Leading With Empathy: DADA Goldberg’s Rebecca Goldberg-Brodsky and Defne Aydintasbas on Cultivating Relationships, Protecting Identity, and Adapting to Changing Times
By Julia Gamolina
Rebecca Goldberg Brodsky and Defne Aydintasbas are the Co-Founders and Chief Strategists of DADA Goldberg, a strategic public relations and digital communications agency based in New York and Los Angeles. DADA Goldberg works with a select roster of developers, architects, designers, and lifestyle brands to clearly define their message, establish them as an authority in the space, bolster their following, and grow their businesses. The practice values forward-looking design that is built to last a lifetime, and creating experiences that build community.
Rebecca started her career as the founder and inaugural editor of the hospitality design title, Boutique Design. She then moved into the marketing PR world, marrying her interest in design and business. Driven by a desire to advance design narratives and empower creative companies, Rebecca launched DADA Goldberg with Defne. Defne started her career in advertising, working with Fortune 500 companies in tech and entertainment, mapping their corporate and product exposure strategies globally. Driven by the love of the arts and architecture, and with a desire to have broader impact on the arts, she moved to a marketing role before starting DADA Goldberg with Rebecca 10 years ago.
JG: How did you both grow up?
RGB: I grew up in upstate New York, in a very small town. Interestingly, I realized that I basically grew up in quarantine, so I feel like I’ve been through quarantine twice now, because I grew up spending a lot of time by myself. I had my brother, but generally we didn’t have a lot of people around. So, I watched a lot of television and I went to stores and obsessively read magazines. I really wanted to understand the world, so I tried to read everything I possibly could.
I always had an extreme curiosity, and I always wanted to be somewhere else, but this actually gave me a really strong sense of self in that I never needed to do what other people are doing. I’ve always looked at certain things aspirationally of course, but I never fit in for the sake of fitting in and always thought that I’d rather be alone than in bad company. So imagination, creation, and the writing and making of things were always elements in my life.
DA: I was born and grew up in Turkey; from age three, I lived in Istanbul. My parents were both artists and creatives; my mom is a painter but over the course of her career she had done performance art, installations, and essentially a lot of multi-media art. My dad was an architect. I think that me and my sister’s exposure to their world during our childhood really formed us. My dad always had a great sense of taste and what was coming up. He could look at a neighborhood in Istanbul, and he could see what would happen in five or ten years.
We were one of the few artist families living in our neighborhood, along with a lot of French expats, and others that migrated from villages in Eastern Turkey to be closer to the big cities. My mom also had studios in emerging neighborhoods, and Turkey was so different then; there wasn’t as much capital in Turkey and the built environment was actually in decay, but my parents always saw a lot of beauty in this. They both allowed me and my sister a lot of freedom to explore where we were, and explore the city. So innately I could understand and appreciate a lot of beauty from these experiences. Finances were so tight for our family though, that I never wanted to do anything creative [laughs]. My sister became a journalist though, and because she’s older than me, I got to see the media side of things as I was coming up in my career. My uncle was a journalist too actually, so I guess I really did end up in between architecture and journalism, being in the position I am in now.
Our first and longest running client relationship, Stonehill Taylor restored and designed the interior of the TWA Hotel. Photograph by David Mitchell.
Canoe Place, a historic Inn, reimagined by Workstead. Photo by Matthew Williams.
The award-winning Lake House on Canandaigua is an independent hotel designed by The Brooklyn Home Company and Post Company. Photographed by Chris Mottalini.
How did you come to the architecture and design industry?
RGB: Because of my love of magazines, I thought I would go to fashion school, so I went to a school in upstate New York that had a program with FIT. Through that time, I realized that what I really loved was exploration and writing, so I ended up adding an English major. I graduated and took the first job I could find, which was for an extremely obscure textiles newspaper upstate. Six months into that, I had an opportunity to start a magazine. The magazine was about the boutique hotel industry, which was a new concept at the time, and I just fell in love with hearing designers vision and walking with them through a space. The merger between art, psychology, business, and culture all coming together in a space was fascinating to me. Everything that I was most interested in finally came together and made sense to me.
