SmileSpace · Dr. Corey Black, DMD · January to September 2026
We stopped selling his time and started selling his authority.
In 2025 Dr. Corey Black was a quotable dentist. Brands rented him by the interview, paid a few hundred dollars for an organic mention, and owned none of the content afterwards. By August 2026 he was a Philips brand ambassador. Nothing about his practice changed. What changed was what we were selling.
- Client
- SmileSpace, three NYC locations
- Principal
- Dr. Corey Black, DMD, founder
- Role
- PR, positioning and brand partnerships
- Category
- Healthcare, founder-led
The problem
A dentist is an expert. An expert is a commodity.
Dr. Black runs SmileSpace across Clinton Hill, Central Harlem and Boerum Hill. He is exactly the kind of practitioner consumer brands want quoted: credentialed, Brooklyn, photogenic, articulate on camera.
That is also the trap. The market has a standing rate for a quotable doctor, and it is low. In 2025 his brand work ran through an agency on a pay-per-interview basis, a few hundred dollars per organic social mention, with the brand taking no paid usage rights because nobody had thought to sell them any. The work was real. The ceiling was structural.
A dentist competing on availability will always be priced like a freelancer. The only way out is to stop being an expert for hire and become an asset a brand needs exclusive access to.
You cannot negotiate your way out of the wrong category. You have to leave it.
The repositioning · What we changed
From media expert to key opinion leader.
In March 2026 we rewrote what Dr. Black sells, line by line, before a single number went to Philips. Every row below is a different commercial product, not a price increase on the same one.
| Term | 2025 model | 2026 model |
|---|---|---|
| Primary role | Media and PR expert | Brand ambassador and KOL |
| Social | Organic mentions, priced per post | High-production content assets |
| Commitment | Pay per interview | Annual retainer plus exclusivity fee |
| Licensing | Organic use only | Paid usage rights and whitelisting |
| Category | Open, no restriction | Category exclusivity, priced |
| Speaking | Bundled into the interview rate | Priced separately as a medical keynote |
| Goal | Volume of PR hits | Authority and brand association |
The argument we took to the brand was that a verified clinician converts at a rate a lifestyle influencer cannot, because the title itself carries trust that search and social algorithms now reward directly. A doctor on camera is not a cheaper influencer. It is a different product, and it should never have been priced against the same rate card.
We then built two offers rather than one, a full-year strategic partnership and a lighter content-and-PR campaign, so the conversation was about which tier rather than whether.
The deal
Five months from cold introduction to signed ambassador.
The agency of record for Philips came to us in early March. What followed was not a pitch, it was a negotiation we controlled, and the pacing is the part worth studying.
- March 4 to 11
- Introduction and first collaboration call. We put a three-person team on it and held the scoping conversation before any rate was discussed, which is what allowed the repricing to land later as a category argument rather than a negotiation tactic.
- March 26
- The repositioning memo, internal. Two tiers built, the licensing and exclusivity terms written into the offer, and the speaking rate unbundled for the first time.
- March to June
- World Oral Health Day event participation and a public service announcement developed with the brand, moving the relationship from a proposal into shared work before the contract existed.
- June to July
- PSA through the brand’s legal review, contract drafted, and our team running the follow-up cadence on the client’s behalf through two rounds of feedback.
- August
- Brand ambassadorship secured. We immediately took the announcement to the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and had it agreed for member amplification within four days.
The contract took five months. The category change took one memo.
Press and platforms
Everything else was built to make the deal make sense.
An ambassadorship is easier to argue for when the person already looks like a public authority. The press and speaking work below ran in parallel with the negotiation, and each piece answered a question the brand was going to ask.
- PIX 11, On The Rise
- A feature segment in the number one US media market, framed around SmileSpace upgrading the dental experience while widening access in underserved communities. Not a veneers story with a community footnote, a community story with the clinical work inside it. That framing is what made a general-assignment desk take a dentist.
- Authority Magazine
- Thought-leadership feature on building a career in dentistry, pitched and accepted in January. Evergreen, searchable, and the first asset in the file that positioned him as someone with a methodology rather than a chair.
- Hunter College
- Guest speaker at the Pre-Dental Society annual banquet on dentistry and entrepreneurship, with our team on site capturing content. An academic credential that costs nothing and reads as authority on every subsequent pitch.
- Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce
- Membership activated and promotional benefits negotiated, then used to amplify the Philips announcement to the borough business community.
- Barclays Center
- Direct introduction to Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment premium sales, and the Nets small business program brochure and rate card worked through with the client. A local-institution route that a dental practice does not normally get a meeting for.
- Power Player Suite
- Red carpet placement at the inaugural 2026 New York edition, an evening around sport, entertainment and business. Founder visibility in rooms that have nothing to do with dentistry, which is exactly the point.
- Podcast pipeline
- Targeted outreach to business and founder shows including Earn Your Leisure and dental trade podcasts, pitching him as a healthcare entrepreneur rather than a clinician.
The number
Modest impressions. That is not where the value is.
This campaign did not produce the impression volume of a festival or an album rollout, and pretending otherwise would misread it. A founder-led healthcare account is measured on what the visibility converts into, not on how far it travelled.
The press figures below are counted the same way as every other campaign in our work, at the outlet’s documented audience. The earned media value is impressions multiplied by a disclosed cost per thousand.
| Placement | Basis | Impressions | EMV |
|---|---|---|---|
| PIX 11 broadcast | New York DMA, roughly 7.5 million television households, at a $25 CPM | 7,500,000 | $187,500 |
| PIX 11 digital | pix11.com companion feature, at a $12 CPM | 540,000 | $6,480 |
| Authority Magazine | Category estimate, media kit requested, at a $12 CPM | 2,000,000 | $24,000 |
| Brooklyn Chamber | Member amplification of the Philips announcement. Reach figure requested. | Pending | Pending |
| Speaking and red carpet | Hunter College, Power Player Suite. Audience and photography reach not counted. | Not counted | Not counted |
| Total | Three counted placements | 10,040,000 | $217,980 |
Ten million impressions and roughly $218,000 in earned media value is a respectable nine months for a three-location dental practice. It is also not the result. The result is a global consumer brand signing an annual ambassadorship with paid usage rights and category exclusivity, in a category where the same practitioner was previously being booked by the interview.
Why it worked
Three things that transfer to any founder-led practice.
- Sell the asset, not the hour
- Interviews are time, and time is capped by the calendar. Content assets, usage rights and category exclusivity are products, and products are priced on what they are worth to the buyer. The single highest-leverage move available to an expert is to stop quoting a day rate.
- Build the credential before the ask
- Broadcast, a university lectern, a chamber of commerce and an arena introduction are not vanity. Each one is a fact the brand’s legal and marketing teams can point at internally when they justify an ambassadorship to someone who has never heard of him.
- Give them a tier, not a price
- A single number invites a yes or a no. Two tiers move the conversation to which one, and the higher tier makes the lower one read as the reasonable option rather than the expensive one.
A practice grows by adding chairs. A practitioner grows by changing what he is sold as.
Founder-led healthcare needs positioning, not just publicity.
Playbook MG is a boutique public relations and influencer agency in Brooklyn, working with culture-rooted brands and founders across healthcare, beauty, food and beverage, fashion, entertainment, arts and nonprofits. This engagement covered public relations, speaking and institutional placement, and the brand partnership negotiation end to end.
All case studiesPlaybook MG · Industry City, Brooklyn · EMV calculated at the CPMs printed above · Figures as of September 2026