Curly Girl Collective · CurlFest 2026 · March to August 2026
Three founders. Three networks. Three days.
CurlFest returned after a year away with no ad spend, no corporate parent, and a venue that changed twice inside the outreach window. Playbook MG ran the press campaign, then kept going: community partners, a sponsor, a Caribbean cultural stage, and the talent standing on it.
- Client
- Curly Girl Collective
- Role
- Public relations and earned media lead
- Structure
- Three-agency campaign
- Event
- Saturday, July 25, 2026, Randall’s Island, New York
CurlFest 2026, Curly Girl Collective.
The assignment
Four line items on paper. A full campaign in practice.
The contracted scope was narrow: pitch journalists, book founder podcasts, submit awards, escort media on event day. What the festival actually needed was an entire narrative architecture, a sponsor, a cultural stage, and a partner program, built in parallel while the venue was still unconfirmed.
We built all of it. The work below is what was delivered, not what was requested.
Contracted
- Journalist pitching, pre and post event
- Founder podcast bookings
- Award submissions
- On-site media escort
Delivered
- 20-story narrative architecture and pitch map
- Two press releases, two wire distributions
- Four television bookings, one radio interview
- Community partner program and agreements
- Golden Krust secured as sponsor
- Caribbean cultural stage, built and staffed
- DJ promotional obligation framework
- Live password-gated strategy deck
The play · Broadcast
We did not send the founders out as a group.
The obvious move with three co-founders is to book one joint segment and call it a win. We split them instead. Each founder carried a different network, on a different day, in the last week before gates opened. One story became three, and no outlet ran the same interview as its competitor.
Television producers lock segments two to three weeks out. The venue was not confirmed until roughly June 25, which left three and a half weeks to pitch, confirm, brief and deliver all of it.
Fox 5 WNYW, Good Night New York
Melody Henderson. Positioned as a New York summer culture preview rather than a beauty story, which is what moved it through a general-assignment desk. Aired twice with the re-air.
PIX 11, Morning News
Charisse Higgins. Booked one day after Fox 5 and delivered on two surfaces: the in-studio segment plus a companion feature on pix11.com that stayed searchable through event weekend.
BronxNet, OPEN Morning Show
Taped July 8 and held to air the Wednesday of event week. Reaches 275,000-plus Bronx households across Optimum and FiOS, an audience the Manhattan outlets do not serve.
ABC7 Localish, on-site
Simone Mair. Inbound, not pitched. ABC7’s Here and Now desk passed CurlFest to Localish, and we converted the inquiry into founder access plus cleared on-site coverage of vendors and talent.
Media partnerships
Coverage that came with a stage, not just a story.
HelloBeautiful came on as official media partner, not as a placement. The deal carried a hair-pro editorial feature and a branded panel on the Empowerment Stage, and we programmed that panel alongside Cocoa Butter, its sister property. Both sit inside iOne Digital, the network that also carries MadameNoire, reaching more than 24 million monthly uniques.
That structure is the difference between being covered and being built into the event. A media partner has a reason to promote the festival before, during and after, because its own content lives on the lawn.
A placement ends when the segment airs. A media partner keeps selling tickets.
Narrative
Nothing was pitched off a template.
A sixteen-agent research swarm ran across sixteen topic areas: founder press history, market data, competitive landscape, venue rationale, Queens and NYC demographics, Caribbean diaspora media, policy context, and individual journalist profiling. The output became a 20-story pitch map, each story carrying its own angle, talking points, target outlet set, and a stated reason that angle fits that desk.
After the client feedback session the map was cut from 28 stories to 20. Four angles were killed outright, five merged into three, and every market figure was re-sourced. Twenty-five corrections were applied across every asset before a single send fired.
- Media universe
- 341 contacts researched and enriched, email-validated at a 70 percent accuracy threshold, leaving roughly 116 sendable. Every contact carried a behavioral profile, beat assignment, recent published work, and an identified care point. Thin evidence meant a neutral pitch, never an inferred one.
- Wave one
- Approximately 91 press accommodation emails on June 12, structured as a credential and access offer rather than a pitch. It generated live replies including national morning broadcast.
- Wave two
- Approximately 116 personalized pitches from June 25, staggered across five mailboxes at three-minute intervals. Every pitch opened with a recognition hook referencing that writer’s specific recent work. No mail-merge copy was used anywhere in the campaign.
