Fayetteville’s AM Group Helps Restaurants Tell Their Story

Andrea Ritchie (left) and Mary Mickel, managing partners and cofounders of the AM Group of Fayetteville, which counts a number of restaurants as clients. (Provided)

The communications agency AM Group of Fayetteville came across my restaurant news radar with its representation of the Barnaby Group, the hospitality company behind George’s restaurant in Little Rock.

AM Group, founded by Andrea Ritchie and Mary Mickel, handled the announcement of the Barnaby Group’s purchase of the Town Pump in Little Rock and of plans for the neighborhood pub The Lady, also in Little Rock, and South School, a 23-acre nature-based retreat in Fayetteville.

It also serves a number of other restaurant and hospitality-related businesses, among them Stonebreaker Hotel & Restaurant, Tula and Fossil Cove Brewing Co., all of Fayetteville, and AC Hotel Bentonville, which recently opened on the Walmart Home Office campus.

So my questions were, how did this become a focus (though it’s hardly AM Group’s only focus; more on that), and how is representing restaurants different from other communications work?

“The focus of AM Group is communications and marketing strategies for all of our clients,” Mickel said. “And that really can be applied to hospitality clients but everyone else. Andrea and I both cut our teeth in hospitality. We both grew up waiting tables and bartending and kind of put our way through college that way and learned what customer service meant, through those odd jobs in junior high and high school and college.”

Mickel is originally from Little Rock, Ritchie from Fort Smith, and both attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Asked how representing restaurants was different from serving other clients, Ritchie said, “For hospitality, it all comes down to the customer, which, honestly, it translates pretty easily to all of our clients.

“But we’re seeing a lot more influencers that we’re utilizing for hospitality, rather than our other clients because that storytelling aspect — it’s more than just a press release where it’s just basically a news article. These influencers can experience it firsthand and help tell that story in a different light.

“I think the influencer-led campaign, that’s probably the biggest difference that we’re seeing.”

Mickel agreed, adding, “I think the difference between a restaurant and a normal 9-to-5 business is they’re always on. There’s a plethora of different communication strategies that we apply because of how those businesses work.

“Not even just the hours, but you’ve got to anticipate seasonal changes, economic changes, political changes and how they impact the restaurant, how they do business, how they price, how they accommodate for service, how they hire. All of those things are factors that we’re considering when we’re developing a communication strategy for a restaurant.”

This led into a conversation about how social media (Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) influencers might be compensated. My bottom-line question to Mickel and Ritchie: Do you pay influencers? How does that work?

“I think it depends on the level of influence,” Mickel said. “Some are happy having trade and in-kind, so come in and experience this restaurant. We’re going to comp the meal and you’re going to give us a hopefully unbiased account of the experience within the restaurant.

“It’s a give-and-a-give, right? Giving them those experiences but then they have, now, content for their audience that they didn’t necessarily have before. So that type of ‘trade’ situation, if you will, for micro-influencers right now is really predominant.

“As their influence is greater, then the negotiations are a bit more in depth,” she said. “And whether they’re just posting it on their feed or their story or whether they’re coming in and doing a whole content creation calendar on that client’s behalf. There’s a lot of ways you can lean in with influencers.”

Mickel added: “Everyone’s level of what they can accept and what they can’t accept is different, and it’s changing rapidly every year.”

The constantly shifting environment is a challenge. “There’s this question of earned vs. paid media,” she said. “It skirts the line, but I think that the influencer economy is vast. The creator economy is vast.

“You think about Walmart and what they’re doing for their creator economy. They have a whole studio that was built just to make content for these creators or just have creators come in and make content. It’s quite the enterprise these days.

“We do it on a different level because we want our mom-and-pop restaurants … to feel some love. Whether they’re [influencers] in town or they live in northwest Arkansas, we want them to come and experience something new.”

Asked what happens when an influencer has a bad experience, Mickel said that hasn’t been an issue. “I think having a really transparent relationship with the influencers up front and knowing that they can come and if they did have a unique experience that, ultimately, wasn’t something that they feel confident publicizing on their platform, then that’s something that we would talk about and cross that bridge when we get there.”

More Than Restaurants

AM Group is a spinoff of a previous agency, founded by Mickel and another partner in 2012 in Austin, Texas. Ritchie, who also did a stint at CJRW, worked at the northwest Arkansas office of that original agency, and then she and Mickel founded AM Group in 2023.

And while that original agency initially specialized in hospitality, the COVID pandemic caused it to diversify and work with “really resilient industries,” Mickel said. “Outside of hospitality, we’ve begun being interested in financial literacy, in real estate, in other industries, not just because of the resiliency but because that’s something we want to know as businesspeople, is how the economy works.”

But the two managing partners “also leaned into what northwest Arkansas is offering,” Ritchie said. “Of course that’s hospitality. That is community nonprofits. That’s outdoor recreation and tourism. And then, of course, the financial development, all of that.”

The diversification means AM Group, with its staff of six, also has clients like Cushman & Wakefield | Sage Partners, AcreTrader, Ozark United Football Club and Experience Fayetteville.

And though Ritchie and Mickel declined to share revenue figures, Mickel said AM Group’s billings were up 60% this year compared with 2024.