Posted May 1, 2012 by Chris
Caren West learned a thing or two before staring her own PR firm at 26
Twenty-six might seem a young age to start your own PR firm in Atlanta, but Caren West had already learned important lessons from her 12 years working in hospitality: “Your job is to make sure your guests have a good time and a great meal.”
Now she counts restaurants, musical events and media companies among her firm’s clients. “It’s more than a job, it’s someone else’s dream that we get to be a part of.”
Caren West
When she was 13, Caren walked across the street from her home outside Baltimore and landed a dishwasher’s job. During college summer breaks from Auburn, she worked at the Weekapaug Inn in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. “Think Dirty Dancing,” she suggested. “Auburn’s summer breaks were longer than other schools, so I raked it in at weddings and big dinner parties after the other students went back to school. It helped pay college expenses!”
She wasn’t headed for a career in PR. She majored in communications and minored in psychology (her mother’s field). “I was interested in TV production and I landed a job at Turner, but they merged with Time Warner before I could start and my job was caught in a hiring freeze. So I decided to evaluate what I was going to do next. I tell people I didn’t find PR, PR found me.”
She started at a music label and soon was pulled into working for two small PR firms, yet continued freelance writing – her first love. “I loved the media and I’m obsessed with magazines. I thought I’d try journalism, but people kept asking me to write for PR.” She eventually landed a weekly column at the Sunday Paper, was special projects editor at Jezebel and landed a weekly on-air gig on 99X. Then her PR projects started getting bigger and bigger and Caren West PR was born.
CWPR clients include the 20th anniversary of Jeffrey Fashion Cares, Wild Heaven Craft Beers, next month’s retirement of Monica Pearson from WSB-TV as well as CounterPoint, a new music festival planned for this fall in Chattahoochee Hill Country.
“I have a passion for writing. In PR, it’s important. You have to be great writer to be able to tell a story with every pitch. There is so much noise, so many blogs and social media, having consistent and meaningful messaging is so important.”
She partnered with graphic artist Chad Shearer in 2005 and the four-person firm keeps an office in Old Fourth Ward with four dogs. “It’s a zoo. I love it,” she said.
“I’ve had offers to go to New York, but I always turn them down. I love Atlanta. Atlanta was on the verge and I wanted to be here,” she said. “It’s an entrepreneurial city. The PR community works together to breed success. I love the fact that I can partner with other PR people and cross-promote.”
CWPR was an early adopter of social media and building the buzz. Jezebel Magazine just listed Caren’s personal Facebook page as Atlanta’s funniest. (Better hurry if you want to be her friend, she only has a few spots left before she hits the ceiling of 5,000.)
She was especially honored to be asked by WSB to handle Monica’s retirement schedule. “I love media people so much and I respect the hours that go into what they do and I’m willing to jump through hoops to do whatever they need.”
– Chris Schroder
Posted April 23, 2012 by Chris
Sharon Goldmacher might be the only person who can solve this winning PR formula: C21 + 2013 = Final Four
When Sharon Goldmacher of communications 21 was trying to decide where to start her career, she had a bit of a Goldilocks experience: New Orleans was too hot and the Baltimore/D.C. area was too cold. Atlanta, it turns out, was just right.
Not only is she celebrating her firm’s 20th year, she and her firm have taken on a second job of sorts: managing the operations and execution for the 2013 NCAA Men’s Final Four as well as providing marketing, PR and promotion services. That would be c21’s 21st year, coming of age just in time, naturally.
Sharon Goldmacher
“I tell people my full title is ‘Executive Director of the Atlanta local organizing committee and I have no tickets!’ ” (The NCAA has taken over all ticket distribution responsibilities, but you can enter a lottery for tickets here.)
As Sharon was preparing to graduate cum laude from Tulane with a double major in political science and communications, she worked part-time at the NBC affiliate, WDSU-TV. She helped provide coverage for Mardi Gras, the space shuttle Challenger explosion and a decapitation with an alleged Mafia connection.
“The coup de grace was a 12-car pile-up on a foggy Sunday morning. It was a very bad wreck. That was it for me,” she said. “I’m not a big emotional person, but for survival’s sake, I wanted to stay as humanistic as possible, so I decided to get out of TV News reporting in New Orleans.”
Born in California, Sharon had moved with her family to Orlando, Boston and Baltimore. “We were in Orlando and attended Disney the second day it opened, which was a great memory I will never forget,” she said. “But I didn’t want to go back to Baltimore and, after job-hunting in D.C., I decided it was too cold. My sister went to Emory and my college roommate was from Atlanta. It was the greenest city I’d ever seen in my life, so I moved here.
“After I did some volunteer work at an Atlanta PBS station, someone said, “You’d be great in PR.’ And I said, ‘Awesome – PR, what is that?’ ”
She worked for a small PR firm that handled commercial real estate before joining Knapp Communications, where her friend and mentor was William Pate, now president & CEO of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau.
“I finally decided I wasn’t that great with authority, so after three years at age 28, I struck out on my own. The downside was I had no formal training in running a business,” she said. “From the beginning, I was very much focused on client satisfaction. After all, they are your lifeblood. When you’re getting started, you don’t have flexibility to say ‘I will work with you or I don’t want work with you.’
“I lost focus on the fact that people working with clients need to be happy as well and around my fifth or sixth year in business, I lost a couple of key people. So then I rotated 180 degrees: I learned you have to have great people and make sure they are happy. If the team is happy, then the client is happy. The work is there and if the employees are challenged, they will want to do best they can. So we do a lot of training and pay 100 percent of development and education.”
communications 21 has numerous clients, including the Southeast Dairy Association, Copper Development Association, Community Coffee Company and Quality Technical Services. But the firm’s big client is the NCAA Final Four, which will host the second largest sports event (behind only the Super Bowl) in Atlanta next April.
