The Ground Rises Up

Picture a room full of people who are all talking at once. Not arguing. Not debating. Just talking. Each one certain that if they say it louder, say it more often, say it with more color and more urgency, eventually someone will stop and listen. The room is crowded. The noise is constant. And in every corner, someone with something genuinely worth hearing is being drowned out by everyone else who simply started earlier, or shouted harder, or had access to a bigger megaphone.

This is the media world most experts, founders, and leaders step into when they decide they are ready to be known. They have spent years building something real. They have earned their expertise the hard way. And then they walk into this room and realize, quickly and painfully, that readiness is not the same as visibility. The question is never whether their story matters. It almost always does. The question is whether anyone in that room will ever be quiet enough, and they will ever be positioned well enough, to be heard.

Meeting Amanda

Amanda Ghezzi Rumore has spent over two decades figuring out exactly how to answer that question. As Founder and CEO of The Publicity Collective, a boutique PR and media strategy firm based in Chicago, she has built a reputation for doing something most publicists never master: helping people become instantly understood. Not just featured. Not just mentioned. Understood, at a level that makes media doors open again and again, rather than just once.

What makes Amanda different is not her contact list. It is not the number of placements she has secured, though those numbers are significant. It is the fact that she once lay on a mountainside in Sedona, Arizona, after falling forty feet while hiking, and had to decide, in that stillness, what she actually believed about strength, resilience, and the stories worth telling.

The Path That Built Her

Amanda graduated from Arizona State University in 2004, where she was part of Delta Zeta and began developing the instincts for community and connection that would later define her professional identity. What followed was not a straight line. It was a decade of building skills in rooms that most people never get access to.

She spent over ten years as a freelance media correspondent, contributing to HuffPost, Arizona Foothills Magazine, ABC15, and 3TV. She learned what editors actually want, what producers respond to, and how a story gets shaped before it ever reaches an audience.

From 2014 to 2019, she served as PR Director at AR PR, deepening her fluency in strategy, client management, and the deliberate work of building a brand’s public identity. Then came a year that clarified everything. In 2020, she worked as Content Manager for Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi, placed inside the machinery of some of the most effective personal brand building in the world. She watched how authority is constructed at scale. “From early experiences working with The Grammys and alongside Tony Robbins,” Amanda reflects, “I learned what those rooms look and feel like, and what it takes to create them.”

The fall in Sedona came in 2018, before any of that crystallized into a company. It was near an energy vortex, a place people visit specifically because they are searching for something. She found it differently than expected. Forty feet down, with the ground having made its presence known in the most literal way possible, she was confronted with the kind of clarity that only arrives when everything else goes quiet. That experience shaped her chapter in the multi-authored book Legacy Speaks, where she wrote about healing from trauma while embracing both faith and the unknown. She called it “Experience Afterglow.” The word stuck. It became a philosophy.

What She Is Building Now

In August 2021, Amanda launched The Publicity Collective. It has grown steadily into a globally connected media force, backed by nearly 75 years of combined senior-level experience across the team. Clients span business, finance, wellness, food, hospitality, and lifestyle. Placements have landed on TODAY, NBC Nightly News, Fox, National Geographic, Condé Nast, Business Insider, Food and Wine, and dozens more. But the numbers are not the story. The approach is.

“We’re in a moment where ideas travel faster than brands,” Amanda says. “That changes everything.” Her firm has moved deliberately away from what she calls the “getting placements” model of public relations. What she is building instead is engineering recognition. The difference matters enormously. A placement gets you seen once. Recognition gets you understood, and then called back.

“When someone sees our clients, there’s no question what they stand for,” she explains. The work starts long before any pitch reaches a journalist or producer. It starts with repeatable narratives, media-friendly language, and positioning that translates across every platform. A client who can be instantly categorized by the media, in the right category, on their own terms, compounds visibility over time rather than chasing it repeatedly from scratch.

“Visibility only compounds when it’s consistent,” she says plainly. “If the market can’t quickly understand you, it won’t remember you.” This philosophy extends into her perspective on AI. Alongside her work at The Publicity Collective, she has stepped into a part-time CMO role with an AI media platform, giving her a close view of how quickly the environment is shifting. Her position is not evangelical and not dismissive. It is calibrated. “AI supports what we do, but it doesn’t replace the nuance, intuition, or human connection that strong positioning requires,” she says. “The authority still comes from the person. We’re just using better tools to bring it forward.”

That is a meaningful line to hold in an industry increasingly seduced by automation. Amanda holds it without apology. Her concept of afterglow has evolved beyond a chapter title. It now anchors her leadership style, her client philosophy, and her upcoming digital talk show, Afterglow with Amanda, launching on This Is It Network, centered on what becomes possible on the other side of real growth. “In leadership, that shows up as discernment,” she says. “I’m not reactive. I don’t chase noise. I help clients move from urgency to intention.”

In luxury and high-stakes positioning especially, she believes presence outweighs volume. “You don’t need to be everywhere,” she says. “You need to be felt in the right places.” Her clients confirm this. Dr. Simone Alicia, known as The Self Esteem Doctor, says of working with Amanda: “When you work with Amanda, you feel like you’re her only client in the entire world.” Teena Anderson of Anoka Meat and Sausage credits her with “big picture thinking along with an eye for details,” and with generating measurable new business through a media strategy she built from the ground up.

Amanda chooses her clients the way she says the best media relationships are built: with genuine belief. “We intentionally partner with brands we believe in,” she says, “because when we are truly passionate about your brand, the results speak louder, travel further, and resonate deeper.”

What Remains

Somewhere on a mountain in Sedona, there is a place where the ground falls away suddenly and the sky comes rushing in. Amanda Rumore went there looking for one thing and found something she was not expecting: a much cleaner understanding of what matters, and what does not.

She came back and built a company around that understanding. Not around noise. Not around volume or urgency or the desperate need to be seen at all costs. Around clarity. Around the belief that the right story, told to the right people, at the right moment, does not need to shout. It just needs to be understood. And the people who learn to position themselves that way, Amanda has spent four years proving, do not get featured once. They get remembered. The afterglow, it turns out, is the whole point.