Joe Molina and 40 years of PR Excellence, Takes the Right Seat at Artomobilia
Joe Molina, founder of JMPR and a fixture of the collector car world, joins Artomobilia as an advisor.
Every so often the right person arrives at the right moment. As we close out our nineteenth year and turn toward our twentieth, we're glad to share that Joe Molina has joined Artomobilia as an advisor. It is the kind of addition that raises the level of everything around it, and we do not take it lightly.
If you've spent time in the collector car world, you've felt Joe's work whether you knew it or not. In 1977 he founded JMPR Public Relations in Los Angeles and spent more than four decades building it into one of the most respected automotive PR agencies in the country. The client roster reads like a tour of the industry itself: Infiniti, Bentley, Bugatti, McLaren, Airstream, Galpin Motors, Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auctions, the Mullin Automotive Museum, and the Los Angeles Auto Show, which JMPR guided from 1980 to 1996 and again as agency of record beginning in 2013. Joe credits that show as one of the launch pads that first gave his firm national standing, and it is telling that a client would come back to him nearly two decades later.
His deepest institutional relationship may have been with the Petersen Automotive Museum, one of the great automotive institutions in the country, which JMPR represented for seventeen years, one of only two agencies the Petersen ever entrusted with the work. That relationship traced back to publishing legend Robert E. Petersen himself, the man whose magazines shaped how generations of Americans understood cars, and it opened doors across the industry.
The through-line of Joe's career is that he worked with the people whose names ended up on the buildings and the fenders, the founders and the legends. He moved easily among the figures who built this world, and his clients and colleagues have been fixtures at the events that define the calendar: SEMA, Pebble Beach, The Quail, the LA Auto Show. He helped bring "Days of Thunder" to the public and worked alongside enthusiast icons like Jay Leno, Tim Allen, and Rod Stewart, men who love cars as deeply as anyone and trusted Joe to tell their stories right. As he tells it, he started at the top, did excellent work for the right people, and let that work introduce him to everyone else. In a business where reputation is earned one relationship at a time, Joe built one of the best in the room.
A few years ago, in November of 2021, Joe and his wife Beth made a move that surprised even him. They left Los Angeles for Carmel. Beth is a native Hoosier, and after years of visiting her family in Indiana, the two decided to trade L.A. traffic for a city Joe describes as almost too good to be real. As he put it, in Los Angeles they call it a set, but here it's real. They settled in Jackson's Grant, filled the house with their modern art collection, and surrounded it with the kind of interesting cars you'd expect.
Since then, Joe has become a friend and mentor to me, and a genuine supporter of what we're building. Our conversations have a way of leaving me with more clarity than I walked in with, exactly what you want from someone who has seen this industry from every angle over half a century. He has watched events rise and fall, brands come and go, and trends turn over more than once, and that perspective is not something you can hire or manufacture. So when the idea came up of formalizing that relationship, it felt less like a decision and more like acknowledging something already true.
In his advisory role, Joe will help us think through the questions that come with a milestone year: how to grow without losing what makes Artomobilia what it is, how to tell our story to a wider audience while keeping it honest, and how to honor nineteen years of history as we build toward the twentieth. These are good problems to have, and they're better with Joe's counsel.
Welcome aboard, Joe. We're glad you're here, and we're grateful for your guidance as we step into our twentieth year.