“Our goal is to have this be the best tournament ever, in honor of 75 years of March Madness in 2013,” said Sharon, who was the volunteer chair for marketing and PR promotions in 2007 and then helped prepare and deliver the Atlanta organizing committee’s winning pitch for the 2013 event. It wasn’t long before the committee asked her to be executive director of the Atlanta committee. “Our goal is to have the Final Four here every three to five years,” she said.
In addition to taking over ticket distribution, the NCAA has its own telescopic seating that it will install over the lower bowl of the Dome, making it a much more intimate setting than four years ago when only 50,000 seats were available. Not only will seating increase to 73,000, but the floor will be raised three feet above the benches and media. Also, instead of just three total games, the event will include a free music series (The Big Dance) and 89 different sports in the Georgia World Congress Center as part of Bracket Town – the fan fest event.
In addition to heading the committee, c21’s 13 employees will handle all marketing, PR and event promotions. Normally a host city has an executive director, a director of operations and a support person. “I told them they are getting 10 additional people for the price of three!” Sharon said.
– Chris Schroder
Posted April 15, 2012 by Chris
Carol Cookerly learned early on that an appropriate demeanor needs to fit the occasion – Today, that would be happy
When PR expert Carol Cookerly was early in her TV career just after graduating from Duke, her news director gave her a lesson in appropriate demeanor that fits the occasion.
“He called me in to his office after I had done a live shot at an explosion. ‘Carol,’ he said. ‘Instead of looking so happy at doing your TV reporting job, you should probably look more empathetic to the occasion.’ I went back and looked at my tape and that was a eureka moment for me,” Carol said Monday. “Make sure your demeanor fits the occasion. Even though I really was happy doing my job as a live stand-up reporter on the local evening news in Greensboro and Durham.”
Carol Cookerly
Today, celebrating 20 years running her own PR firm, Carol’s happy demeanor seems most appropriate. With 24-full-time employees serving a diversified client base, she reports that the economic impact on her firm’s revenues of several recent downturns in the economy “has been negligible.”
Carol grew up in Charlotte until she was 15 and then her family moved to Washington, D.C. After majoring in economics, he worked four years covering “the mundane to murders” for the Carolina TV stations. Following a move to New Jersey and New York, she joined a PR firm for three years, eventually migrating to Atlanta to work for Hill & Knowlton.
“Then I went into computers and software for two years and learned how to sell,” Carol said. “I learned about the IBM selling process and I credit that with a lot of our ability to grow as a PR firm.”
Three years after she left PR, she opened her own firm and called up a number of the consumer goods firms she had served at H&K. “They weren’t working with any other firms and they were game to work with me,” she said. “So I immediately hired an account person and an admin. I never wanted to specialize in any one vertical and that has worked well for us. We’ve had a very controlled, profitable growth curve.”
Cookerly serves clients such as SunTrust Banks, Georgia Emergency Management Agency, Clean Air Campaign and U.S Micro. Carol has served on the Metro YMCA board for the past 15 years and this past year she was honored with the Bransby Christian Leadership Award for the volunteer of the year. She is also heavily involved with the Murphy-Harpst home in Cedartown, supporting severely abused children.
“I can tell you we focus on writing as in-depth a plan as we possibly can and then try to work those plans. We’ve gotten more complicated business propositions and we’ve gotten very adept at complicated stuff. We don’t just say we’re going to do a media relations gig – we try to work out as rounded a marketing program as we can.”
That has included an early commitment to social media. “We got in early in social media. A VP of my staff, Candace McCaffrey showed leadership early on in that area and became an expert on social media strategies. Then we decided several years ago that everyone was going to be expert in it. We promote our firm heavily in social media. We’re right in the thick of it. Though we also strive, if the goal is publicity, for as much national media, even more than local media.”
Carol, however, just closed down her personal Facebook page. “We’re big into it as a firm, but it’s counter to my nature as a private person to have all this stuff bleeding onto my page even when I don’t post. I’d rather go walking. I take a walk in the woods for 30 minutes each day without a cell phone. That’s how I relax.”
That and horseback riding. Carol was a competitive circuit jumper most of her adult life, but slowed down the past few years. “I’m thinking I’m ready to get back into jumping,” she said. “It’s the only time I can concentrate. When you are riding a horse jumping, you can’t think of anything else.”
– Chris Schroder
Posted April 9, 2012 by Chris
Karin Koser’s career started before she could even finish graduate school – and she’s been shooting higher ever since
Karin Koser will learn in June whether her firm’s video work for Shepherd Center will win one of the industry’s highest awards: a national Silver Anvil, for which their DVD series is a finalist in the Health Care Services category. They’ll be competing against other Atlanta and national broadcast and PR talent – something she’s been doing successfully since she was in graduate school.
In fact, a career opportunity so enticing knocked on her door while she was at the University of Georgia pursuing a graduate degree in broadcast journalism that she never finished her degree.
Karin Koser
“I only had six to nine months to go to complete my degree when I saw a job posted on the bulletin board for the Georgia Department of Tourism to be a travel reporter on WAGA-Channel 5’s PM Magazine program,” Karin recalled Friday. She thought “this is the type of job I’d even quit my degree for – if I could possibly win the competition for it.” She did.
