In Seattle, in January, sunshine is less a weather report than a provocation. Red Sky once used that fact to advertise Idaho. The agency arranged free Uber rides for a day and handed riders bright blue umbrellas. Open one and a yellow sun appeared inside, along with a small instruction: take a picture and post it with #VisitIdaho. Four local bloggers joined in. Prizes included ski tickets, hot-spring weekends and passes to Boise’s Treefort Music Fest.
More than 300 people participated. Red Sky estimated the social reach at 87,594, and the hashtag trended locally. It is the kind of campaign people remember because the explanation fits in one breath: Idaho brought sunshine to rainy Seattle. Yet the umbrella is not the most revealing object in Red Sky’s portfolio. That honor belongs to something less photogenic - a research brief.
The assignment that changed shape
Idaho National Laboratory came to Red Sky with a difficult but common institutional problem. The lab works on nuclear energy, energy systems and national security, yet many Idahoans outside the Idaho Falls area knew little about it. The first impulse was a traditional, singular marketing tactic. Red Sky paused the machinery and asked what the public already understood.
The team surveyed more than 1,000 Idaho residents, convened six focus groups from Boise to Coeur d’Alene and audited the lab’s website and social channels. The answer was uncomfortable: people often needed prior knowledge of INL merely to find information about INL. The communications problem was not a shortage of clever copy. It was an information architecture and awareness problem.
The work changed direction. Instead of one big execution, the lab got a multi-tiered strategy: a pilot that could be adjusted before scaling, audience personas, new messages, tailored materials, stronger photography and video, broader media channels and an internal team that could keep producing content. One goal was to reach 75 percent positive brand awareness across Idaho over three years. Another was to turn employees into advocates.
The lesson is not that every brief requires a thousand respondents. It is that a brief is a theory, not a diagnosis.Red Sky’s INL work, distilled
A newsroom that can enter the room
Jessica Flynn founded Red Sky in 2008 after a career in journalism and corporate communication. The newsroom inheritance is visible. Reporters learn to distrust the first version of an event, locate the people closest to it and translate complexity without pretending it is simple. Red Sky applies that sequence to institutions whose stories arrive with technical language, public scrutiny or both.
For Micron, the agency has functioned as an outside newsroom for the company intranet - interviewing internal experts, developing stories and helping the communications team publish. For Agri Beef, Red Sky staff toured several locations and followed the business from ranch to table before positioning executives for media and culinary educators. For The Nature Conservancy, the team audited the language of other nonprofits and interviewed donors, board members, volunteers and staff before writing a Greater Yellowstone messaging platform.
Interview, write and publish inside Micron’s employee news operation.
Tour the ranch-to-table chain before asking outsiders to care.
Use stakeholder interviews to find language that moves donors.
This explains the firm’s slightly unusual market position. It is a PR agency, but the deliverable might be a survey, a crisis simulation, a messaging matrix, an annual report, a public meeting or executive coaching. The company groups the work around four verbs in practice: understand, position, promote and protect. Clients include tourism marketers, courts, universities, laboratories, healthcare organizations, technology companies and economic-development groups. These are not always glamorous subjects. They are subjects with consequences.
The moment the homemade system stops working
Treefort Music Fest offers a tidy answer to the question “What failed first?” Before 2016, the festival had no marketing budget. Its team pieced together publicity and attracted coverage from smaller blogs. That system had helped a local event grow, but it could not reliably carry Treefort toward national media.
What changed their mind was not a sudden contempt for small outlets. It was ambition. Treefort wanted to grow carefully, reach people who would not automatically consider a Boise festival and compete for artists, press and industry attention. The organizers assigned a budget and hired Red Sky to professionalize media and influencer relations. Coverage in Travel + Leisure and UPROXX followed and spread through other outlets. Treefort’s marketing director connected the visibility to ticket sales and to artists and press choosing the festival over competing opportunities.
The same pattern appears earlier in Flynn’s career at Tamarack Resort. The first task was broad attention for a new four-season destination with more vision than amenities. As the resort grew, the communication system became more selective and more defensive: targeted verticals, an in-house department, employee onboarding built from media materials and crisis work during fires and financial trouble. Promotion created attention. Attention created a need for infrastructure.
What the invoice buys
Red Sky does not sell public, one-size-fits-all packages. It works through custom projects, retained relationships and agency-of-record assignments; public procurement documents describe applicable consulting as separately negotiated. One College of Western Idaho testimonial praises work delivered “on time, on budget,” but does not disclose the budget. The useful financial reference point is historical: O’Dwyer’s reported $1.71 million in 2017 fee income for a 10-person agency, up 62.5 percent from the previous reporting period.
In practical terms, clients are buying experienced attention. A small team can sit beside an internal department, as it does for Micron; serve as external counsel, as it has for Boise Valley Economic Partnership; or assemble specialist partners for design, video, web development and advertising. This model trades the scale of a holding-company agency for senior involvement and regional fluency. Flynn’s biography makes that local advantage explicit: Idaho’s political terrain, entrepreneurial network, economic-development work and mix of legacy and emerging industries are part of the expertise.
The part worth stealing
The copyable part is not the umbrella. Props decay when copied. The method travels better: define the audience narrowly, find a tension the audience already recognizes, make the desired action obvious and choose a measure before launch. For a serious institution, add a research phase. For a growing organization, test whether the informal system that brought you here can reach the next audience. For a crisis-prone one, build the response machinery while the sky is still blue.
This approach depends on access to decision-makers, a genuine story, time to investigate and a client willing to change the original brief. It is a poor fit for teams seeking instant attention without evidence, spokesperson access or room to act on uncomfortable findings.
Red Sky’s name comes from the sailor’s rhyme: red sky at night, delight; red sky in morning, warning. The phrase contains the firm’s whole business model. In calm weather, help an organization earn attention. In rough weather, help it keep trust. The more interesting trick is knowing which sky you are looking at before anyone starts writing the headline.