At 18, Juliana Martins chased starry-eyed dreams from Rogers to New York; six years later, celebrities are hitching their publicity bandwagons to her.
At 24, she runs Eleven11 Media Relations LLC and has gone bicoastal with two employees.
“I split my time, but the home base now is Los Angeles,” Martins said. “I got all my PR experience in New York, and I feel if you survive being thrown into the New York media scene, you can really survive anywhere.”
Martins has worked with stars including 2020 “The Bachelor” lead Peter Weber and Dr. Darcy Sterling, host of “Famously Single” on the E! Network. She has also worked on a campaign with Kesha, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, and launched her own weekly podcast, “Behind the Media.”
In a phone call from Los Angeles, where the mid-January afternoon temperature stood at 67 degrees, Martins described her unusual career path.
“I was born in Fayetteville, grew up in Rogers, and loved artsy classes, English, anything that wasn’t a lot of math,” Martins said with no hint of an Arkansas accent. “I had always thought I wanted to be in front of the scenes in media and had not thought about public relations at all. But I interned with a well-known New York agency while I was in college. I found I loved being behind the scenes.”
She earned a communications degree at Pace University, the former business school in Manhattan, but the media bug had actually bitten Martins back in high school. After meeting a news crew at NWA Fashion Week, she dogged reporters, anchors and managers until she’d talked her way into a production internship with KNWA in Fayetteville.
“The news director told me they didn’t really use high school interns, but I’d shown such interest and hustle they eventually let me shadow the production assistants. And from that time on they could not get me out of that place. I eventually was there five or six days a week, helping run the cameras and actually being a part of the team. It was what really inspired me to move to New York.”
After finishing college in 2018, Martins went full-time with New York agency EvolveMKD. But as the COVID pandemic struck, she saw a growing market to serve brands that “still wanted PR and to get their message out, but didn’t have the thousands and thousands of dollars a month to hire a 20-person agency.” To offer them high-quality PR work “for a portion of what they would pay a super-large agency,” Martins founded Eleven11, taking the name from a common superstition about making a wish anytime a clock face shows 11:11.
“When I see it, I will always make a wish,” she said. “It’s sort of a manifestation of putting what you want out into the universe. I thought of Eleven11 to let my clients know that I’m manifesting success for them. I hope that my company is their wish come true.”
The agency has clients in entertainment, lifestyle, beauty and e-commerce. “I love how diversified it is, because it’s something new every single day,” Martins said. She has generated coverage for clients in Forbes, The New York Times and People magazine, and on TV shows like “Good Morning America,” “Today” and podcasts like “Works for Us,” “Workin’ On It” and “The Viall Files.”
“I have a celebrity relationship therapist [Sterling], a celebrity trainer and fitness app CEO who stars in ‘Vanderpump Rules’ on Bravo, and great product clients like a tequila company and a music discovery app,” Martins said. “I work every single day to find an angle to pitch, something new to promote via media, get articles, get amazing podcast appearances.” Recently, Martins has been turning heads with red-carpet events for clients in Los Angeles and San Diego.
She makes it back to Arkansas about once a year to visit her mother, Kristen Martins, and her grandmother Gerri Smoldt. Arkansas friends follow her career, and she appreciates it.
Through it all, Martins said, she’s largely dodged questions about success at a young age. “It doesn’t happen as much anymore because my work shows for itself, but I try to have a comedic way of answering when people ask how old I am.” One reply: “Do you ask your therapist their age?”