Our History 2020-06-05T15:18:26+00:00

Brown + Dutch was founded in 1996 when Alyson Dutch and her chocolate Labrador Rocky Brown found themselves starting a PR agency, quite by accident. She serves at the helm of Brown + Dutch, personally involved in all projects, while her team executes on her strategies and tactics.

For 30 years, Dutch has worked with major brands from Swatch to ThinkThin nutrition, AOL, Mrs. Fields, Perrier Jouet, to international brands like Miss Universe, Paramount and Sun City, South Africa. She’s been a publicist in legendary PR agencies like Baker, Winokur, Ryder and Rogers & Cowan. She also spent years inside PR departments for companies like Madison Square Garden and Landmark Theatre Corporation.

The CPG specialist has an uncanny knack for extracting the most important aspects of any product almost immediately. Dutch’s superhero level x-ray vision for this was developed by a high-flying and adventurous career that started in her native Los Angeles at the famed Rogers & Cowan Agency. At Landmark Theatre Corporation, she was a part of the birth of the animation industry as it went primetime. Somewhere along the way, she arrived on the Paramount lot where she scandalously absconded with job requisitions that led to providing the publicity for the Miss Universe, USA and Teen USA Pageants for CBS-TV, several trips around the world (and a bunch to Wichita). Dutch became an international specialist working in cities from Taiwan to Bangkok, a highlight of which was in South Africa representing Sun City during the fall of apartheid. At Baker Winokur Ryder, she was the first to book talent for online “celebrity chat rooms” for America Online, and Oldsmobile. Working with many of the world’s best known celebrities from Elizabeth Taylor to Elton John, Dutch has provided publicity services for the Academy Awards telecast, the Grammy’s after party and spearheaded many red-carpet events for the nation’s top 10 charities.

An outgrowth of a franchise manual she wrote for the Mrs. Fields franchisees, Dutch authored the PR Handbook for Entrepreneurs in 2008 to help entrepreneurs understand exactly how publicity works (and what doesn’t). In the works is her second book, titled The P.O.M. Principle: How Product, Operations and Marketing are the Only 3 Secrets You Need to Know to Start Any Business. In 2009, the do-it-yourself PR experience Consumer Product Events was born to help in-house marketing gurus, agency types and entrepreneurs gain direct access to her valuable little black book of influencers.

Dutch is a columnist for Inventor’s Digest and Small Business Digest magazines, a mentor for the Small Business Association’s SCORE program and speaks on the subject of consumer product launch at events from INPEX to the International Association of Inventors. She is also a product agent for The Home Shopping Network.

As straightforward, genuine, and savvy as they come, Dutch is just as adept at handling snowboarders as dignitaries, CEO’s and stars. She possesses an innate knowledge of how to position companies, people, and products to gain a specific objective, whether it be to attract economic investment, to find distribution, or to handle a public relations crisis. Her passion for her work drives her to apply her knowledge in a creative, yet methodical manner. In addition, she has a keen understanding of the cultural sensitivities that rule the marketplace and knows how to command the media’s attention.

Dutch sees her personal and business life as one unified vocation. Congruency is her mantra — all actions connected to values. She is fascinated and inspired by iconoclasts, individuals, those who succeed when it appears they should not. Her heroes are people who never finished high school or started out homeless, but became billionaires. She has a deep appreciation for those who can “just figure it out.”

For fun, she wrote a book called The Pageant Diaries: Confessions of a Beauty Pageant Publicist and more seriously is also working on the story of her father’s life, Poopsie, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor. For 23 years, Dutch volunteered her time as an emergency medical technician for the National Ski Patrol. She has a penchant for French Bordeaux, Piedmont Italians, fast cars, yellow Labradors and being outside when the sun is shining.