Splitting her time between the Tourism office and the TV station, she traveled the state for three years, writing, editing, producing and hosting video segments that aired on the highly rated program until it was bumped off the air by Wheel of Fortune. “My favorite stories were ‘fairy crosses‘ in Fannin County and sitting on the porch of the Greyfield Inn on Cumberland Island with Gogo Ferguson when a baby deer walked up and she fed it in her lap with a baby bottle.”
So she stayed on for a total of 14 years as PR Manager and later assistant director at the GA Dept. of Industry Trade & Tourism, traveling the world, helping raise media and tourist interest in the state and initiating the “Georgia On My Mind” campaign. As the Olympics approached, she was launching the Welcome South Visitors Center when Ken Willis, then at GCI, recruited her to the PR world.
“I was a senior account supervisor working with Shaw Industries and Lake Lanier Islands, but by that time I was also the proud mom of a young daughter and all those hours and travel weren’t compatible. So when a job as PR Director at Egleston came open, I knew that was closer to home and closer to my heart.” She stayed there more than three years, helping with the communications around the hospital’s merger with Scottish Rite hospital.
“I had been thinking of jumping off and starting my own business,” she said. “I was watching and being encouraged by folks such as Melissa Libby and Lee Echols and finally in January 2000, I did that. Fortunately, I talked to my bosses at (the newly merged) Children’s Healthcare and was able to serve them as a consultant for two years, continuing C-level PR strategy work and promoting healthcare breakthroughs and events like the Festival of Trees and Art of the Season. At the same time, I got a small contract with Connecting with Kids to produce short- and long-form videos about child and teen health.”
She’s led KPK & Co. for 12 years and branched off KPKinteractive in 2008 to take advantage of the interactive opportunities the Internet provided with video technology, and social media channels. Her firm’s video/interactive clients include Shepherd Center, with which she’s worked since 2002, Interface and DeKalb Medical Center. On the PR side, KPK & Co. works with Georgia State University and the American Craft Council’s annual event in Atlanta, among others.
Karin knew she wanted a career in PR after her freshman year at UGA when she was in Rome, Italy, with her mom. Karin’s European-born mother taught her conversational German growing up and took her on lots of trips – a benefit of her mom’s job with Lufthansa. On a bus tour of Rome, the tour guide slipped easily from English to German and Spanish while promoting the city with passion. Karin was impressed.
“Then it hit me, I could be passionate about promoting my own city and state and possibly make a career out of it,” she said.
In 2008, Karin and her team created the “Story of Hope” brand for Shepherd, profiling patients who came to the rehabilitation center and found it a life-changing experience. That led to the development of ShepherdTV.org and to a series of videos this past year informing families what to expect following a spinal cord or brain injury and the promise of eventual recovery and a better long-term life. The video programs were distributed nationally and are available at two new websites: braininjury101.org and spinalinjury101.org.
This campaign, consisting of two full-length videos, packaged as a DVD series with companion booklets, marketing materials and online, is the work that could land Shepherd Center and KPKinteractive a Silver Anvil in New York. Other independent Atlanta finalists in the awards are Jackson Spalding and Hipple & Co. Reputation Management.
“I think there is a story behind everything,” Karin said. “If we can connect the product or the service personally, it will resonate and be successful in reaching our client’s targets. Video, especially distributed interactively, is the best communication tool these days to reach people. We feel like we are at the right place at the right time and this is really the core of what we do. I’m personally passionate about health and wellness, higher ed, lifelong learning, arts/travel/culture and that is reflected in our client portfolio.”
– Chris Schroder
Posted April 2, 2012 by Chris
Former ABC Editor David Rubinger jumped to PR, then corporate and now has his own firm.
A number of Atlanta journalists migrated into PR later in their career, but you may be able to count on one hand – perhaps one digit – former editors of the Atlanta Business Chronicle who now work in public relations. Meet David Rubinger, who actually worked on all three sides part of the communication spectrum: journalism, PR and corporate.
“I still think the most fun I’ve had in my career was my time at the ABC,” David told us last week. “It was perfect for someone like me who was new to Atlanta. Anita Sharpe was editor and Ed Baker, the publisher, introduced me to this city in a way a young person at age 24 would never normally get coming to this city.”
David Rubinger
The next stop for David was Ketchum, to which he was recruited by Jane Shivers to run the media relations department. “It was a very difficult decision to leave,” David said. “I valued the time at ABC, but with two children (four now) and looking for further professional growth, I wanted to try something different. The opportunity was right: The Internet boom was starting, Ketchum was growing quickly and I ran media relations. I don’t know if that could happen today, given economic realities for large PR agencies, but at the time they were willing to use my experience at the ABC to win new clients.”
An additional benefit: David got to “work on accounts such as Equifax and the Metro Atlanta Chamber, help implement new programs and learn the agency business without the extreme pressures of being 90 percent billable right away.”
The benefit paid dividends five years later in 2003 when Equifax CEO Tom Chapman recruited David to “go corporate” and head up the corporate communications department. That assignment opened his eyes to a totally new perspective.
“Until you are inside corporate, you don’t realize the complexities of getting all the various constituencies on the same page,” David said. “There are so many voices in a large corporation that you need to align,from the CEO to the board of directors to legal to marketing to human resources to finance. Getting everyone aligned can be a very difficult task and it doesn’t happen until you understand the pressures each of them face to work together as a team. And being a public company made it even more complicated.”
All of which gave him a good perspective when he started Rubinger Inc. in July 2008.
“When you run your own shop, you really learn to understand the client on personal and professional level … to know how they like to work with a consultant of any type,” David said. “I equate it to dating: Understanding what a partner wants, not stepping on toes, giving each other mutual respect, getting to know the client more than a weekly status call. You have to understand their needs. It takes time … sometimes it’s six months before a client and consultant get on the same page. If you know that, it pays off for the long term and it’s much more gratifying over a long relationship.”