I always felt though that I was self-taught in running this magazine, and I needed something more formal to develop my skills within. I ended up going to a PR agency where Defne and I met, and I loved the idea of building multiple brands, and hearing the conversations around setting the strategy for their communications. I fell in love with messaging, brand building, and consulting – all of the things that we do now. I found there that my contribution to the world that I loved was on the communications side.
DA: When I was sixteen, I insisted that I had to leave Turkey, even though I had such lovely parents and quite a nice life in Istanbul. I was curious, like Rebecca, about different worlds, so I ended up as far away as possible in a boarding school in Massachusetts. I knew nothing about the United States, and all of the freedom that I was used to in Istanbul felt like it was taken away – I lived in a dorm now, with a curfew and bedtime, and all this. The culture was also unlike what I experienced in Turkey.
There was a lot of learning in those three years of high school – everything was new, which was both thrilling and lonely. I eventually charted a course for college, and I went to Clark University. My biggest thing was that I wanted to get away from anything creative [laughs], so I felt that I needed to study business to really learn how people turn their talents into a viable life. I studied economics and business, and then worked in advertising agencies for the first ten years, mostly during the tech boom. I then realized that I didn’t really care to specialize so much in tech, and ads for tech, and I felt like I needed to diversify. That’s how I ended up at the agency where Rebecca and I met. We really learned how businesses work there, creative businesses, and that’s how it all started.
““...times are changing, and things that used to work five years ago don’t work anymore. You have to adapt and keep things interesting...We’re really driven and inspired by the idea that every year should not be the same.”
So now please tell me about DADA Goldberg. How did you decide to start the company?
DA: Rebecca and I always worked well together; we have a natural way of finishing each other’s thoughts and were always on a very similar wavelength in terms of how we work, and the vision that we have. Starting something together made sense to us, and we felt like the hard part was done before we even officially started, which is to build that seamless communication and shared vision. Our first client was Stonehill Taylor, in the fall of 2011.
RGB: We wanted to work with brands we could get behind and translate their vision to the media.
What was challenging for us in the beginning was that our former agency didn’t give us much precedent to go off of. When we started, we were still learning what other PR firms did in various circumstances. That was a disadvantage for the first year maybe, but was tremendously advantageous to us personally, because we rewrote the rules on what you should do. We see now that many companies do not know how to evolve. We are fortunate in that we actively pushed ourselves to be uncomfortable early on and we became very comfortable with adaptation.
How did DADA Goldberg evolve, and where is it, and you, today?
RGB: We’ve always had this culture of taking our time to make sure that we did things right. Defne and I have spent so much time on everything with every client — we really lived and breathed the work. Now, the fantastic opportunity and challenge for us as we grow is to translate that attitude towards the culture of the entire company. We want to make sure that when people come in, they’re inspired and want to embody our values. We also want to make sure we move forward together as a group; times are changing, and things that used to work five years ago don’t work anymore. You have to adapt and keep things interesting, for better or worse. It's a more tiring approach but it's what we’re motivated by. We’re really driven and inspired by the idea that every year should not be the same.
We did have a period around 2017-2019, where it was starting to feel like the years were lather-rinse-repeat in the market. When we started, we were also very focused on furniture. Then we consciously said, “There is such a fantastically robust world of design out there, and we want to touch all parts of it.” So we thought about what we could do to shake that up, and work with best-in-class companies from every aspect of our universe. We’re bringing different types of stories to media, and we’re inspiring our contacts on a regular basis, so that they feel like we’re not just coming to them because we have a relationship, but because we’re bringing them things that are genuinely interesting. Luck certainly worked in our favor, but we also took every opportunity we could, and now we have clients from Lang Architecture and Alloy Development to Athena Calderone and Jenni Kayne. We’ve had so much fun breaking our own mold, and we now have this tested approach of studying who our clients are and envisioning the future together.
As the tallest building in Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Tower presides over a bustling downtown. Envisioned by JDS Development Group this residential building is known for unfettered views from its iconic hexagonal design by SHoP Architects. A triumph of old and new New York, a historic bank sits at the base of the tower. Image by Gabriel Saunders.