- Wire
- Two EIN Presswire distributions. A media alert on June 23 to seed the date with newsrooms, cost absorbed by Playbook MG so it went out on schedule, then the full release on June 26.
Beyond press
The parts of the festival we ended up building.
Midway through the campaign the work stopped looking like publicity and started looking like production. We were asked for, and delivered, an entire second front.
- Golden Krust
- Secured as official sponsor and backstage food partner through a relationship Playbook MG already held with the brand’s marketing leadership, built on prior production work rather than cold outreach.
- Caribbean stage
- Developed and coordinated the Caribbean cultural programming, which Golden Krust sponsored. The segment featured Macka Diamond, Ricky Blaze and Denise Belfon. The founders are Caribbean-rooted, and until this year the festival had no programming that said so.
- Talent and performers
- Coordinated entertainment and cultural talent including Sesame Flyers International carnival performers and Moko Jumbie stilt walkers.
- Community partners
- Four secured: caribBEING, Locnificent Fest, Brukwine and Packs Light. Every flyer and agreement was produced in house. The offer ran partner recognition, a 15 percent promo code, 20 percent revenue share on tickets sold through it, VIP tickets, an Instagram spotlight, and discounted marketplace space.
- Packs Light
- Pitched as press, replied about partnership. Verification caught that the standard creator template would have misfired badly on an ADCOLOR Influencer of the Year winner and LinkedIn Top Voice. We rebuilt the response to offer both paths and let her choose. She took partnership, and stayed in the pitch map, so the media value survived alongside it.
- DJ framework
- CurlFest had always booked DJs without any promotional obligation attached. We built one: announcement posts within 48 hours of confirmation, a three-post minimum, unique trackable discount codes per DJ, a branded content kit, and mandatory cross-tagging. Net-new intellectual property the client keeps.
The number
Twenty-two million, and we can show the arithmetic.
Publishers do not release view counts for individual earned stories, so press impressions are reported as the outlet’s documented audience treated as potential reach. Every figure below names its source. Placements we could not source were counted at zero rather than estimated.
| Placement | Basis | Impressions |
|---|---|---|
| Fox 5 WNYW | DMA market reach, airs twice daily | 7,500,000 |
| PIX 11 broadcast | Station media kit | 7,500,000 |
| HelloBeautiful / iOne | Publisher network data | 5,500,000 |
| PIX 11 digital | Reported site traffic | 540,000 |
| HipHopSince1987 | Self-reported uniques | 465,000 |
| BronxNet OPEN | Media kit, cable plus streaming | 275,000 |
| Caribbean National Weekly | Publisher data | 100,000 |
| BK Reader | 2025 media kit | 40,000 |
| Caribbean Times | Publisher data, print and digital | 30,000 |
| Total | Nine placements, documented audience only | 21,950,000 |
Deliberately excluded: BuzzFeed via NewsBreak, Getty Images editorial syndication, NY Carib News, Caribbean Excellence Magazine, and both wire distributions. Each carried real reach. None could be sourced to a figure we were willing to defend, so none of it is in the total.
Earned social conversation
What it cost, honestly
The venue moved twice, and we protected the campaign from it.
In early June the venue changed from Randall’s Island to a Queens campus. Around June 25 it changed back. In between, follow-ups on the strongest reply set in the campaign were halted, nine outreach mailboxes came off warming, three venue-dependent stories sat frozen, and a full research and asset build was scrapped.
One decision saved it. Both press releases and all of wave one were written strictly location-agnostic, with venue held as “to be announced” to build anticipation. Because nothing public ever named a venue, nothing had to be retracted and no correction was issued to a single journalist. Ninety-one emails and two releases survived the reversal intact.
Venue confirmation gates roughly a third of any festival narrative map. Lock it contractually before the press calendar is built.
Culture-rooted brands do not need a vendor. They need someone already in the room.
Playbook MG is a boutique public relations and influencer agency in Brooklyn, working with Caribbean heritage and culture-rooted brands across beauty, food and beverage, fashion, entertainment, arts and nonprofits. The Caribbean media block on this campaign opened through relationships we already held. So did the sponsor.
All case studiesPlaybook MG · Industry City, Brooklyn · Figures reflect campaign records through the post-event window