SPRITZ knows what happens before the crowd arrives

A squash tournament in Grand Central Terminal has an enviable starting point. It already has a place worth looking at. But a memorable setting does not automatically tell a newcomer why a match matters, who the players are, or when to buy a ticket. Those are smaller problems. They also happen to be marketing problems.

For the 2018 J.P. Morgan Tournament of Champions, SPRITZ worked on that distance between spectacle and interest. Its assignment covered three months of promotion and ten days of on-site social coverage. The agency used player facts, a ticket giveaway, sponsor posts, and live updates to give people several ways into the event. Its case study reports more than a million impressions across the three-month campaign.

That sequence offers a way to understand this San Francisco agency. The visible occasion comes at the end of a great deal of preparation. Someone has to make the assets, recruit the partners, write the invitation, and get the destination ready. SPRITZ sells help with all of it.

The agency between the invitation and the room

SPRITZ’s service list puts public relations next to application development. It also includes brand identity, paid advertising, search, email, social content, and event activation. The interesting question is what a client gains by buying those capabilities together.

Consider the handoffs. A publicity campaign can send people to a website. The website has to explain the offer. The graphics need to match what people saw elsewhere. An event partner needs material it can actually use. A business can appoint different specialists to each task, but someone still owns the joins. SPRITZ’s proposition is to take responsibility across that chain.

Beth Schnitzer and Raghu Shivaram are the co-founders. The company describes an in-house and India-based team, with its About page listing more than 25 people and offices in San Francisco, Bangalore, and Paris. Its website also lists Austin. That combination gives the firm a local relationship business alongside a geographically distributed production capability.

Beth Schnitzer

Raghu Shivaram

A sponsor needs something to sponsor

The Sonoma International Film Festival makes the combination easier to see. SPRITZ refreshed the identity and messaging, created print and digital materials, and developed sponsorship packages with specific activation opportunities. The work included media strategy and relationships with regional organizations.

There is a useful distinction inside that assignment. Selling a sponsor a logo position is relatively simple. Giving it a reason to participate asks more of the organizer: an audience it wants to meet, an experience it can contribute to, and benefits someone will remember to deliver.

SPRITZ reports a 25% expansion in regional media coverage and 20% growth in cash and in-kind sponsors, alongside record attendance in 2016. Those are the agency’s account of the results. The practical lesson is visible in the work itself: design the partnership offer while designing the campaign.

The international brand with a local guest list

Celebrity Cruises needed greater awareness in the San Francisco Bay Area. SPRITZ’s response was to connect the cruise line with places its prospective customers already gathered: food and wine events, tennis, film, restaurants, charity fundraisers, and LGBTQ programming.

The agency also negotiated official-cruise-line partnerships with the Sonoma festival and the Richmond/Ermet Aid Foundation. For an international travel brand, these were locally specific introductions. The campaign gave a broad travel proposition a set of nearby occasions.

There is a condition attached to that method. A partnership needs a believable audience connection. A busy calendar alone does not make a strategy; it can simply create more work. The useful question for another business to borrow is precise: which organization already has the attention of people we can serve?

When the anniversary becomes the brief

At Scoma’s, the occasion was a 50th anniversary. SPRITZ updated the restaurant’s website for search, developed social and email activity, handled publicity, and supported the celebration with events and partnerships. A piece of restaurant history became a shared deadline for several kinds of work.

The agency’s published audience counts go from 2,269 to 4,575 over 24 months: roughly a doubling. More revealing than the percentage is the coordination. Publicity supplied a reason to look; digital work helped people find the restaurant; the anniversary gave the campaign an actual occasion.

That approach suits an established business with a story customers might enjoy hearing again. It depends on the experience holding up when they arrive. An attractive invitation creates an expectation that the kitchen, the service, or the event still has to meet.

And then there is the software

TrueRent interrupts the impression that SPRITZ is principally an events-and-publicity shop. The agency helped name and brand the property-management business, mapped the application flow, and designed and developed its cloud platform. The intended tasks included tenant screening, rent collection, rental management, and reporting.

This is a different purchase from a run of social posts. Here, the thing being designed is part of the customer’s working day. Naming and identity sit alongside decisions about how somebody moves through an application. SPRITZ’s case study also describes ongoing engineering support and an animated explainer.

Its pet-hospitality offering follows a related logic. In an August 2023 article, the agency describes reservation tools, customer communication, review management, email, and digital promotion for boarding facilities and similar businesses. The booking experience belongs in the same conversation as the advertising.

For a prospective client, that makes the brief more concrete. Bring the point at which a customer gets confused or gives up. It might require a clearer message, a better interface, a response to a review, or a campaign. Buying a channel before diagnosing the problem can leave the actual difficulty untouched.

The bill, and the first draft

SPRITZ earns its money from client projects and continuing service relationships. A useful historical reference is LendClear’s approximately $8,000 website project, completed in April 2014. That is an old project price, not a present-day offer.

In another 2014 interview, ACsailingSF founder Brad Webb described a roughly $40,000 annual marketing budget, not an agency-only fee. He valued SPRITZ’s contacts and flexibility, but also wanted draft-collateral errors caught before they reached him.

“Every dollar counts in my little business.”

Brad Webb / ACsailingSF founder / 2014

There is a sensible purchasing lesson here: agree on what is being delivered, who checks it, and how success will be judged. Access to an enthusiastic team does not remove the need for a careful final read.

The work still involves showing up

A current careers page asks for someone who can maintain content calendars and also capture material at events, including community and tourism activity for Discover San Ramon. In May 2025, Schnitzer began a sports column in the San Francisco Bay Times. Both details fit a business whose work requires familiarity with people and places.

The market position becomes fairly clear. SPRITZ offers a broad agency relationship to organizations that need both production and promotion. A client needing only one tightly specified task may find a specialist sufficient. A client with a launch, a website, several partners, and a date on the calendar has a coordination problem as well.

That is where this portfolio becomes useful to study. Before the crowd arrives, someone has to work out why it should come, what it will find, and what happens next. Those questions make a better starting brief than a request for more posts.