There were 555 automotive-technology exhibitors registered for CES in 2018. Imagine 555 booths, each populated by people insisting that their cameras, chips or algorithms represented the future of driving. Then imagine being Foresight Automotive, an Israeli startup with almost no market presence and a four-camera vision system nobody had seen. The obvious response was to explain the cameras. Rainier Communications decided to explain the weather.
The agency had read research showing that consumers worried about the safety of autonomous cars. So it moved the message away from a procession of specifications and toward a human anxiety: could a self-driving car still see in fog, darkness, rain and glare? The new claim was complete visibility in difficult conditions. The tagline became “Automotive Vision, Perfected.” Foresight announced six days before CES, after two and a half months of outreach, and arrived with embargoed briefings, an analyst's endorsement and video reporters could actually use.
According to Rainier's case study, the campaign produced 18 original pieces of coverage, almost 400 customer leads and a 30 percent increase in website activity. The interesting number is not the audience estimate. It is 555. Rainier did not make the trade show quieter. It gave one company a simpler sentence to say inside the noise.
The agency an engineer could not find
Rainier began in 1993 with a professional irritation. Steve Schuster, an engineer turned marketer, had watched PR agencies promise fluency they did not possess. They could polish a sentence but could not always explain why a new technology mattered, who would adopt it or which rival claim it displaced. The first thing that failed, in other words, was comprehension.
Schuster built a firm around the opposite sequence: understand first, position second, publicize third. The company now calls the result “defensible audacity.” Like many good agency phrases, it is half boast and half operating instruction. Audacity supplies the memorable claim. Defensibility keeps a skeptical engineer, analyst or reporter from taking it apart.
“You engineer the technology. We engineer the market.”Rainier Communications
That distinction explains Rainier's odd-looking roster. AMD, Boeing, Analog Devices, NXP and Texas Instruments DLP appear alongside quantum-software, GitOps, cultivated-food, solar-wafer and ultra-wideband startups. Size is not the organizing principle. Difficulty is. These are businesses whose products often require a diagram before they require a slogan.
The work is sold as professional service, through ongoing agency relationships and defined campaigns. Rainier does not publish a rate card. There is one useful boundary marker: its Nano Dimension work received a 2016 Bulldog award in the “campaign under $50,000” category. That is not a current price, but it tells us the agency's celebrated work has not depended exclusively on giant-company budgets.
Read the technology, the market and the doubt standing between them.
Turn product detail into a claim an outsider can test and repeat.
Prepare the speaker, supply the proof and arrive before the news pileup.
A BlackBerry launch in four weeks
The cleanest demonstration arrived in 2020. OnwardMobility had spent more than a year in stealth and planned to announce a licensed 5G BlackBerry device with manufacturing partner Foxconn. It gave Rainier less than a month. The smartphone market was not merely crowded; it had already formed an opinion about BlackBerry.
Rainier prepared the executives, sharpened the message, assembled a detailed internal Q&A and offered pre-launch interviews to influential business, consumer and mobile-technology journalists in the United States and Europe. More than 17 briefings took place. Over 30 journalists received the announcement under embargo. Rainier reports that stories appeared across more than 1,900 outlets, the release drew nearly 80,000 views, and the CEO's launch video passed 90,000 views in 30 days.
Then comes the useful complication: the phone never shipped. OnwardMobility lost its BlackBerry license and shut down the project. That does not erase the campaign's communications results, but it draws a bright border around them. PR can create attention, clarify a proposition and assemble an audience. It cannot finish the hardware, preserve a license or rescue a business model. The campaign worked at the job it was hired to do. The company failed somewhere else.
The moment the frame changes
Rainier's best move is often a change of frame. For Foresight, consumer safety research replaced a feature story with a visibility story. For Sckipio, the agency helped make an obscure broadband standard legible as affordable, ultra-fast access. A client executive later claimed roughly 100 times the coverage of a $40 billion rival on a “shoe-string budget.” For Nano Dimension, the task was to make 3D-printed electronics sufficiently coherent that the young company could become a regular voice in its emerging category.
This is where Rainier fits in the market. A generalist agency can distribute news. An internal communications team can protect institutional knowledge. A large global firm can bring offices, disciplines and purchasing power. Rainier's proposition is narrower: senior technical communicators who can enter an unfamiliar engineering market, grasp the mechanism and help a client influence the people who define the category.
Its current menu follows that logic: market strategy; message development; media and analyst relations; technical content; press releases; tradeshow, speaking and awards programs; media training; and measurement. The newer addition is SEO and GEO, language for conventional search and AI answer engines. The medium changes, but the wager is familiar. A product becomes easier to find after its market has agreed on what to call it.
The adjective that earns its keep
It is tempting to borrow Rainier's most visible tactics: announce before the conference, prepare an exhaustive Q&A, line up embargoed interviews, secure an analyst quote, make good visuals. All are worth copying. But tactics become theater when the claim underneath them is weak. “Defensible” is the word doing the work.
The method favors products with genuine technical differentiation, executives willing to be taught and corrected, and enough evidence for a reporter to verify the story. It is less natural for a commodity product seeking attention by volume, a lifestyle brand that wins through taste rather than technical authority, or a leadership team that wants guaranteed praise. It also cannot compensate for a product that will not ship. The more consequential the claim, the more expensive an unsupported adjective becomes.
In September 2026, Rainier made its first CEO change in 33 years. Sarah LaLiberte, who had worked at the agency early in her career, returned after roughly a quarter century to succeed Schuster. The story has the symmetry a PR person might appreciate: the company built to preserve technical continuity chose a leader who understood it from before the turn of the millennium.
Rainier's work is not really about making complicated things sound simple. Simplicity can be a disguise. The more exact ambition is to make the crucial part of a complicated thing sound inevitable - the safety concern, the bandwidth jump, the reason a design engineer should care. When that sentence is right, reporters repeat it, analysts test it, customers bring it into meetings and a category begins to form around it. The publicity is the visible part. The choice of sentence is the product.