Talk to me more about how your services have evolved as media itself has evolved.
DA: We don’t come from traditional PR backgrounds, and didn’t when we started the company, and so what was a disadvantage at the beginning like Rebecca said, proved to be an advantage later as we had a broader marketing playbook in our arsenal. Over the years, there are of course very tangible impacts of how the media landscape has changed. For example, print advertising revenue started going down for publications, and then more online content shot up. Overall, there are fewer US outlets that cover the high end design that our clients are targeting, and the way we adjusted to that was to open up our services to an international list of publications; we talk to media around the world about our clients.
Of course the other big change is that we have a whole division now doing Instagram management and content creation. We’ve brought on a Creative Director and a Brand Director to work on a visual approach. It’s not about having really beautiful products shot just once anymore; it’s about continuous content creation, and we’ve adapted to now offer that as a service. In terms of other PR agencies that work with clients on content, like writing captions, we have a brand building approach to content creation.
The other element I’ve been wanting to ask you both about is how you’ve created such a wonderful culture at DADA Goldberg; I’ve worked and corresponded with many of your staff, and I’ve said to Rebecca before that I am so impressed with how graceful, sophisticated, warm, kind, and responsive everyone is across the board — including the two of you, of course! Everyone is just best-in-class in terms of their professionalism, and I was wondering how you achieved that with cultivating this really amazing group of people.
RGB: This is so thrilling to hear Julia, and especially because we’ve always wanted to hire good people that lead with empathy. We want them to understand our clients and be immersed with them, but also to understand that it’s about the media first because those are really sacred relationships since we translate everything about our clients to the media. It boils down to the fact that you’re a human being talking to another human being, and we’ve very intentionally taught that mentality.
The people that are with us now are so great and we are super proud of them. As we grow, we are also growing a more formal leadership group and we’re happy to have people that embody our ethos into other people, to make sure that that filters down indefinitely. Our approach is the hallmark of who we are, and while we really value being creative, we also value being kind. I think those two things have to go hand in hand. We have to be gracious because you really can’t take anything for granted.
We’ve been doing this for ten years now, which is amazing to think about. But what do the next ten years look like, especially now in a remote or hybrid setting, where people can’t casually observe you? How do you make sure everyone is getting that personal touch? That’s something that’s modeled by our team, so that everyone can see our mindset consistently.
“Too often, personal branding and marketing yourself is something that is seen as secondary to the creative endeavor. In reality though, it’s part of having a vision and being purposeful.”
What are you both most excited about right now?
RGB: It is a very uncertain world but, because of that, there’s great opportunity to be a leader. During Covid we leaned into the curve, pushed a little harder, and tried to preempt the changes in the market. We worked with influencers, ecommerce and added a digital division early, knowing that that would be important. We’re in a moment where things are getting more niche, but our universe has broadened a lot, so it’s a fascinating time to be communicating to everyone and anyone.
I personally think that this is a big moment for people with creative ideas and curiosity to go and to say, “This is what we’re all about, this is what we want to do, and this is what the world should look like.” We intend to champion that forever, and we want to do that through the traditional services that we’ve always offered, and also through the new ones like social media. Social has grown so much over the year, that we’re making a big investment by adding to the team, and trying to figure out how to create even more creative content that raises the bar for placemaking and personality.
We are entering a world where self-publishing is a practical thing that everybody should be taking advantage of. We’re using our market knowledge and building a team around creative production. We feel like we can do that better than a lot of other companies as we have the aesthetic of a branding company but the positioning capabilities from years of being skilled in PR. Combining those two things hasn’t really been done effectively before and we are aiming to do that.
DA: As we’ve noted, it is a changing world, but that’s something that excites me. I think of this time as the age of entrepreneurs, because it's no longer an exclusive club, which is great. The current culture gives us a chance to do business with really dynamic entrepreneurs, and be those as well as it is all about great brand building, great storytelling, and corporate responsibility. All of those come together to make something very exciting, and it’s no longer about who you know or the sales relationships you’ve had previously. It’s a fantastic age for brand building, and we love to be a part of it.