David grew up in Manhattan, “devouring the New York Times each morning.” He was involved in the college paper at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, worked an internship at McGraw-Hill’s Electronics Magazine, leading to his first job at McGraw Hill’s online real-time news pilot program. He moved to Atlanta with his wife Hedy, a partner with Arnall Golden Gregory. “I like to say I’m a ‘Damn Yankee’ who became a ‘good old boy!’ ”
He began what he calls his “decade-long MBA program at the ABC,” first as banking/finance writer, then the real estate beat, then managing editor and finally editor for three years, leaving in 1998.
“Your sole goal as a journalist is to get the story and when you don’t get cooperation from a business entity, as a journalist, you don’t understand,” he said. “When you move to corporate, you understand the dynamics involved with legal, marketing, etc.”
At Rubinger, David and his five contract professionals serve clients such as State Bank Financial Corporation, Vocalocity, Heery International and Half-Off Depot.
“As a small firm practitioner, real success is when you are a true partner with the client,” he said. “I do whatever I can do to help them succeed as a business. It’s so much more than getting your client a news clip … it’s being their counselor in ways PR practitioners 50 years ago never would have dreamed. I love what I do now, capitalizing on a 23-year rolodex, helping solve issues, promoting brands, using my best thinking to solve clients’ problems.”
– Chris Schroder
Posted March 12, 2012 by Chris
It’s easy to press Bari Love’s hot button – the one she’s wearing now, that is!
When Bari Love was a young travel writer, she was assigned to write about a small town in Georgia. When she drove into the village for the first time, she was welcomed by a big sign on the local bank: “Welcome Bari Love of Southern Living.”
“That was a big lesson to me in branding,” Bari said. “Powerful brands have a big impact and must create and maintain a great trust with their customers.”
Bari Love
Bari took the MAC job in October after three decades on the agency side of numerous Atlanta PR and advertising firms, including Jackson Spalding, Ogilvy PR, Fletcher Martin & Ewing and Fitzgerald & Co.
Quite a career path for a woman whose college ambition was to go to law school.
“When I transferred to the University of Alabama from Indiana University, where I was majoring in political science, I needed to declare a minor,” the Birmingham native recalled Friday. “So I chose advertising and PR. Rusty (husband Russell Love) was finishing up law in Tuscaloosa and I landed a job at Southern Living in the file room of the travel department. I spent the summer reorganizing all their files and doing research. Occasionally, I’d find something interesting and they would let me write a filler story.”
After a year, she was promoted to travel writer, in what she called “the best job out of college ever! I’d travel with a photographer for the first week of the month, gathering 10 to 15 stories and then spend the rest of the month writing them.” Her favorite stories were about the pre-development days of Jekyll Island and when she and a photographer spent two weeks working on a cover story “getting to know every inch of Stone Mountain. We even found the guy who did the giant stone carving.”
When Rusty landed a job in Atlanta, Bari went searching for a job. “I had never worked in PR but I had met a lot of PR people when I was a writer, so I started interviewing with them,” she said. “Adweek Magazine’s cover story the week we moved here was their selection for Agency All-Stars and Julie Davis was their PR selection. So I wrote her a letter, saying ‘Congratulations on being named … you probably need to find the next All-Star,” so she called me in and hired me.
“My first day on the job, Julie was out of the office and her partner called me in and said, ‘I have some news: we’re dissolving the agency, but the good news is we’re letting everyone go except for you – you can help us dissolve the firm.’ The partners ended up splitting the business and I went with Julie. We built the firm back up mostly through supporting ad agencies. One of them, Dave Fitzgerald, bought the firm. That was when ‘Integrated Agency’ was all the buzz, even before we had a name for it.”
After seven years working with Julie, she served as EVP at Fletcher Martin Ewing for seven years before three years at Ogilvy as managing director. In 2007, she joined Jackson Spalding as a partner, leading several large accounts including the Primrose Schools and Chick-fil-A. When the communications job at MAC opened up, she was recommended strongly by Renay Blumenthal, a classmate in the 2006 Leadership Atlanta program.
“This is such an interesting opportunity at the Chamber,” Bari said. “It was the right time to help Atlanta with its marketing communications. There is so much positive news to share. We have so many assets. My main priority at MAC, other than transportation, is to transform the website into a digital media platform, which debuts in July. There is also a lot to do to continue building on our partnerships in the region and across the state. Our job is to to recruit companies to the region and to help those that are here to grow.”
Looking back, Bari sees the Atlanta PR industry as “still a business of a lot of personal relationships. Through relationships you build trust and that is so critical. The transition to MAC has allowed me to look at a new set of issues and priorities and to get creative on solutions. Fortunately at MAC, I have great colleagues and a little more time to think and work through the critical issues to help us grow.”
When she’s not pedaling major policy issues, Bari is pedaling fast on her bicycle. One of her favorite routes is a place she knows well: “All around Stone Mountain, of course!”
– Chris Schroder
Posted March 5, 2012 by Chris
You might say Melissa Libby wrote the book on Atlanta Restaurant PR
Melissa Libby was debating which major to declare at the University of Georgia and became skeptical of her ability to get a job if she chose English, even though she knew she loved to write. So she selected journalism instead, but when she took her first class in PR with a “fabulous” professor, she knew that would be her career.
“I never dreamed I’d have my own PR firm with such great people and such great work,” she said Monday in between conference calls. In September, Melissa Libby & Associates will celebrate its 20th anniversary.
