This article appeared in the Aug. 8, 2003 Jewish Advocate.

New communications firm utilizes different approach

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

Using a fresh approach, Bayleaf Communications Inc. has worked to find new public relations opportunities for educational institutions, restaurants, specialty retail stores, and travel groups for the last two years.

Founded by public relations and event management specialist Jaimie Adler of Watertown, the company offers a wide array of services, including public and media relations, event development and implementation, print, broadcast and electronic media placement, image enhancement, product launches and promotion, and grand opening receptions.

The 31-year-old Adler started the firm on a part-time basis after working for two companies with clients in the hospitality industry. “I wasn’t getting the credit I deserved, and knew I could give more of what they wanted,” she said.

Her first clients were Rauza, a Catalan restaurant in Union Square, Somerville, and two Bread & Circus locations. Le Bocage, a French restaurant in Watertown, followed. The business is a full-time venture now.

Adler has secured media coverage for her clients in unexpected places in print publications, television, and radio. She managed to get a story of a restaurant into the Travel section of a major newspaper, placed a non-profit in a lifestyle section, and was able to land a story on a theatre troupe in the career pages.

Adler serves as the public relations chair for the new England Culinary Guild and the Watertown/Belmont Chamber of Commerce, and was the raffle chair for the Chamber’s annual Taste of the Towns event. A featured speaker at the anti-hunger group Share Our Strength’s Conference of Leaders 2002, Adler was also chosen as one of 10 publicists to work for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. She writes a bi-monthly food column for Newton Magazine, and is helping to plan a fundraiser for the Newton-based Wellness Community.

Adler, a Reform Jew from Long Island, Adler was Bat Mitzvahed and attended a Jewish high school. “My maternal grandmother fled Austria two weeks before Hitler invaded,” she said. Her maternal grandfather immigrated to New York from Hungary before World War II. Both her paternal grandparents were born in the United States, but her paternal great-grandmother, a nurse, was born in Palestine in 1898.

Adler and her husband, Jeffrey Palter, 33, whom she met on TheJewishPeople.org and married in September, are members of Temple Sinai in Brookline. She intended to major in voice at the University of Delaware, but was forced to change course due to tonsil problems. “During my junior year, with no declared major, my mother suggested PR – to put that big mouth of mine to work,” she recalled. “It totally stuck.”

For more information, email bayleafgcomm@rcn.com.