and 2026. In 2026, she received the IN2 SABRE award for DE&I Professional of the Year. Her agency also announced her inclusion in Ragan’s Top Women in Communications that April.
These are public markers in a career spent arranging public moments for other people. The more revealing thread runs back to the roommate: a working life became imaginable because someone nearby was living it. Martinez took the opening. Years later, with a firm of her own, she acquired the ability to offer other people an opening as well.