Melissa Libby
Though clients today include Aria, Fifth Group Restaurants, JCT Kitchen, Marlow’s Tavern and Woodfire Grill, Melissa certainly never thought she’d be focused on restaurant PR when she landed her first job as an assistant in the PR department of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta. Nor did it seem logical seven years later when she left as PR director at the Hyatt Ravinia to be PR director of the Swissotel at Lenox (now The Westin).
When business had slowed down at the Ravinia, her boss gave her permission to do freelance work. After printing business cards, she landed her first client: Michael Tuohy at his then hot new restaurant, Chefs’ Café at the High Museum. So in the face of a recession in 1992 when Swissotel eliminated her job, she was ready to go on her own full-time. quickly landing Robert Mondavi wines and Guest Quarters Suites as clients.
“Looking back, I probably should have focused on restaurants, but at the time, there were not any restaurant-only PR firms,” she said. (There are perhaps a dozen in Atlanta today.) “I would have skipped the funeral homes and IT companies.”
One day over drinks with Rick Gove, another Atlanta PR pro, they were each lamenting how they had clients that weren’t in their sweet spots. So Melissa traded Rick her business-to-business accounts and he gave her his business-to-consumer accounts.
In the beginning, it was all about media placement. Then in 2001, she published a cookbook, “Atlanta Cooks,” though that was not her original intention.
“We were really frustrated that Atlanta had all these great restaurants but the national media wouldn’t include any of them in their ‘best’ lists. So we were going to gather some recipes and put them in homemade cookbook and send to the media. But then we decided if we were going to do that, we should do photos, then we said we should make it look nice and add color photos. Then we thought if we were going through all this trouble, we should bind it, then we decided to make it a hardcover edition and then we said if we are going to spend so much time, we should sell it.”
She sold 10,000 copies, following it up five years later with “Atlanta Cooks at Home,” which focused on chefs’ free time and what they do at home. She sold another 10,000 copies, some of which are still available in stores and websites.
Today, her eight full-time employees spend much of their time on social media. “It’s a perfect way for the restaurant industry to communicate with their costumers,” she said. “When you think about where you are going to go out to eat, you either go online, talk to friend and get a word-of-mouth recommendation. Social media works really well for that. It’s immediate, social, fun and emulates conversation with friends.”
The LaGrange, Ga., native lives in Collier Hills with her golden retriever and enjoys long runs in her spare time, having completed nine marathons. She is famous for having driven Julia Child around Atlanta one day and complying with her request to go through the drive-thru at McDonald’s. Julia ordered a hamburger, shake and fries … french fries, of course.
“I love the restaurant industry,” Melissa says. “The people in this business are creative, hard-working, hospitable … they love serving people. I joke that some people have to talk about serious matters with the media. I have to explain the newest cocktail trend or St. Patrick’s Day gimmick. At a cocktail party, I’ve always got something new and fun to talk about!”
– Chris Schroder
Posted February 27, 2012 by Chris
Bob Hope can’t wait for wacky ideas to come back into vogue … he always has lots of them ready!
Bob Hope not only has a legendary name, he’s had a legendary career in Public Relations: working for the Braves, Coca-Cola, a small Atlanta firm, one of the world’s largest firms in New York and then back to Atlanta to start his own firm.
He’s perhaps best known for the wacky, crazy ideas he came up with to bring Atlantans out to the Braves games when the team was not that successful in the 1970s. And the PR career? It sort of happened when he couldn’t stand rolling giant rolls of paper while working the night shift to help pay for tuition while he studied journalism at Georgia State.
Bob Hope
“I was six months into college and working the graveyard shift and I made a long list of companies that I’d rather be working for and the Atlanta Braves were #1 on the list,” Bob said. “Luckily when I went to apply, a guy in the PR department had just been called up to the Army and they asked if I wanted to fill in? Lee Walburn asked if I knew how to write a press release and work with baseball stats and I said, ‘Absolutely!’ ”
Bob had just started college and hadn’t taken the press release course yet so he found a friend who worked part-time at the AJC and he helped Bob prepare his press release samples to bring back the next day. “I think I impressed him and once I was in there, I never left. It was a wonderful experience going through college. Then Lee left when I was 24 and Atlanta was hosting the All-Star game that summer. Later Ted Turner bought the team and that’s when the real craziness began.”
Ted couldn’t pay the players enough to field a great team, so Bob was charged with coming up with promotions that would attract fans to the ballpark. “I told Ted I wasn’t sure we are going to see a big rise in attendance but since you and I are going to be here we would have to at least entertain ourselves.”
Some of Bob’s crazy promotions included couples marrying before the game with wrestling matches afterwards, a frog jumping championship, flying saucer night, a mattress stacking competition, motorized bathtub racing and the infamous ostrich races.
“I was working with Ted night and day and I always thought I was dying of something, the tension was so high. Some of it was self-imposed as I was trying to meet Ted’s expectation level. He was world’s greatest promoter and I was his promoter. Then I was in my early ‘30s, had two little girls and a wife and I said I have to stabilize myself. Coca-Cola gave me a great job, though it seemed like the most boring place on earth compared to working with Ted.
“I had a brilliant idea to start my own firm and have Ted and Coke as a client and then Bob Cohn of Cohn & Wolfe came to me when he had 11 people and asked if I wanted to come in and slowly buy him out. We grew quickly. Bob was good salesman and he eventually sold the firm to Burson Marsteller and I moved to New York with my family.”
Having grown comfortable working with CEOs, Bob Hope fit right into the Manhattan scene, working with a color CEO who was always inviting Bob to go to lunch with well-known names such as Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, Fred Smith and Roberto Goizueta – even the exiled king of Greece.
