meet the a team
Abigail Hennelly & Ariana Swerdlin
Marketing and PR Professionals
Ariana
BACKGROUND
Ariana and Abigail began their careers working across the consumer, crisis, and corporate departments at Weber Shandwick’s New York headquarters on the traditional PR and Social teams.
After 4 years at WSNY, Ariana was approached for an inhouse role to help modernize the famed Plaza Hotel, tasked with bringing New York back into the building. Ariana was specifically brought on to evolve the iconic castle on Central Park South through today’s luxury lens. Through leveraging relationships across top tier media and celebrities, out-of-the-box PR and innovative activations, the results further cemented The Plaza as the premiere backdrop for monumental moments in pop culture for today’s generation.
Around the same time, following her keen interest to further an understanding of the publisher and paid side of marketing, Abigail transitioned into an integrated marketing role at NBC Universal where she led strategies to fit specific sponsorship & brand partnership objectives from ideation and proposal through to execution and recap across NBC’s News Portfolio. In this role, Abby oversaw multi-million dollar campaigns across on-air, event/experiential, digital and social campaigns across TODAY, Meet the Press, Nightly News, MSNBC and CNBC; with clients spanning auto, travel, luxury goods, issue advocacy, spirits and CPG.
Marketing and PR Professionals
After years of freelancing on the side, and launching a handful of startups together, Abigail joined Ariana at The Plaza where they transformed the communications department. Together they garnered incremental millions from previously untapped direct to consumer tactics. Nicknamed “The Ateam” garnered billions of press impressions for scroll-stopping activations and experiences for consumers and media alike, increasing the hotel’s social channel from 25K to 125K+ followers in three years. During The Plaza’s COVID closure, Accor moved Abigail to Los Angeles to open the famed Century Plaza Hotel, and Ariana to San Diego to bring the Forbes triple five-star, Fairmont Grand Del Mar, into today’s luxury landscape.
Throughout their time on the agency side and running marketing departments for luxury brands, they saw a need for a cohesive marketing & communications agency to streamline and optimize all efforts. Oftentimes, the ideas agencies suggested showed a lack of operational understanding. They knew they could bring value as outsourced Brand Managers & Marketing Directors to build stronger communications departments and set up the digital infrastructure often missing across paid and organic tactics.
Lifelong friends, they treat their clients as family with an authentic passion to deliver. Born and raised in the tri-state they are direct and results obsessed. Having worked in start ups to multi-million dollar budgets, The ATeam knows where to be scrappy without compromising on quality and where it is imperative to invest. The ATeam brings best practices and industry knowledge to remain ahead of the trends.
