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June 6, 2026
A Kansas-born, Orange County-based founder who walked out of two decades of Fortune 500 PR to build Arkive, and is telling beverage brands the quiet part out loud.
Most founders we meet pitch us their PR strategy like this:
Write a press release → blast it to ten reporters → wait for the New York Times to care.
Clean. Predictable. Wrong.
Reality?
Most brand stories are noise. Most reporters never opened the email. Most of the press the brand is proud of was paid for. And the McDonald's CEO bit a Big Mac on LinkedIn that the entire internet knew he had never eaten in his life.
That's the world Priya Dua walked into when she burned the boats two years ago and built Arkive PR.
And what she said on the show is the cleanest framework I've heard for beverage brand storytelling in three years.
🎙️ This Week on Drink Up
This week on Drink Up Live, Saturday morning, full coffee not yet drunk, technical difficulties included, Adam and I sat down with Priya Dua, founder of Arkive PR.
Kansas-born. Orange-County based. Two decades inside Fortune 500 PR, agency-side and in-house.
Now running a four-person agency she built around earned media, human-written copy, and the willingness to walk away from a client who won't listen.
👉
🧠 The Naive Belief Every Founder Holds About Their Own Story
Every founder I have ever met thinks their brand story is interesting.
Most of them are wrong.
Priya said it cleaner than I have ever said it:
“Too often the C-suite has a specific idea of what a good story looks like, what a good brand story is for their particular company, when they don't necessarily understand what a story should be, what it should look like, and how it would speak to existing customers and potential customers.”
Sam's take: this is the part of every founder coaching session that goes badly. You sit with the founder. You ask what their brand story is. They tell you a story that is interesting to them, their mom, and their college roommate. And it has nothing to do with the person walking down the aisle in Total Wine. The C-suite isn't lying. They're just standing too close to the painting to see what it actually looks like.
Adam said it on the call, and this is the line I want every founder to write on their whiteboard:
“A lot of people just assume that their story is interesting because it's interesting to them. They don't think like, well, is that true?”
🔥 Hot Take: "All PR Is Good PR" Is the Biggest Lie in the Industry
If you have said this phrase out loud in the last twelve months, Priya is talking to you.
“All PR is the biggest lie ever. I'm so sick and tired of people saying that. That is not true. I fully disagree, 100 percent.”
She brought receipts.
The McDonald's CEO eating a Big Mac on LinkedIn, a guy who clearly has not had one in fifteen years.
Reba McEntire shilling a brand on TV that nobody in Reba's life is convinced she actually uses.
Both technically PR. Both technically coverage. Both technically a disaster.
Sam's take: this is the most overused, most lazy, most founder-destroying cliché in all of consumer brand building. "Any press is good press" is something people say when they don't have a plan. It's not a strategy. It's a coping mechanism. Stop saying it. Start asking what the press is actually doing for your brand.
💸 Earned Press vs. Paid Press, The Two-Word Audit
If you take one thing out of this newsletter, take this.
Read the top of the article.
If it says the word "sponsored," it's an ad.
“If you see that, you're like, great, but you paid for this. This is not anything that a reporter endorsed. This is something you just spent some dollars on.”
Priya's standard on this is the cleanest I have heard from any PR pro in the last five years:
“I would rather see the New York Times post something, even if it's a tiny mention, that's organic for a client, versus Wall Street Journal doing something huge that's got a lot of [paid].”
👉 A two-line earned mention beats a half-page bought spread. Every time.
Industry context: per Cision's 2025 State of the Media report, 71% of journalists say they distrust brands that lead with sponsored or paid content, and 63% of consumers can now identify sponsored content within five seconds. The boost button on LinkedIn isn't building credibility. It's burning it.
📺 The Media Wheel, Why PR Is Not a One-Time Launch
Most beverage founders treat PR like a press release on day one and then go silent.
Priya's response when I asked when in the brand journey to do PR:
“Media all the time, all day long, truly. It's just, it has to be a wheel. It's an ongoing wheel.”
She walked through one of her own beer-brand case studies on the call.
• Pre-distribution: earned media built credibility.
• Distribution conversations: brought clips to the table.
• Post-distribution: kept the wheel turning with iterations and new-market announcements.
Result: into Walmart. Into Buc-ee's. Into multiple national retailers.
Sam's take: this is the order operation most founders run backwards. They wait until they have distribution to do PR. By then, the buyer at Walmart already googled them and found nothing. PR is the credibility layer that gets the distribution call returned. Not the celebration after.
🛒 Demand Before Distribution, The Beverage-Industry Version
I pressed Priya on the part of the conversation that matters most to beverage founders specifically.
Do you create the demand before you arrive at the store?
“Yes, that's the whole point there. Absolutely. Get them excited. And then they also realize that they actually do need it. They may not even know they need it, and then they do, and then they go ahead and make that purchasing decision.”
👉 The buyer should have already heard of you before the distributor rep sits down.
Adam said the part nobody likes to admit:
“I think people tend to conflate sales and marketing and advertising, especially in the early days of a company when maybe money's a little bit tighter, and they all kind of just meld into one amorphous blob. And it's not the best.”
If sales, marketing, and PR all sit in one Notion doc owned by the same overworked founder, none of them are getting done well. Priya built her agency on that exact gap.