In 1994, Bob’s family was tired of New York, so he called Paul Beckham, whom he had met while working for Ted. “Ted is unconventional and he didn’t want to restrict me, but he didn’t have unlimited money, so he had a young financial guy, who turned out to be Paul Beckham, shadow me and occasionally put a leash on me. So when I came back to town, Paul was looking look for his next move and we jumped in together.”
As they knocked on doors to build up the young Hope-Beckham firm, the PR agency grew fast. Today, the firm as 18 employees and clients such as Aaron’s, Belk, Comcast, the Atlanta Track Club and Greenberg Traurig.
“The sad thing about the recent economic downturn is that some companies started playing conservative and they didn’t do things that got them in the successful position they were in,” Bob said. “They began playing it safe. They need to keep employing the good creative ideas that got them to where they were. The biggest killer in this business is the safe choice.”
With Bob, it’s a pretty safe choice that a client will have access to lots of great ideas. Just ask Ted.
– Chris Schroder
Posted February 20, 2012 by Chris
Jeff Dickerson likes a good battle and he’s in another now: Transportation
Over the years, PR pro Jeff Dickerson has written for the AJC, the Atlanta Business Chronicle and appears on local TV, but what he enjoys most is fighting the tough battle. He’s been doing it since high school.
“My attraction is to those cases that look like they can’t be won,” Jeff said Friday, driving from the WAGA Fox-5 Studios where he just finished taping another segment of the Georgia Gang. “I spent a lot of years at newspapers getting people into trouble with the press and that prepared me pretty well to help people get out of trouble with the press.
“In high school, I went out for the debate team. The debate topic was gun control. ‘Which side are you on,’ they asked me. I said, ‘I don’t care, just give me a side and I’ll argue it.’ ”
Jeff Dickerson
Right now Jeff is fighting for the July 31 Transportation Referendum, working with two other communications professionals, Bert Brantley and Saba Long, for passage of the 1 percent transportation sales tax that appears on metro area ballots.
“We’ve never come together as a region,” Jeff says. “Never ever. Now we can raise $6 billion, generating nearly 200,000 jobs over 20 years and get some traffic relief and stay competitive with other regions that want to eat our lunch. We have to learn how to stop thinking parochially. We’ve just got to do it. We have to think beyond this county didn’t get train or that project. We have to think as a region.”
Jeff didn’t have such long-range thinking when he left the University of Michigan and started walking down the street in Detroit – in January in the snow.
“I wanted to be a lawyer and was on my way to the post office to get apply for a job,” Jeff said. “The wind was blowing and the post office was a half mile away. So I turned instead into the Detroit News building since it was closer and I got a job right away as a stock boy. Soon, I was on the copy clerk in the editorial department.” Within five years of that snowy walk, he was editorial page editor of the News, which at the time had a daily circulation of 650,000 and 850,000 on Sunday.
“The News was in an amazing newspaper war with the Free Press – they were 15,000 apart in circulation. After I moved to the AJC, former managing editor Jim Minter discovered I had written some opinion pieces with the conservative News and he said wanted me to edit the Journal editorial page (then separate from the more liberal Constitution). I wrote on and off for the editorial pages 17 years,” Jeff said.
He never did become a lawyer, but he thinks the PR industry has lots of parallels. “A PR professional is like a lawyer in that everyone deserves a public defense,” Jeff says. “Only a fool represents himself in the court of law and it is pretty much the same in the court of public opinion – except out here there are no rules, no judge, no discovery – a reporter doesn’t have to share information with our clients the way a prosecutor has to share with the defense. I think it is much more foolhardy to go into public event without seeking professional help.”
Former Atlanta PR executive Betsey Weltner finally talked Jeff out of the newspaper business. “A week before I was to join Betsey’s firm, I called her and said, ‘Tell me again what it is I’ll be doing in PR?’ I had no concept of what I was to be doing. I had worked at paper for so long, it was sort of a huge risk in 2000, when newspapers were still fairly healthy. She said, ‘You’ll figure it out when you get here.’ The first Saturday a client had a big issue come up and I jumped right in. Then I realized what I was supposed to be doing. It was an easy transition.”
Later that year, he went out on his own, Jeff started Dickerson Communications with the Georgia Bankers Association as a client and later SCANA. He helped SCAD secure its Midtown campus and then jumped into the fight for the parking lot in Piedmont Park. He represented the Atlanta Botanical Garden, which had to secure approval to build the lot despite neighborhood opposition – a project that reminds him of the current Transportation debate.
“I think our chances of passage of this initiative are 50/50. If we do a lot of work and really articulate the benefits of coming together as a region, then we will prevail. We have to listen and appreciate and respect others’ opinions and argue benefits and not be judgmental. If we do that, it will put us over the top., ”
He hopes to ride some of the new less-congested roads on his motorcycle – one of his hobbies. “I just jump on my bike and I never really know where I’m going to end up,” he said.
Sort of like that snowy day a long time ago in Detroit.
– Chris Schroder
Posted February 13, 2012 by Chris
Rob Baskin on What Clients Really Want – and, yes, he should know.
Rob Baskin has worked on all sides of the PR equation: as a reporter, a client and now as president of the Atlanta office of Weber Shandwick, a global PR agency with offices in 81 countries.
“I’m equally comfortable on either side of the desk,” he said Friday. “It’s really one and the same skills, though applied differently. Having worked both sides, I’m now better at both of them.”
Rob Baskin
So what do clients really want, we asked?
