OFFICIALLY: Valerie Staggs is Lead Marketing Consultant at RWA Marketing, the strategy-first agency she founded in 2002 and led for more than two decades. With more than 30 years of experience spanning advertising, media, research, promotion, journalism and nonprofit leadership, she helps organizations clarify their message, identify meaningful opportunities and build marketing programs that connect creative work to real business objectives.
Before founding RWA, Valerie spent 10 years in media sales, research and promotion, followed by five years on the agency side managing high-profile real estate and automotive accounts. As an agency founder, creative director and head copywriter, she has guided branding, advertising, content development, public relations, media strategy and campaign execution for businesses and organizations throughout South Florida and beyond. She now brings that experience to clients as a trusted strategic advisor, writer and marketing consultant.
Valerie is also a published author and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in South Florida lifestyle magazines and news outlets, including Jupiter Magazine, Stuart Magazine, Florida Weekly, NBC Think and Stet News. Her memoir, This Side of Heaven, chronicles the year following the death of her husband and the new world she and her son Ryan had to navigate together. She is a graduate of Ithaca College and the founder of Pandora’s Kids, a nonprofit established to support children and families coping with grief.
UNOFFICIALLY: Valerie is what happens when a professional writer, agency founder, magazine journalist, author, nonprofit founder, rescue-dog enthusiast and recovering media person decides that having one career is simply an unacceptable underachievement. Somewhere along the way, she built an advertising agency from the ground up, wrote a memoir, launched a nonprofit to help grieving children and families, developed a second career telling other people’s stories, and apparently still found time to become frighteningly competent at marketing strategy.
She is originally from Rochester, New York, which may explain the toughness, the directness and her apparent belief that weather should be judged not by temperature but by whether it presents a legitimate threat to human survival. Florida has softened her only slightly. She now spends her time writing, consulting, playing golf or pickleball, strumming a guitar with what she herself describes as questionable skill, and walking local streets with adopted mutts Axxl and Ozzy—who sound less like dogs and more like the opening act at a very loud concert.
Valerie has the rare ability to listen to someone describe an unclear business problem for approximately 90 seconds, identify the actual issue, develop three campaign directions, improve the headline and quietly wonder why nobody called her sooner. She is warm, funny and wildly capable. Give Valerie a challenge, a blank legal pad and perhaps a decent cup of coffee, and she will return with a strategy, a story, a better name for the thing and at least one observation that makes everyone in the room laugh while realizing she is completely right.