Shortlisted for PR Agency of the Year, KCSA is in the “begets” business…
As artificial intelligence floods the market with automated content and a sophisticated retail class redefines Wall Street, agency KCSA outlines a radical return to corporate authenticity and data journalism.
In the glass towers of Manhattan and across the digital wires of global finance, a quiet battle is being fought for the soul of corporate narrative.
As investors navigate a sea of AI-generated press releases, and newsrooms shrink to skeleton crews, public relations and investor relations teams have ceased to be solely corporate functions.
Embracing this shift is KCSA, a US communications agency that has spent decades bridging the gap between corporate balance sheets and the public square.
Jeffrey Goldberger, Principal at the firm, and Jon Goldberg, Managing Director, explain there has been an aggressive evolution and the agency has actively sought to navigate what they describe as the “second or third inning” of an AI-driven marketing wave.
For Goldberger, now entering his 23rd year with the firm, the current corporate frenzy surrounding artificial intelligence triggers an intense sense of déjà vu.
“It reminds me of the dot-com era, when companies added ‘.com’ to their names despite having no online presence,” he says.
“They thought the label alone would fix their valuation. It didn’t, because it wasn’t authentic to who they were.”
Today’s landscape presents an identical structural problem. While native AI firms are genuinely driving industrial innovation, a parallel class of legacy operations has dusted off the old playbook, adopting an AI veneer to satisfy what has become a mandatory “check-the-box” requirement for larger organisations.
Rather than chasing the narrative hype, KCSA’s focus is practical and structural. The firm is building internal, proprietary tools designed to assist its PR and IR teams with research, reporting, and case studies, prioritising backend operational efficiency and client profitability over outward corporate posturing.
Jon Goldberg, who heads KCSA’s asset management and financial services media relations, voices an even sharper critique regarding AI’s impact on corporate content.
“I worry about AI-generated content. Too many asset managers put out ideas that have clearly been run through a large language model,” he says.
To counteract this flood of synthetic intelligence, KCSA pushes its clients toward highly personalised media formats, such as recorded video commentary, to foster a distinct, un-copyable human connection. In a world of automated content, an unvarnished personal voice has become the ultimate differentiator.
The permanent integration
A core thesis separates KCSA from some traditional agencies: the belief that public relations and investor relations are permanently intertwined.
Historically treated as church and state by corporate boards, KCSA approaches them as a single, unified mechanism.
Over decades, the firm has leveraged this philosophy to transition away from corporate generalism, building out deeply institutionalised, specialised practice areas covering financial services, healthcare, media, technology, and an “alternatives” practice focused on highly technical, emerging frontiers like longevity, medical cannabis, and psychedelics.
Operationally, KCSA splits its strategy across two distinct corporate weight classes, aligning its approach perfectly with market realities.
In investor relations, the agency’s “sweet spot” focuses squarely on publicly traded companies with a market cap of $1 billion or less.
For these emerging micro-to-small-cap businesses, building out an expensive internal IR apparatus is often an operational error.
By outsourcing to an agency, they gain an immediate external perspective and a layer of capability missing in isolated corporate environments.
“If you’re only internal, you’re working inside a petri dish,” Goldberger says, highlighting the insulating traps that claim early public companies.
KCSA tops this function with a specialised capital markets desk, an institutional sales force consisting entirely of former institutional salespeople with active books of business and established buy-side relationships.
Data-driven narratives
How does an agency win media real estate when newsrooms are under unprecedented pressure and the journalist population is actively shrinking?
KCSA’s method leans on strict, data-driven narrative engineering designed from the perspective of the media itself.
“We work backwards from the media,” Goldberg says. “We ask: what types of companies are media-friendly?”
To execute this, KCSA establishes a “shadow newsroom,” mapping out global news trends, analysing editorial calendars, and anticipating precisely what overstretched reporters will require weeks before an event occurs.
The agency says it consciously avoids the transactional nature of the “one-off” pitch, focusing instead on building long-term editorial consistency.
This media strategy relies on a strict tactical blueprint: a three-to-one ratio of print media to broadcast appearances.
“Television opportunities are limited,” Goldberg explains, drawing on his background as a former producer at CNBC.
“To get on TV, you need a paper trail. Before an analyst appears on air, producers want to see them quoted in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.”
Recognising that modern reporters lack the bandwidth to investigate complex macro-trends from scratch, KCSA acts as an external data provider, guiding clients to engineer proprietary, data-driven quarterly reports.
The true innovation, however, lies in how that data is packaged. Abandoning dense, multi-page white papers that sit unread in inboxes, KCSA designs summaries that Goldberg describes as “graphic novels.”
“You should be able to read a chart in eight seconds. That’s what I was taught at CNBC,” he says.
“The best reports look more like a comic book than a white paper.” This extreme clarity creates an incredibly sticky cycle of media coverage.
In one notable instance, a quarterly data report built by KCSA has been continuously utilised by financial reporters for 14 years.
“It’s like Mad Libs, reporters change a few words and update the numbers,” Goldberg says.
This framework feeds the ultimate operational objective: media begets media, and client success begets client growth. “We’re in the begets business,” Goldberg notes.
Re-engineering the relationship
The macro-professionalisation of corporate communications has systematically destroyed the old model of the public relations “generalist,” the directors agree.
Modern IR and PR departments are increasingly staffed by former CFOs, sell-side analysts, PhDs, and medical doctors.
This influx of Wall Street and operational pedigree has drastically raised the bar for agency performance, and rewritten the client dynamic.
“It used to be that companies told us what to do and we simply executed. That doesn’t work anymore,” Goldberger states.
“If they’re hiring you just to execute, that’s not a real relationship.”
Successful long-term corporate positioning requires unhindered, direct access to the C-suite and a management team willing to break from corporate monotony.
“You have to be willing to say something meaningful, something outside the norm,” Jeffrey says.
Failed agency relationships almost always trace back to a fundamental misalignment of expectations at the starting line, particularly among executives who assume writing a check guarantees immediate market miracles.
To pre-empt this, KCSA mandates a rigorous, two-and-a-half-hour deep-dive onboarding session with every internal business unit before a single line of text goes public.
The process maps a comprehensive messaging matrix, forcing internal alignment on two-year strategic goals. In practice, this onboarding functions as a form of organisational therapy.
“Public relations is often a path to better internal relations,” Jon Goldberg concludes. “It’s like a dating game, if you ask a couple where they’ll be in two years and they give different answers, that’s a problem. Companies shouldn’t move forward with a campaign until they’re aligned internally.”