Brickman Marketing

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our venue offers music and dining. I’m the general manager/owner.

What challenge were you trying to address with Brickman Marketing?

We wanted a publicist who could promote our business. Our previous publicist did not mesh well with us, and we needed an alternative.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Wendy [President, Brickman Marketing] promotes us online, creates press releases for our events, and helps us spread the word about new business, groups, and fundraisers. She also researches other companies in our industry for marketing strategies and techniques.

What is the team dynamic?

Wendy is our sole contact. She handles everything.

How did you come to work with Brickman Marketing?

An acquaintance referred her to us. She came in and we spoke. We liked how aggressive and friendly she is.

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve invested over $25,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together for roughly three years. The relationship is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Her goal is to put our name out there, and she keeps us constantly in the press.

How did Brickman Marketing perform from a project management standpoint?

Wendy is wonderful. I can talk to her whenever I need to, day or night. Our last publicist put heavy restrictions on us, but I can text, call, or email Wendy and she’s there for me. We communicate constantly.

What did you find most impressive about them?

She really feels like family, and we can interact on a personal level. She’s respectful, pleasant and energetic, eager to broadcast us in the market, and willing to be aggressive. I can’t say enough good about her. She knows the town really well, and all the right people to speak to. She’s a great publicist, and never sits back and just lets things happen. She’s always active.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Tell her what you need and what you hope to accomplish. She’ll do everything on her own without any extra encouragement.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of the Monterey County Fair and Event Center in California, which is a District 5 Association. It’s a state-owned facility under the umbrella of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. We have 12 employees year-round, and about 30–35 seasonal employees during the summer.

What challenge were you trying to address with Brickman Marketing?

We needed help with marketing and advertising.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Since we’re a government agency, we have a very small budget. We’ve worked with Wendy [President, Brickman Marketing] for over 10 years, and she’s created our entire County Fair theme campaign, from finding artwork, to doing over 30 press releases. Marketing efforts for the fair start in October every year, and end in September of the following year. She’s done marketing all along the way, including setting up interviews for myself and staff members.

She’s worked on marketing the carnival, entertainment, exhibits programs, and has also done a lot of interim marketing for us for our facility as well. She’s done all of our sponsorships, and has built press media and sponsorship kits, raising an average of about U.S. $60,000–$70,000 per year in revenue for the County Fair.

If she doesn’t know something, she takes the time to learn it, which is awesome. She is a self-taught social media specialist who knows how to use WordPress, websites, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

What is the team dynamic?

We only worked with Wendy.

How did you come to work with Brickman Marketing?

I met Wendy when I was involved in the Monterey Peninsula Chamber of Commerce, and she was involved with the board’s marketing. She’s really involved in the local community, and is also a great networker.

How much have you invested in them?

We’ve spent well over U.S. $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Wendy in October 2005, and the relationship is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve seen a big ROI with sponsorship efforts, which Wendy does a phenomenal job with. She also works with our non-profit in soliciting sponsorships for the annual Beer Festival. She’s very tenacious, and if she has a goal, she meets it.

For our annual Country Fair, our attendance has grown every year from 8% in 2012, then 2–3% thereafter.

How did Brickman Marketing perform from a project management standpoint?

She’s very timely, and she gets everything done well before deadline. We have a lot of email correspondence when we work together, and she works well with my team. She even numbers her emails to keep everything on track, which is also very helpful. We meet in-person 3 months before our event, as well as every other week.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Wendy is very involved in the community and has a lot of connections, which is really helpful in the marketing world.

Are there any areas they could improve?

A few years ago, I would have said she needed to be more organized, but she’s since greatly improved with email communication. She’s really grown in that area in order to better help her clients.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Wendy has a lot of energy, and may be overwhelming at first for some people, but that same energy keeps everyone on track and enthused about the project. If potential clients go along with the way she works, they will be happy in the end.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I own a 1,000-seat Performing Arts Center. We are a live entertainment venue for artists like Howie Mandell, Seinfeld, Boz Scaggs, Home Free. They come and play at our Performing Arts Center and we sell tickets to the shows.

What challenge were you trying to address with Brickman Marketing?

We needed to ensure visibility of the artists in all of the local newspapers and news. We asked Wendy to help us with these marketing efforts.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Wendy does all of the press releases for us as well as some of our social media efforts. She contacts the news whenever we have big events going on at the theatre and coordinates efforts between the artists, the newspapers, and the interviewers. Wendy schedules the interviews, makes sure the interviews go through, and ensures our artists get on the local radio station.

Wendy also helps us with our Social Media including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

What is the team dynamic?

I work with Wendy [Owner, Brickman Marketing].