“Clients really want three things: they want their PR firm to listen better, execute well and to be a good source of ideas,” Rob said. “Agencies and their people, by necessity, have to be in the forefront of change. A communications professional’s skills have to be honed ever sharper each year.
“We are all subject to innovation in marketing and communications – ever more true with technological innovation – but certain principles of communication have not changed. Public relations professionals need to be widely read, well informed generally and specifically on how people acquire and use information. Of course there are online aggregators, but younger professionals should remember there’s this great invention called the newspaper. It organizes a summary of what’s going on in the world – whether it’s in print, online or on a mobile device – in an informed way that provides a general overview and gives its readers a sense of community that can be useful to clients.”
Like a lot of PR folks, Rob started off in newspapers, first as a reporter for the Marietta Daily Journal covering county government and later joining a trade group (Southern Newspapers Publishers Association) as program director, training reporters and editors in 14 states in the fundamentals of newspapering.
“My great lament as a journalist is that the newspaper industry had a virtual monopoly on subject expertise in whole areas of local interest – government, schools, lifestyle, sports and they squandered that. They thought they were in the newsprint business and didn’t understand they were in the news business and they unknowingly abdicated their leadership. They didn’t have to.”
Rob said he went back a couple of years ago and read “Future Shock,” a 1970 book by Alvin Toffler. “I was blown away by how accurately he forecast how we’d live, how information would flow and how people would gather information. I liken the changes to what the agency business was 20 to 30 years ago: It was checkers and now it’s a three-dimensional chess game that never ends. The PR professional has to know how information moves through society and to manage that flow. We have to present it in an influential manner. While that’s always been true, the dynamic is dramatically more complicated today which, in turn, makes our business much more interesting.”
Fitzgerald + Co. CEO Dave Fitzgerald brought Rob over to Weber Shandwick a year ago. “We were friends for 30 years and we had had conversations about my joining his PR unit four or five times over that period,” Rob recalled. “In the fall of 2010, we literally bumped into each other and Dave said, ‘Am I ever going to be able to lure you over here?’ I said, ‘Well, actually, this is the perfect time to make the deal.’ ”
Rob first entered the PR world as account director at Cohn & Wolfe when there were eight people in the firm that soon grew into the biggest shop in the South. He was later its general manager in between stints on the client side at Coca-Cola, where he was director of PR in North America and director of corporate communications during Coke’s fast-growth years in the 1980s and 1990s. Before joining WS, Rob was with MSL Group, serving as managing director for MSL Atlanta and interim managing director for MSL San Francisco and MSL Los Angeles.
A Cleveland, Ohio native, Rob majored in political science and earned a graduate degree in journalism at Ohio State before heading south in the late 1970s.
So, what lesson did he learn he’d like to share with PR folks?
“Some agency people get frustrated when they present new ideas to clients and the clients don’t readily embrace them. Clients work on funding and execution cycles and they can’t always make decisions quickly. Clients want ideas, but for them to take root can take time. A PR person has to have patience and staying power.
“Eighty percent of the jobs in a PR firm are tactical in nature and that is a must – you throw yourself into those details and work it hard to make programs successful. But that’s table stakes. Every agency does that or tries to. What differentiates agencies are the consistent efforts at presenting new ideas that bolster a client’s business objectives and offering them up in such a way that clients keep asking for more – even when they don’t immediately act on them.”
– Chris Schroder
Posted February 6, 2012 by Chris
Media Guide project turned into a business for Mitch Leff
Little did Mitch Leff know in the early 1990s when his boss at Cohn & Wolfe asked him to take over the firm’s 20-year-old Atlanta media guide that he was looking at a future revenue stream for him and his wife Karen. After he opened his own media relations firm in 2002, PR people around Atlanta would suggest that Mitch revive the annual guide that had originally been a printed booklet.
“PR people took great pleasure in calling me to say it was out of date right after it was printed, but of course it was,” Mitch said. “Media people move around all the time and some always did the week we printed the guide. The firm used it internally and then began selling it to others for $10. We used the money from selling a couple of thousand each year to pay for the firm Christmas Party.
Mitch Leff
“I told Jim Overstreet we could sell it for more than that. He finally let us raise the price to $16 or $20, including an occasional updated insert. People would show me their books all written over with changes. The project went on until Cohn & Wolfe closed their Altanta office in early 2000s.” Mitch said.
“Ten years ago when I was on my own, I thought about doing it as a CD, but it turned out the cost of a CD was more expensive than a website – and you’d still have to update a CD,” Mitch said. Finally, he decided to produce his own database online and call it Leff’s Atlanta Media. (Schroder PR designed and built the website for him.)
Today, hundreds of Atlanta subscribers pay $149 for an annual subscription to the database – “an incredible bargain!” Mitch proclaims. “We update it every day and update whole sections every month. The website allows you to search for more than 1,500 contacts in a 15-county area of metro Atlanta – print, TV, radio, online, national bureaus and freelance writers.”
In addition to the directory, Mitch provides subscribers with a PR guidelines section, tips on how a business can work with the media, Microsoft Word templates for pitches, press releases and fact sheets. He’s expanded the site to include Mitch’s Media Musings, where Mitch can explain media moves in more detail, as well as Mitch’s Media Match, a companion site that connects journalists with local sources to help flesh out stories on which they are working. It’s free to journalists and only $150 a year for a firm that might want to post experts on its searchable site and receive emails from reporters on deadline who need a source to interview.
Mitch has thought about expanding the service to Georgia or other Southeast markets, but it already takes up to 20 percent of his time and he does have a media relations firm and a family to manage.
