ICONN Digital PR

Heard of Fyre Festival and Ja Rule? If not, watch the trailer of the Netflix documentary that was made about it.

So where do I start….

I reached out to Ja Rule’s team via Instagram, found a business email and sent a cold email (not expecting a reply back).

And then I got his reply from his manager, David Prince of Prince Management.

So we got talking, explained what I could do, gave a small pitch, showed him some case studies and he said “Hey, that’s kind of like PR…”

And so we discussed strategy, what Ja Rule was trying to do with ICONN, and went from there.

So what exactly did we get?

Well within the space of several months we effectively used targeted email outreach to get:
– Features on PageSix, BlackEnterprise and various hip hop news sites.
– connecting to the Forbes CMO Summit (more below)
– Keynote speaking engagement another summit (didn’t go ahead only due to Ja’s own schedule clashing)
– Interview booked with major YouTube channel with over 1 million subscribers.
– Interest from producers of dozens of radio shows.
– Conversations with entrepreneurship YouTube channel with 1.5 million+ subscribers
– And outreach which led to discussions with producers at 3 major TV shows.

Not all of these have gone live, or led to a successful media placement – but some have. And many are certain to be a ‘foot in the door’ to one in the near future. All we have to do is reach out to that person when we need to, or they’ll come back to us when the time’s right.
The key thing is that to even get to them efficiently and get any kind of response and subsequent phone calls or meetings – took targeted outreach, to the right people and with the right angle.
(The same approach we take with link building)

Forbes – An anatomy of how we landed this

So back in 2019, I saw that the Forbes CMO summit was coming up. But to get here it had a take a particular approach.
So I decided to contact the editor of Forbes CMO Network.

Which led to a phone call with her and another senior executive at Forbes, a follow up call with Ja Rule’s management – and the rest is history!

Five Takeaways from the Forbes CMO Summit

This led to:
– The opening, keynote speaking engagement at the Forbes 2019 Summit in front of the world’s top marketing leaders and decision makers at some of the biggest companies in the world.


– An article on Forbes: “Ja Rule Talks About Marketing Fyre Festival And If It Might Happen Again” (this article still gets thousands of views every month even today)

– Eventually management got a separate shorter interview with Forbes, which was broken down into smaller clips and shared across Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/YouTube. The YouTube clip alone has 20,000+ views and ranks top spot for the term “Ja Rule Fyre” – which is great from a rep management perspective.

– All this culminated in a lot of people writing about this interview happening (some bad and good reactions from people), but we definitely got Ja’s side of the story across. Got people talking about him (and Fyre and ICONN) and I estimate we reached at least 500,000 people up until now with the amount of social media shares, media coverage and hype this created.

-Here’s another one we got in fact, by leveraging HARO Outreach: https://www.bjtonline.com/business-jet-news/a-conversation-with-ja-rule



Here’s a testimonial from David Prince of David Prince Management