The first thing to understand about Alaska is that a map is a poor briefing document. It tells you the state is vast. It does not tell you that one badly chosen phrase can travel through a small professional community faster than a snowmachine on hardpack. It tells you where Anchorage is. It does not tell you who will recognize an imported campaign before the first sponsored post has finished loading.
Thompson & Co. Public Relations lives in that gap. The Anchorage agency does the familiar work of modern communications - media relations, crisis planning, public affairs, social, video, design, events and digital advertising. But the interesting product is judgment. Who should tell a story? Which local partnership gives a launch legitimacy? When is a press list too large? What needs to happen in a room before anything happens online?
This is a woman-owned firm with roughly 30 employees, an all-women executive leadership team and staff distributed across Alaska and several Lower 48 states. It works with businesses, nonprofits, trade groups and government agencies. The client names range from the Alaska Travel Industry Association and Huna Totem Corporation to GCI, Alaska Railroad and Tommy's Express. The range matters because T&C is not selling a specialty channel. It is selling passage between constituencies.
01 / The ownership story
The intern who learned the room
Jennifer Thompson joined the predecessor firm, Bernholz & Graham, as an intern in 1999. Seven years later she was president. On April 1, 2009, she bought the five-person agency and eventually put her name on the door. By 2019, the staff had grown beyond 20. The company traces its history to 1989; Thompson's version of it begins with the unfashionable advantage of having watched the business from nearly every chair.
Her line about the work is blunt: “If you don't understand Alaska, then you won't understand these accounts.” It sounds territorial until you examine the accounts. Alaska is not merely the scenery behind them. It is a network of Native corporations, tourism operators, public agencies, resource companies, military families, small towns and national media fascinated by a place their audiences may never visit. A communications mistake can be cultural, geographic and political at once.
“If you don't understand Alaska, then you won't understand these accounts.”Jennifer Thompson
Thompson's approach was not to keep the firm small and local. It was to make local knowledge travel. The agency developed national media relationships and a distributed team, while keeping Anchorage as headquarters. In 2024 it went further: Thompson, veteran GCI communications executive Heather Handyside, and Blueprint Alaska president Sarah Erkmann Ward formed a three-partner leadership structure that combined T&C's PR and digital work with Blueprint's public-affairs and advocacy practice.
02 / Precision beats volume
Three reporters walk into Alaska
The firm's cleanest case study starts with a surprisingly short guest list. Huna Totem Corporation, an Alaska Native-owned tourism company, wanted national attention for new destinations at Klawock Island and Chugach Glacier Gateway - but attention aimed at cultural stewardship and community benefit, not another postcard treatment of glaciers and totems.
T&C invited three travel journalists. Just three. The agency built a multi-stop itinerary through Whittier, Juneau, Hoonah and Klawock, arranged meetings with Tlingit elders, artists and community leaders, and prepared executives to discuss the difficult balance between tourism growth and cultural integrity. Those three journalists produced 10 national stories across outlets including Condé Nast Traveler, Afar, Travel Weekly and Fodor's Travel. T&C reported potential monthly reach of 217 million, plus another 21 million through the writers' social networks.
There is a copyable idea here, and it is not “host a press trip.” It is to make the denominator smaller. Choose the few people whose curiosity matches the full complexity of the story. Then give them access that cannot be recreated from a press kit. Most media strategies chase multiplication. This one began with subtraction.
03 / The launch with an area code
A car wash learns to say 907
When Tommy's Express opened its first Alaska car wash, it had the classic outsider problem: a national operating system arriving in a place suspicious of generic openings. T&C did not disguise the franchise as a local invention. It found points where the brand could participate in the community honestly.
The local general manager is a veteran, and two co-owners are active-duty Air Force members. The launch partnered with the Armed Services YMCA and donated proceeds from a nonprofit day, raising $3,200 for military-family programs. Indigenous artist Crystal Jackson created a mural for the site. There was a giveaway for the 907th car - 907 being Alaska's statewide area code - plus live radio, local influencers, stuffed moose in branded shirts and prints of Jackson's work.
The result was not merely opening-weekend traffic. The location met and later exceeded its membership goals, while the client described its first year as one of the most successful across the company. What did the brand change its mind about? Implicitly, the opening stopped being a broadcast about a new facility and became an occasion for existing local identities - military, Indigenous, Alaskan - to occupy the center.
Start with a real connection between the organization and the community, not a borrowed cause.
Commission, partner and listen. Visibility without agency is merely set dressing.
The 907th car works because it could only make sense in Alaska.
04 / What failed first
The corporation had no face
For GCI, Alaska's telecommunications company, the original problem was negative social sentiment - particularly the idea of a faceless corporation serving remote communities. The first story had failed before the campaign began: people could see the company, but not the people inside it.
T&C's Trailblazer Stories profiled more than 30 employees. The choice followed audience research showing stronger engagement with employee imagery. The reported result was a 54% increase in positive social sentiment, with most posts receiving entirely positive comments. The useful move was almost embarrassingly literal. If the complaint is facelessness, show faces. If the service reaches distant Alaska communities, feature the employees doing that work rather than asking a corporate account to declare its own humanity.
That instinct also explains the agency's culture pitch. Its values - called the “T&Cs” - emphasize integrity, transparency, effort, results, family and curiosity. Flexible work, family leave and professional development helped it earn PRNEWS workplace recognition in 2020. The culture claim is relevant commercially: a relationship business cannot convincingly humanize clients if its own people are treated like interchangeable production capacity.
05 / The invisible product
Practice the crisis before the crisis
The least photogenic service may be the most defensible. For more than two decades, T&C has worked with the Alaska Travel Industry Association on crisis communications. The plan covers categories ranging from earthquakes and pandemics to plane crashes, cruise incidents, missing persons and fatalities. It is updated and tested through desktop drills every year. Staff trained in federal incident-management systems can activate around the clock.
The work does not depend on a clever tagline. It depends on accumulated memory: what happened during the 2018 Anchorage earthquake, what changed during COVID-19, who needs to know first, and which message protects travelers without minimizing facts. This is the agency business model at its stickiest - retained expertise, rehearsed judgment and relationships that get more valuable with time.
T&C does not publish prices. Like most independent agencies, it appears to sell retained and project engagements shaped by scope: a market launch, an annual crisis program, an advocacy campaign, a video shoot or ongoing media relations. The cost that matters in its case studies is often the cost of getting context wrong - wasted reach, public suspicion, or a crisis response invented under pressure.
06 / Market position
A translator with a production department
Thompson & Co. sits between two kinds of competitor. Local Alaska agencies know the market but may offer a narrower bench. National agencies can mobilize reach but may arrive without the relationships that confer credibility. T&C's answer is an integrated menu - PR, digital, creative, public affairs, advocacy and crisis - anchored in Alaska and extended by staff across several time zones.
The danger of that menu is sameness. Every full-service agency now claims strategy, storytelling and measurable results. T&C becomes distinctive only when the general capabilities attach to specific local intelligence: the right Tlingit voices on a press itinerary, the right military nonprofit at a car-wash opening, the right annual drill before the next earthquake. The nouns are common. The judgment linking them is not.
That is the Alaska test. A campaign passes when the people who live there can recognize themselves in it - not as scenery, not as a demographic, but as participants. The principle travels well beyond the state. Wherever a market has memory, identity and its own informal map of trust, somebody needs to translate. The clever part is knowing that translation begins by talking less.