There is a black wall in an office on Baxter Street in Athens, Georgia, and on it a neon sign curls through three commands: See. Spark. Go. It looks like the sort of decoration an advertising agency might order after a long meeting about its lobby. But the sign is more useful than that. It contains the whole company.
See Spark Go was founded in 2007 by Andy and Brittany Thoms, who had met at the University of Georgia. Andy became chief executive; Brittany became president and chief storyteller. Their early proposition was disarmingly plain: find worthwhile stories and tell them well. The proposition survived. The agency around it became more complicated.
Today, See Spark Go has offices in Athens, Atlanta, and Nashville and a reported 45 full-time employees. It works for clients as unlike one another as an RV manufacturer, a golf tournament, a restaurant chain, a construction-technology company, and faith-based nonprofits. The services now range from press relations and influencer programs to paid media, websites, CRM integration, SEO, and video. What joins them is not a channel. It is the set of verbs on the wall.
A name becomes a method
Agency names are usually surnames, initials, or handsome words that refuse to do any labor. See Spark Go is different. “See” means listen until the real story emerges - who the audience is, why the brand deserves attention, where an opportunity exists. “Spark” means turn that story into one integrated strategy across public relations, creative, content, and performance. “Go” means measure the result, optimize it, and do it again.
Find the story
Listen before making. Define the audience, tension, and reason to care.
Make every channel agree
Put earned, owned, and paid work behind one narrative instead of three departmental plans.
Follow the action
Measure business movement, revise the work, and scale what survives contact with an audience.
The distinction matters because the marketing business is very good at mistaking activity for progress. A million impressions can be excellent news, or merely a million small interruptions. See Spark Go’s current pitch is that publicity and creative should be attached to the same commercial nervous system as paid advertising. Attention must eventually do something.
“Tactics fade. Platforms shift.” The durable asset is the story people can repeat.
The proof is in the long middle
The most revealing case is not a viral post. It is THOR Industries. See Spark Go began working with the RV manufacturer in 2015, curating lifestyle content, testing formats, engaging owners, and monitoring sentiment across five social platforms. Over nine years, the agency says the community grew beyond 220,000 followers and produced 432 million impressions, more than 10 million engagements, and four million link clicks.
That is the unglamorous secret of brand building: much of it happens in the long middle, after the launch and before the retrospective. See Spark Go conducts quarterly sentiment audits for THOR and keeps testing. The work resembles tending a public square more than firing a campaign cannon.
Other assignments move faster. For the TOUR Championship in Atlanta, the agency coordinated local media, event planning, executive visibility, and a cocktail contest with Atlanta Magazine. Since 2022, it reports more than 400 media placements, 93 percent of them feature coverage. The tournaments sold out in 2022 and 2023. Public relations, in this case, ended at a turnstile.
The first thing to fail was the handoff
Integrated marketing sounds obvious until the data arrives. On one franchise assignment, advertising lived in Facebook and Google, leads lived in HubSpot, deals lived in Salesforce, and ten brands required ten versions of the truth. Manual reports could show activity. They could not reliably show which activity became a signed franchise agreement.
See Spark Go brought in reporting specialist MetricMaven to build a common system: automated data pipelines, repeatable brand dashboards, portfolio comparisons, landing-page analytics, and deal-stage attribution from inquiry through closed contract. The important change was conceptual. A lead was no longer the finish line. It was one station on the route to revenue.
Before commissioning more content, write one sentence that names the customer action the story should cause. Then connect every channel to the same action and vocabulary. If the CRM cannot answer the question, fix the plumbing before celebrating the traffic.
This approach worked especially well for Threshold Brands, a portfolio of ten home-services franchises. In the first year, See Spark Go reports that an omnichannel program increased opportunities by 79.96 percent while cutting cost per opportunity by 56 percent. The audience was broad in geography but narrow in intent: people ready to consider franchise ownership. The story gave the channels coherence; attribution showed which channels deserved another dollar.
An agency built beside a campus
Athens is not incidental. The University of Georgia supplies a current of young writers, designers, strategists, and account people. A 2025 profile reported that more than 250 students had passed through See Spark Go’s internship and apprenticeship programs. One employee told UGA’s PR student society that her internship involved real social work and advertising presented to clients, then became a full-time job.
The culture has its own four-part vocabulary: Character, Competence, Chemistry, and Calling. The company runs hybrid and uses “Spark Sessions,” all-hands brainstorms assembled around active campaigns. This setup is useful when a client’s problem genuinely crosses disciplines. It is less useful when a company wants a cheap commodity, an instant result, or a single isolated task with no access to sales data. Integration asks the client to integrate, too.
See Spark Go makes money the old agency way - custom-scoped projects and ongoing relationships - while trying to erase an old agency weakness. Creative departments like to make. PR teams like to place. Performance teams like to count. Here they are supposed to begin with the same story and finish with the same business question.
What the verbs leave behind
The agency entered the Inc. 5000 in 2024 at No. 4,874 and ranked No. 171 on the 2025 Inc. Regionals Southeast list. Those are growth markers. The more interesting number is 98 percent, the client-retention rate See Spark Go reports. Retention is not flashy. It is the arithmetic of promises kept repeatedly enough that nobody feels an urge to run a review.
The Thomses have said they want to grow toward 100 people, $10 million in revenue, 110 concurrent clients, and 1,000 student career launches. Ambitions like those put pressure on the very chemistry that helped the agency grow. More accounts create more handoffs; more specialties create more silos. The name therefore becomes both a process and a warning. Keep seeing. Keep sparking. Do not forget to go check what happened.