There was a moment, back when restaurants were still deciding whether Facebook was a pastime or a place of business, when a sushi restaurant in Baltimore became a laboratory. RA Sushi had a young crowd and a familiar problem: the customers were online, but the marketing plan was not. Amy Burke Friedman, then an account executive at PROFILES, began experimenting at the chain's East Coast location. She built its Facebook presence, developed its Twitter account and tried promotions that rewarded people for checking in with friends.
The numbers were modest by today's influencer arithmetic and startling for the time: more than 8,000 Twitter followers and more than 5,000 Facebook fans during the engagement. More important, the Baltimore location gave the corporation evidence. Other RA locations were allowed to build their own Facebook pages. Promotions tested here traveled to other markets. A single restaurant had not merely acquired an audience; it had written instructions.
The useful metric was not the follower count alone. It was a corporate decision to repeat the experiment elsewhere.
The little market that can watch itself
Baltimore has a civic nickname that sounds like an affectionate warning: Smalltimore. Networks overlap. The person running a museum may sit beside a banker at a board meeting and bump into a reporter two evenings later. This can make public relations delicate. It can also make feedback unusually fast. A campaign that lands becomes visible; one that feels false has nowhere to hide.
PROFILES was built for that density. Amy Elias started the firm in 1990 with one employee - herself - and one client, the advertising agency W. B. Doner and Company. Her formulation of the work was blunt. The point was to advance the client's business, whether that meant selling a steak, filling a hospital bed, enrolling a student or raising money. Attention for its own sake was not the product.
We don't get them attention for attention's sake.Amy Elias, founder
That sentence separates PROFILES from the cartoon version of PR, where the job ends when a logo appears on television. The agency's current menu is broad: media relations, social content, messaging, brand design, websites, events, crisis response, SEO, dashboards and even temporary CMO work. These are sold as scoped professional services and ongoing account work, not as a self-serve product with a public price tag. What joins them is choreography. The press statement, the event entrance, the CEO's interview, the landing page and the social post should not behave like strangers who met in the parking lot.
Research, positioning and messaging decide what the public should understand.
Launches, openings, events and media outreach give the story a reason to happen now.
Training, monitoring and crisis counsel prepare clients for the question they hoped would not come.
Analytics, reporting and dashboards test whether attention changed anything useful.
Two Amys and a twenty-year handoff
In 2003, Elias interviewed a 22-year-old who had studied journalism, interned in marketing at Baltimore magazine and worked in public relations for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Friedman liked the media, she would later say, more than she wanted to be the media. Elias told her that she wanted someone who could stay, learn, grow and perhaps take over. It was a rather extravagant thing to say to a junior-account-executive candidate. Friedman was not plotting an acquisition. She took the job.
Then came the slow education that succession announcements often delete. Friedman ran accounts. She helped launch a social-media division and an internship program. She worked on events and crises, supported business development and learned what to do after making a mistake. In 2015, the agency's 25th year, she became president. On January 1, 2023, she became CEO. Elias remained a consultant, and Friedman became the owner.
It is tempting to describe this as a baton pass, but batons travel in seconds. This one took two decades. The advantage is less romantic and more operational: by the time the title changed, the successor had already seen accounts, people, technology, hiring, sales and bad days. There was no need to confuse novelty with vision.
The folding-chair advantage
Friedman once described working on the ground at Artscape after becoming CEO. In a larger organization, this might have been filed under delegation failure. She saw it as the job. A smaller agency cannot create an elaborate caste system around the unglamorous work. Someone has to meet the camera crew, check the run of show, calm the spokesperson and notice that the sign points toward a locked door.
That proximity is the firm's competitive answer. Baltimore has capable specialists and larger integrated agencies. PROFILES does not win by pretending to be the largest. It offers senior involvement across unusually adjacent disciplines. For a nonprofit, cultural institution, developer, hotel or health organization, that can reduce the gaps where a message usually leaks away.
The client history makes the point. The National Aquarium used PROFILES for work that helped its Deepwater Horizon research reach NPR. Homes for America received a new identity, positioning, brand guidelines, copy and website. In 2026, the agency supported the announcement that the B&O Railroad Museum would become the National Museum of Railroad History & Innovation; all four major Baltimore television networks attended, alongside local and trade publications. Different artifacts, same assignment: make an institution legible at the moment people are prepared to care.
The part worth stealing
The RA Sushi story offers a playbook that does not require a PR budget. Begin with one place where behavior can be observed closely. Choose measurements that describe action, not applause. Give the test enough local freedom to surprise headquarters. Then ask whether the result is sturdy enough to travel.
- Pick a contained market with a real customer problem, not a sandbox detached from revenue or attendance.
- Run a few visible experiments and assign each one a behavioral measure: visits, sign-ups, coverage quality or participation.
- Keep the operator close to the audience. The person reading comments should be able to change tomorrow's execution.
- Scale only the behavior that repeats. A viral post is a souvenir; an adopted operating practice is evidence.
It works best when the first market resembles the next ones, the team can respond quickly and leadership is willing to let evidence revise the plan. It works poorly when compliance makes local variation impossible, when one celebrity moment distorts the data, or when the pilot is treated as theater and starved of time. Proximity is useful only if someone has permission to act on what it reveals.
PROFILES' longevity is not proof that every campaign worked. No serious agency could make that claim. It does suggest that the firm learned how to remain near the work as platforms changed around it. In 1990, the tool kit was press lists, telephones and events. By the RA Sushi years, it included tweets and check-ins. Today it includes paid creators, analytics dashboards and whatever arrives next. The instrument changes. The little laboratory remains.