How did you come to work with Brickman Marketing?

I was referred to Wendy [Owner, Brickman Marketing] by a local restaurant that was using her. The owner of the restaurant introduced herself when we purchased the venue about 3 years ago.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2013 and the work is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

When Wendy works with the newspapers, we get a bump of about 75-100 tickets a show. With our social media, she’s been able to grow our social media about 20%.

How did Brickman Marketing perform from a project management standpoint?

She’s excellent with organization. Her organizational skills are some of the best I’ve seen. I like that she’s always available. She responds to things extremely fast. We communicate 75% by phone and then 25% email.

What did you find most impressive about them?

She’s a work machine. She works a lot. I’ve not had a situation where she wasn’t available to help out. She’s creative with her strategies to market products and she goes beyond the call of duty to make sure that client is satisfied.

Do you have any advice for potential clients of Brickman Marketing?

My piece of advice is to have your ideas organized. If you don’t have your things organized, she’ll come up with several different ideas and that could cause anxiety. If you have your ideas together, then it’s probably easier for her to operate.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm immediate past president of Fisherman’s Wharf Association, a collection of 35-40 businesses on the wharf in Monterey, which is a unique pier in California. I've been president for the last 6 years.

What challenge were you trying to address with Brickman Marketing?

We needed social media marketing and advertising services for Monterey, California’s Whalefest.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Wendy promotes the events that we have through social media, TV, and radio. She helps with our website as well.

She has worked on Whalefest, an event that brings 12,000-15,000 people to Fisherman's Wharf on the deadest weekend in January. Monterey has a population of 30,000 people. When Wendy is able to bring that many people to town, it's quite an accomplishment.

Whalefest is sort of a non-profit event, so she works with various organizations in order to get the event publicized on the community calendars. She also works with other organizations so we can get exposure on the state, national, and international level.

On the state and international level, she does a really great job. We've had people who have come from New York specifically for our symposium. We've had families come from Vermont to attend our festival and attendees from around the world.

Wendy also arranged for AMP, a private TV station, to videotape the Symposium from Whalefest and send it to YouTube and over 400 institutions around our country.

She also set up numerous presentations for me to discuss our upcoming events and creates win-win collaborations with other organizations.

Lastly, Wendy helped work with graphic artists, produce fliers and banners, put forth many press releases and continuously updates our website and social media platforms.

What is the team dynamic?

She is the main person that I work with. She's the sole proprietor.

How did you come to work with Brickman Marketing?

She’s a winner of many awards from the local Monterey and California Chamber of Commerce as well as other organizations including a Woman of the Year business award.

She has been recognized by the community in many different formats, and I happened to sit next to her at a luncheon one time. We started to chat and realized that she would be perfect for the Whalefest. I brought her to Whalefest, and I found her to be so efficient and easy to work with that I recommended her to another five or six organizations after that.

How much have you invested with them?

We have about $100,000 in-kind support from the community. Wendy's actual budget is $5,000. However, the way that she is able to manipulate her relations in the community augments it at least another $20,000-30,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've been working with her since July 2010.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We've seen an increase in the amount of people that attend Whalefest. We have tracked this through the coast guard’s observations and parking lot attendance. On our first year, we had 3,000-4,000 people. Now, we're up to about 12,000-15,000 people.

How did Brickman Marketing perform from a project management standpoint?

She is extremely organized. She is able to respond quickly by cellphone, text, and telephone. She reports back immediately with her accomplishments. When she is given an assignment, she contacts those organizations and gets back to you immediately.

Her communication level and management is very good. She might get stymied on the other end, however, she doesn't give up.

What did you find most impressive about them?

She's always available. She gets the job done, and the jobs can be either major projects or very minuscule projects. She's well educated, bright, and she is very thoughtful about political situations. She goes above and beyond her role or the duties that one would think, and she provides cost-effective solutions for our marketing. She helps us stay within budget and lets us know when certain avenues are not going to be productive.

She's great on new technologies. Sometimes I call her and ask how to do certain things. We can talk about very sophisticated things on our website. There are no walls in her purview. There's a tank in all the walls. It's probably the reason why she's a multi-award winning firm.

What I find amazing is she's involved in so many different agencies and institutions doing their promotions. I find it amazing that she has time to handle it all so well.

She also has a great understanding of graphic design and website development. In graphic design, people have a different perspective than they did 20 years ago on how things should be presented. As far as website development, that changes as we speak. She's incredible as far as staying on top of things like that.

Lastly, publicists don't typically attend committee meetings. She makes a major effort to attend as many committee meetings as she can for the organizations she is responsible for. Through attending these events, she is able to get a better feel of what direction the boards want to go in.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don't have anything.