Company: Theirsay
Founder: Jason Simms
Website: https://theirsay.com
About Theirsay
A short stint at an established PR firm was all 20-something Jason Simms needed to see to know he was going to set out on his own, be successful and make this his career. He knew he could do public relations at a high level and solve the pain points of leaders and business owners looking to get their companies noticed in the media. He knew this because he is a former journalist.
Jason founded Theirsay in 2013 with the idea of building an agency that thinks like a newsroom. What others say about a company matters more than what it says about itself. A dozen years later, Theirsay has a shelf full of PRSA Connecticut Mercury Awards and a PRSA Anvil Award to show for its work.
Theirsay’s biggest challenge has been proving a small independent agency can outperform larger firms on a national scale.
These three partnerships show how Theirsay has done that:
The Dyrt: This camping app came to Theirsay after parting ways with two PR firms. Within 60 days a repeatable media engine was built around one idea: The Dyrt community knows more about camping than anyone, so its data should lead the national conversation. Theirsay created and positioned an annual Camping Report, drawn from surveys of campers, US residents and campground owners in all 50 states, as a news event that fuels story angles all year. The New York Times, NBC News, The Washington Post, Forbes, Inc., countless local papers in every state and every noteworthy camping or outdoors outlet have cited it. A single idea Jason had in 2021 directly led to a high-profile sponsorship from Toyota in each of the last three years. The Dyrt is now the unquestioned No. 1 authority on camping in America.
GuideGeek: Generative AI arrived with a credibility problem. Travellers feared hallucinations, and tourism boards feared losing web traffic. Theirsay positioned Matador Network’s GuideGeek as the trustworthy answer: an AI travel genius trained on local expertise and refined through human feedback. Theirsay collaborated with the PR teams at dozens of destination marketing organizations on the media rollout of custom GuideGeek tools, including NYC Tourism + Conventions, South African Tourism, The German National Tourist Office and Tourism New Zealand, which built GuideGeek into its playable Minecraft destination. Each launch resulted in widespread media coverage that helped the tourism board engage visitors and steer them to local businesses.
Lingokids: Parents download education apps out of guilt, and children abandon them out of boredom. Following a rebrand, Theirsay repositioned Lingokids in the media from an education app to an entertainment platform for kids that makes learning stick. Simms and his team brought forward data from Lingokids’ loyal user base to show that quality content can make screentime a source of joy and bring the family together. Theirsay’s storytelling leveraged collaborations with heavyweights like Disney to place Lingokids alongside media brands rather than flashcard apps.
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