Separately, I also think it's a fantastic time for hospitality ventures. The small, diversified offers in the lifestyle space in hospitality is super exciting – new locations, new types of hotels and restaurants. There is a lot of dynamism out there. Everyone is thinking in terms of small start-ups, which is a great position to be in for brand building.
We invited Yuko Nishikawa, a Brooklyn-based Japanese artist, to create a site-specific installation for The Brooklyn Home Company in honor of the purity and artistry they bring to all of their residential developments. Titled Memory Functions, this program was up during May 2022's NYCxDesign, drawing visitors from all over the world to tour the apartments that are designed team to meet exceptional standards for sustainability and quality. Photo by Matthew Williams.
Inside a 675,000 square foot building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Dock 72 is revolutionizing the work environment with next level amenities, designed by architecture and interior design firm Fogarty Finger. Photographyby Connie Zhou.
Eva Chen's home, designed by Hendricks Churchill, and photographed by Chris Mottalini. We suggested a range of furnishing options for this home, earned a prominent placement in Architectural Digest, and shot one of the top performing AD Visits videos for their Instagram channel during the height of Covid.
What have been some of the challenges in your career?
DA: It’s one thing to build a financially sustainable business, but it is another to continuously run a company, and run it well. I remember when Rebecca and I just started, a friend of ours who had a thirty person firm at the time, said to us, “I am so envious of you two…I wish I could just be working with my partner again.” Working with human capital, finding great people that are just as dedicated, forming a culture – all of those things take intentional effort and time, and we’ve learned that along the way. Every step of the way was a challenge in that, and we’re still learning. Every big milestone, and every time we’ve pivoted has been a learning, going from five to ten people, ten to fifteen, then fifteen to twenty-five. You have to continuously adapt and look to the future – we’ve almost had to become addicted to this kind of momentum, but how we’ve been able to adapt is something we take pride in, and always aim to do well.
RGB: All of that. I want to say that because Madame Architect is a platform for and about women, I think it’s pertinent to call out that Defne and I have four children between the two of us, and that’s something that’s still misunderstood in the market in terms of the commitment and outside toll that it takes and that no one sees. We had four pregnancies between the two of us, which both of us tried to hide for as long as we could, disguising them behind long dresses and scarves and all of that. Yet, the beauty of it and the parallels between nurturing people at any age in life, are very rewarding. You see how people need and deserve to be treated fairly to just keep going in their daily lives, and being parents has broadened our foresight in terms of how we can appreciate differences, in terms of skills and needs, and adapt ourselves to that.
The world is different for women, and there continue to be roadblocks that we constantly face. I remind my husband often that in order to make the same money as him, I have to work twenty percent harder. Society is still not where it should be. This is the time where it's even more important for us to be out there and continue this path for women who are just starting.
And my last question for you, what advice do you have for those just starting their careers? Do you have any additional advice specifically for women?
DA: Too often, personal branding and marketing yourself is something that is seen as secondary to the creative endeavor. In reality though, it’s part of having a vision and being purposeful. Marketing is not a separate endeavor; constantly asking yourself why you do what you do is a great narrative that no matter how young you are, you should articulate – before you start a project, while you’re working on the project, and after you’ve finished the project. In that sense, what we do ties very closely to the people that we work with, their career success. If schools and people themselves can train themselves in that, everyone would be better off. I love the idea of more publicity and positioning education in schools.
RGB: Whatever someone’s lens is on a business, whether they’re building it, or doing the communications for it, my biggest advice is to know your history. It is the biggest surprise to me when people don’t aim to know their history. You have to read and know what’s been done before so that you can break some rules. For a lot of people, just showing up seems to be enough, but you have to give yourself a minute to understand another human being or a movement to learn and accomplish something new. And what are we all doing if we’re not trying to accomplish something new?
For women specifically, don’t let anyone take your power away. I say this to my daughter often. You’re born with a spirit and internal thumbprint that’s totally unique. You’re born perfect, and don’t let anyone take that from you – it’s your job to protect that your entire life. If you lose that, how can you maintain a distinct identity? But if you really protect that, and connect into the consciousness that we all live in, that’s how you can make a difference and make things that matter and have a legacy in this world.