There is a particular kind of person who can watch a championship game and notice the folding tables. Tony Fay is that person. The crowd sees the field. The communications operator sees the credential desk, the interview order, the camera positions, the volunteer briefing and the fact that a reporter on deadline still needs the correct spelling of a name. This is not glamorous vision. It is useful vision. And it explains the company Fay built in Dallas.
Tony Fay Public Relations, or TFPR, works where sport, entertainment and civic life collide. Its clients have included the College Football Playoff, PGA of America, Dallas Stars, Dallas Wings, Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic, Klyde Warren Park, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, the Perot Museum and Heritage Auctions. That list looks eclectic until you notice the common problem. Each organization has a large public moment and a complicated story behind it. TFPR makes the story legible.
The apprenticeship was the business plan
Fay started as a Dallas Mavericks intern in 1987 and rose to lead communications for the team. He later served as vice president of communications for the North Texas Super Bowl XLV Host Committee. Before starting his own firm, in other words, he had learned publicity from inside the machine: where the deadlines are real, the principals are busy and the event will begin whether the press materials are ready or not.
He founded TFPR in 2011 as a one-person shop. By 2024, the agency said it had nearly two dozen people serving more than 40 clients. LinkedIn now places the company in the 11-to-50 employee range. The growth did not come from inventing a strange new category. It came from applying an old newsroom rule to clients: the easier you make it to understand a true story, the more likely it is to travel.
“Functioning less like a traditional PR agency and more like an active newsroom.”Tony Fay Public Relations, describing its media-relations model
The newsroom loop
The story beside the score
The Dallas Stars case is revealing because the problem was not obscurity. A professional hockey team already has scores, stars and fans. What failed first was not hockey coverage; it was relying on hockey coverage to explain the institution's wider role. The Stars wanted a voice beyond the rink, particularly in business and philanthropic circles, and changed the game plan. TFPR helped frame that larger identity. The assignment was not “get attention.” It was “reach a different room without pretending to be a different organization.”
That distinction is the agency's market position. A generalist can distribute a release. A sports specialist knows which former player can carry a community story, which statistic is television-friendly, and why a charity activation should be designed with the media moment in mind. A nonprofit specialist knows that the beneficiary cannot become set dressing. TFPR operates in the overlap.
The reported figures are large, but the more useful evidence is longevity. TFPR has worked with Klyde Warren Park since the park opened in 2012. It participated in each of the first 10 College Football Playoff National Championships. These are not one-week publicity splashes. They are continuing exercises in finding the next honest chapter after the opening-day headline has been spent.
Four services, one deadline
Media relations
Shape the angle, prepare the assets, connect credible spokespeople and pitch the outlets where the story belongs.
Event strategy
Design pageantry, media operations, volunteer systems and public moments for events that cannot be rehearsed forever.
Consulting
Guide capital campaigns, community initiatives, fundraising structures and corporate introductions.
Content creation
Carry the earned story into social campaigns, short videos and integrated messaging for fragmented audiences.
The business model is straightforward professional services: retainers and projects, people and judgment sold against an assignment. There is no public rate card. Public records do offer scale markers. A nonprofit tax filing lists $216,500 paid to the agency for public relations and marketing in 2022. A Texas Tech procurement report lists two June 2024 payments totaling $192,000 under the same agency contract. Those examples are not a quote, but they show that institutional work can live comfortably in six-figure territory.
Public institutional records show the scale of some engagements. Actual cost depends on scope, duration, staffing and event complexity.
A festival the size of a town
In 2022, TFPR partnered with Troy Aikman on Highway to Henryetta, a benefit music festival in Aikman's Oklahoma hometown. The team solicited sponsors, booked a dozen performances and sold enough tickets to roughly triple the town's population during the event. It is a neat example of what “event strategy” means in practice. The press release is the easy object to see. The work includes talent, sponsors, ticket demand, local meaning and the choreography that holds them together.
The firm's nonprofit work uses the same architecture over a longer clock. For United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, TFPR turned a centennial from a birthday into an 18-month platform, combining earned media, corporate partnerships, sports integrations, experiential storytelling and community activations. The campaign culminated at Fair Park and the Cotton Bowl in November 2025. One date supplied the excuse; a year and a half supplied the story.
Awards followed. PRNEWS named TFPR Small Agency of the Year in 2023 and again in 2025. In between came a wonderfully literal piece of publicity: professional pickleball played in the Goodyear Blimp, which won PR Stunt of the Year in 2024. In 2025, the agency and Heritage Auctions shared a media-relations campaign honor for work around an auction featuring Babe Ruth's “called shot” jersey. The connecting skill is not spectacle alone. It is recognizing the object or image that lets a broad audience enter a specialist's world.
The part worth copying
A company does not need a blimp to borrow the method. Start with the receiving end. Ask what a reporter, editor, producer or community partner needs to make a responsible decision quickly. Prepare the proof. Offer access. Use a real character, a clear consequence and a visual that explains rather than decorates. Then plan the social and owned content as an extension of the same idea, not a separate pile of posts.
The method has a boundary. It depends on something genuinely newsworthy, credible spokespeople and enough access to answer questions. It is a poor fit for organizations that want guaranteed praise, cannot substantiate their claims or expect relationships to replace relevance. Earned media is not inventory. The agency can improve the pitch, the timing and the package; it cannot make an indifferent fact interesting by decree.
That may be the quiet lesson of TFPR. Public relations is often imagined as a megaphone business. The better metaphor is the press box: a room above the noise where people translate the action, check the names and send a coherent account into the world before the next thing begins.