A Long Island, NY, native, Mitch moved to Atlanta in 1979 and graduated from Peachtree High School and Emory. At Emory, he majored in finance while planning concerts on campus. “I’d bribe college reporters with tickets in return for an article – something that doesn’t work in the real world,” he said. He graduated a few months after “Black Monday” on Wall Street, eliminating most opportunities for a finance job.
“So I started looking at other things to do and since I’d been doing marketing and PR, I thought maybe I could get paid to do it.”
He first started working on the Goodwill Games during a 10-year stint at Cohn & Wolfe. He later joined Edelman, GCI and Turner Broadcasting before starting Leff & Associates with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America as his first client, a non-profit for which he had been volunteering and which he still serves today.
One of the ironic parts of his job is “when reporters call me and say I haven’t written about their publication lately in my blog. So I just tell them, ‘Send me some news!’ ”
– Chris Schroder
Posted January 30, 2012 by Chris
Claudia Patton Developing Talent – and Tastes – around the World for Edelman
When Claudia Patton was named Chief Talent Officer (CTO) five months ago for Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm, she figured she would be spending a lot of time helping its many U.S.-based employees expand their global horizons. So she had to smile when she was in London recently and met with a PR professional from their Shanghai office who was preparing to spend 18 months in Atlanta as part of Edelman’s “Fellow” program.
“I think she might have been a little intimidated when she connected with our Atlanta team via Skype video,” Claudia said. “There she was in Shanghai and she looks into the screen and sees 80 Edelman employees staring back at her. She asked what it would be like when she moves here in May, so each of us took a turn telling her what we would partner with her on. She took it very seriously, so when I saw her in London, she had a detailed list of questions she wanted to know more about, including ‘hot dog at The Varsity.’
Claudia Patton
“That’s not something you can really explain,” Claudia said. “You just have to experience it.”
Claudia began her professional experience as a teacher in the DeKalb County Schools, later entering the music business before teaching a commercial music course at Georgia State. Being an entrepreneur by nature, she started a small PR firm on the side with a hospitality focus. The Headline Group eventually grew to $3 million in revenue and captured Richard Edelman’s attention when he was looking to grow his fledgling Atlanta office.
She not only grew the combined office from the 14th largest firm in Atlanta to the largest, she was soon appointed the Southeast leader for the New York-based PR firm. She says the teaching background really helps her understand how to help each individual employee grow his or her international perspective to meet the increasingly global client base.
“You have to listen first,” she says. “Then you can pick up how each person learns.”
No longer responsible for a profit & loss ledger, Claudia is charged with ensuring the firm has a global mindset, “developing growth plans for each of our employees whether they are sitting at their desks or working in a global client’s office.”
Her world now is filled with developing career paths, building computer training programs with graphics and video, ensuring everyone is sharing knowledge and cultural insights and organizing the Fellows program, which immerses employees in a totally different culture for 18 months at a time.
“Already I’ve found when leaders are repatriated into their original offices, there is a big difference in their mindset and their passion about their clients. It is supercharging the company for our next generation. Everyone has to understand each other culturally as well as from a business perspective. We are planning who we are going to be years from now.”
It’s required a little cultural change for Claudia as well. She wakes up a couple of hours earlier each morning to be on the phone with Europe and then late at night she’s talking to Asia.
“It’s cut into my exercise time,” she said. “But I can get back to that soon enough. Right now, it’s all very exciting.”
– Chris Schroder
Posted January 23, 2012 by Chris
Jacksons & Spaldings partners in more ways than one
When Bo Spalding looked up at the doorway of his wife Melissa’s Piedmont Hospital room last week, he saw the smiling face of his business partner’s wife, Claire Jackson. In a remarkable twist of fate, the spouses of the longtime PR firm partners were each undergoing breast cancer surgery on successive days in the same hospital. The same doctors performed surgeries, which lasted nearly five hours each. Not only that, Claire and Melissa each underwent similar, though less invasive cancer surgery together 12 years ago.
When Glen Jackson and Bo left Manning, Selvage & Lee in 1995 with five other PR professionals to start their own firm, they knew they would be going through a lot together as business partners. Weathering up and down markets, the pair has seen their firm experience mostly ups. Jackson Spalding has grown to Atlanta’s largest local independent firm and one of the largest in the Southeast now with more than 80 full-time professionals, including their Dallas, TX and Athens, GA offices.
Bo Spalding, left, and Glen Jackson
Little did they know their families would be going through such a close encounter with cancer together. On Friday of last week, Claire wandered into Melissa’s room and told her, “24 hours ago I felt like you do now. I feel so much better now, so know that you will too.” In an email to more than 50 friends and family members, Bo said Claire’s visit was extremely encouraging to Melissa, who at that point was experiencing a lot of pain.
“Melissa had breast cancer 12 years ago, but the doctors didn’t get it all, so she had another surgery. She underwent chemo, got that behind her and faithfully went back annually for mammograms.” Bo said. “That’s a good thing, because a mammogram in December showed a tumor on the other side.”
“Melissa’s surgery has an even higher degree of concern since she was diagnosed with cancer for a second time,” Glen said Saturday. “Claire elected to have the surgery Wednesday after battling cancer 12 years ago to reduce the risks of it returning.
“It is ironic that Bo and I were together at Piedmont, but it was great to support one another,” Glen said.
Glen, of course, was the founder and guiding light of the Atlanta PR Interfaith Prayer Breakfast, held annually on the Thursday before Thanksgiving for four years. Due to a number of factors, the breakfast was not held in 2011. That morning of prayer will not be lost on the PR community, who are offering up countless prayers this week for a speedy recovery for Claire and Melissa.
– Chris Schroder
