“There is no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs.” It’s a message David Adelman, CEO of Campus Apartments, often shares – and one that feels especially relevant as we mark the 20-year milestone of our AOR partnership with Campus Apartments.
Twenty years of building and managing reputation through earned media is no small feat. It means surviving trends, transitions, turnover, recessions, and reinventions. It means answering the text no matter the time, responding with candor no matter how difficult, giving wardrobe advice before a big interview, and owning the good headlines and the ones we missed.
It also means something rarer: earning trust that lasts.
Our partnership with Campus Apartments is one of those relationships. What began as a local, mom-and-pop student housing company has grown into the nation’s largest privately held student housing company — and we’ve had the privilege of supporting that evolution from the trenches.
For two decades, that trust has never been something we’ve treated casually. We believe we must deliver with consistency, show up with discipline, and treat a client’s business like it’s our own — because anything less means we’re just “another vendor.” Loyalty is fragile; companies scale and sell, and reputations change. And yes, great clients outgrow great agencies all the time. That’s just the business of public relations. But it has never been the business model for Red Thread PR.
David has also seen our agency scale from humble beginnings in 2006 as a four-person team into the award-winning agency we are today. Along the way, he’s graciously made countless introductions to prospects and served as our reference in as many RFPs. It has been a partnership built on mutual respect, shared ambition, entrepreneurial spirit, and a love for all-things-Philly. It has endured and thrived because it’s built on the kind of continuity that only comes from work that works – and putting in the hard work when no one is watching- year after year, without getting complacent.
To honor the occasion, we’re presenting Campus Apartments with a mixed media canvas painted by our talented founder and fine artist, Berny Brownstein – a small but meaningful tribute to a relationship that has shaped us as much as we may have shaped it.
Twenty years later, we’re still taking the stairs because we’ll never take loyalty for granted.
We’re grateful and proud. And we know exactly how rare this is.