Filed under: Public Relations
Mass Transit: “Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chief Communications Officer Pauletta Tonilas will leave the L.A. area transportation agency to return to the Regional Transportation District (RTD) in Denver to serve as assistant general manager, communications,” replacing long-time AGM Scott Reed who retired last fall.
“Tonilas held the positions of FasTracks public information manager and senior manager, Public Relations & Public Information at RTD before joining L.A. Metro in August 2015.”
Filed under: Public Relations
“Less than a month after 9News’s Gary Shapiro caused a tweetstorm by bluntly refuting Twitter charges of fake news, the veteran morning anchor has announced that he will stop posting as he has been out of frustration over what he characterizes as the commandeering of his account,” Michael Roberts at Westwood reports.
“My feed has been taken over by tons and tons of people who are from out of state and probably don’t even know who I am,” Shapiro says. “So except for tweeting about breaking news and weather, I’m going to shut it down.”
Meanwhile, fellow 9News anchor Kyle Clark has doubled down on his approach to confront and mix it up with trolls, which has put him in an online fight with the QAnon, the shadowy, far-right conspiracy group.
Filed under: Public Relations
Three years after forcing NFL players, including then-Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, to withdraw from a fantasy football convention in Las Vegas because of its connections to gambling, the NFL announced that Caesars Entertainment is the first-ever “Official Casino Sponsor of the NFL.”
“We couldn’t be more excited to work with one of the world’s largest gaming and entertainment companies. Combining the NFL with Caesars’ expertise in world-class entertainment will provide our fans unique experiences both here in the United States and abroad.”
–– Renie Anderson, SVP of NFL partnerships, sponsorship & consumer products
Filed under: Public Relations
PR Week has named its 2019 Best Places to Work, and the news isn’t particularly good for agencies not located on an ocean. Denver agencies like GroundFloor Media, Linhart PR, Ink Communications, Turner PR, Sterling-Rice Group, Room 214 and others may be recognized on other lists, no firms located outside California, Florida, New York and Washington, D.C. were recognized on PR Week’s list.
The locations of the winners:
Small Agencies
- Santa Monica, Calif.
- Miami
- Santa Barbara, Calif.
- Washington, D.C.
Mid-size Agencies
- New York City
- New York City
- New York City
- New York City
Large Agencies
- San Francisco
- Washington, D.C.
- San Francisco
Filed under: Public Relations
It has been a tough year for the Pac-12 Conference. Despite having traditionally strong teams like UCLA, USC, Stanford, Oregon, Arizona State and (ahem) Colorado, the conference continues to be overlooked on the national stage. Add to that a series of self-inflicted wounds – an exorbitantly paid commissioner, exorbitant HQ office space and a less-than-exorbitant television deal – and you can see why it has been a troubling year for the conference’s schools.
To better tell its story and repair the damage to its brand, the Pac-12 has engaged mega-agency FleishmanHillard. John Canzano at The Oregonian reports:
“Conference commissioner Larry Scott recently pitched his bosses a plan that would sell a 10-percent equity stake in the conference’s media rights to private investors for $500 million. The hiring of FleishmanHillard is designed to help position the conference for that possible offering.”
“Still, when your motto is ‘Conference of Champions,’ being left out of the championship tournaments in college football and failing to matter in men’s basketball is far more impactful to your brand than talking points.”
Filed under: Public Relations
As 2018 comes to a close, I take time to reflect on some of the higher-profile PR disasters, debacles and mistakes:
Roseanne Barr – There has always been a fine line between creative genius and mental illness, and it can be argued that Roseanne wobbled along that line when she melted down on Twitter in May. Riding high from the return of her groundbreaking television show, “Roseanne,” the mercurial star made outrageously racist comments about a former advisor to President Barack Obama. ABC immediately canceled her show, then revived it as a separate show, “The Conners,” that does not include her.
One company did emerge from the Roseanne debacle looking good, however: Sanofi, the makers of the sleep drug Ambien. When Roseanne said her tweets were a byproduct of using the drug, Sanofi responded by saying, in part, that “racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
Apple– The computer giant started 2018 with the corporate equivalent of a big New Year’s Day hangover when it was disclosed that the company was throttling iPhone performance to maximize battery life. While that trade-off is one that many might willingly choose, the fact that they didn’t let consumers make their own decisions was at the heart of the problem. Apple apologized and quickly offered an inexpensive battery replacement program for older phones, but the company still got a tidal wave of “planned obsolescence” stories that questioned its integrity.
Continue reading on the GroundFloor Media blog
Filed under: Public Relations
If you are headed to the big game in Denver – and it really doesn’t matter which one – you may want to skip the concession line. ESPN studied recent health inspection reports from 107 pro-sports stadiums and arenas and found that Mile High Stadium, Pepsi Center and Coors Field all rank in the bottom 10.
The article is especially tough on the Colorado Rockies. Let’s just say that Dinger isn’t the only rodent wandering Coors Field. The lead paragraph in ESPN’s report:
“Most Cracker Jack boxes come with a surprise inside. At Coors Field in Denver, the molasses-flavored popcorn and peanut snacks came with a live mouse. A health department inspector found the mouse in a commercial-size bag of Cracker Jacks at Coors Field in September 2016, along with five live cockroaches in a trap in a storage room. Two weeks earlier, inspectors had found copious amounts of mouse droppings on a kitchen floor, in food-prep trays, inside a bin of rice and amid bags of cookies that had been chewed. Dead mice were found, and another live one had been found.”