⚙️ The Arkive PR Bench: Four Scrappy People, No AI Copy
Priya's team is four people.
Not forty. Four.
• Priya, new business, vision, strategy.
• A media-relations specialist, the big pitcher.
• A thought-leadership lead, awards, speaking, long-form writing.
• Dani, admin and the human glue holding the chaos together.
And the rule she would not bend on, even when I poked at it:
“All content is fully human-written, no AI support. I suppose we could go to AI for an idea, for research points, but that's something that's very, very important to me.”
Sam's take: I am pro-AI. I use Claude every day. I am building agents in the back of BevAssets to handle tasks I do not want to handle. But Priya is right about one thing, the moment your brand voice sounds the same as every other AI-generated press release in the inbox, you are background noise. The cheapest competitive advantage in 2026 is sounding like a human.
👀 The Reality Check: When to Fire the Client
Most agencies will not say this on a podcast.
Priya did. Twice.
“I've actually had potential business with some companies where the CEO just would not listen and was not willing to bend to our expertise, and we've not been able to actually work with them. We've turned them away, because at that end, everyone's just gonna fail. We aren't gonna be set up for success on either end.”
Sam's take: walking away is the most honest thing an agency can do. We do the same thing at BevAssets. If the founder will not engage, will not return the call, will not provide the data, will not be honest about who their customer actually is, there is no version of this engagement that ends well. The check is not worth the year of friction. Priya's filter is sharper than most.
Industry context: per the Holmes Report's 2025 agency survey, 58% of PR agencies under $5M in revenue cite "client misalignment on strategy" as the #1 cause of contract loss within the first 12 months. The agencies that quietly screen clients up front have nearly half the churn of agencies that take whoever signs the order.
🧪 The Energy Efficiency Case Study, Hyper-Local Media at Scale
Priya's cleanest campaign example was not a beverage brand. But the framework translates straight across.
Client: an energy-efficiency company.
Problem: every US region has different energy-cost pain points.
Her play: region-by-region campaigns. Each one with its own three-part bundle.
• Media, local outlets, regional broadcast.
• Web, dedicated landing pages by geography.
• Blog, long-form content addressing the specific regional pain.
“We would take those different pieces across these different hubs in the US, and then communicate the need for these kinds of technologies. We found that to be really, really helpful in terms of sales. And we're trying to take it global now.”
👉 Translate that for beverage: California has a different drinker than Texas. Texas has a different drinker than the Carolinas. Run three campaigns, not one.
Industry context: per NielsenIQ's 2025 regional beverage panel, the top 10 US DMAs differ on RTD, premium spirits, and non-alc preferences by as much as 35-50% in share-of-throat. A national PR push that says the same thing in every market is leaving 30%+ of category resonance on the floor.
🔄 Branding Is Not Static, The Pivot Permission Slip
When I asked her closing thoughts for the founders listening, Priya said the thing most founders need to hear and won't say out loud:
“Branding is not a static activity. It's something that's always in flux. Give yourself some grace. If you find something isn't working, it's OK. Just pivot. Remember, you can always pivot. And if you have the right people in place, the right partners, you'll get to where you need to go.”
Sam's take: most brands die not because the original positioning was wrong, but because the founder refused to update it once it stopped working. Permission to pivot is the most underrated leadership skill in beverage. If your bottle, label, story, or distribution map is the same as it was 18 months ago and your velocity is flat, the data is telling you something. Listen.
🎯 The One Idea You Should Steal
Adam asked Priya the question we ask every guest.
What is the difference between success and failure?
“Success is only a blip in time. Failure is only a blip in time. It's really just how you move forward on both of those. Success is great, it's awesome that you get it. But that doesn't mean you land there and you end there. It's all about constant momentum.”
👉 Both are moments. Neither is a destination.
If you got a 50-account expansion this quarter, that's a blip. If you lost three accounts last week, also a blip. The only thing that compounds is the next move.
🧭 What This Means For You
If you're a beverage founder reading this on a Saturday morning:
Stop saying "all PR is good PR." It isn't, and a buyer at a 90-door grocery account just heard you say it.
Audit your last 12 months of press. Highlight the earned coverage in green. Highlight the sponsored placements in red. Look at the ratio.
Build the wheel. Do not launch and go silent. Quarterly iteration. New-market announcement. Founder thought-leadership piece.
And if you're paying an agency that won't push back on you when your brand story is noise, you're paying for a yes-man. Fire them.
💬 Final Thought
Priya said the line that should be a desktop wallpaper for every emerging beverage founder:
“We're all just people at the end of the day. We're all trying to achieve our goals to make exciting things happen. Relationship building has become kind of a lost art. It's kind of dying out.”
PR is not a press release.
It is a relationship, between the brand, the reporter, the buyer, the bartender, and the person about to put a four-pack in their cart.
Stop chasing impressions.
Start building relationships.
🔗 Sources & Further Reading
🧃 Your Move
If you're building a brand right now:
Don't buy press.
Don't paraphrase your customer.
Don't write your story for yourself.
👉 Build the wheel, write like a human, and fire the yes-man agency.
The next 24 months belong to the founders who got their story right before they got their distribution.
Truthfully,
Sam
