2007 turned out to be a decent year for the mega-agencies. IPG, the parent company of MWW and Weber Shandwick, reported a 6 percent increase in revenue in 2007, while WPP posted a 14 percent increase. Hopefully your agency saw similar increases in 2007, because 2008 could be an ugly year for us all if the economy doesn’t show some signs of life.
Month: February 2008
5280 Says ‘Screw You’ to Publishing Upstarts
Amid all the talk of upstarts Denver Magazine and Denver Life, and the now-defunct Shine, 5280 is trying to remind Denverites who the 800-pound gorilla is by announcing its biggest press run ever. The mag will print 100,000 copies of its March issue (“Best Restaurants”) in anticipation of heavy newsstand sales.
New Client Wins
PRimaDonna PR has landed several new clients, including Brand Juice, Grand Teton Lodge Company, Brazilets and Trio Interior Design. Public relations at Brand Juice, Brazilets and Trio previously was handled in-house, while Grand Teton formerly was represented by LeGrand Hart before dropping them and switching to PRimaDonna.
Instant Karma’s Gonna Get You
Let’s all shed some crocodile tears for Anti-Gym owner and notorious chubby-taunter (“No Chubbies”) Michael Karolchyk, whose gym in Cherry Creek North has shut down. His barrage of offensive and annoying television commercials weren’t enough to save his troubled enterprise. Now if he had only sunk some of that money into public relations instead of advertising …
Why Doesn’t J-School Teach You the Really Important Things?
Our apologies for making fun of Hub Cap Annie’s desire to transition into public relations — it turns out she’s much more qualified than we gave her credit for.
CP+B Beats Fallon for Microsoft Advertising Account
Miami/Boulder-based Crispin Porter + Bogusky has won the $300 million Microsoft advertising account, beating out Minneapolis-based Fallon.
VOCA PR Announces Two New Clients
Luxury real-estate and travel agency Voca PR has announced two new client wins: EcoBroker International and Maytag Mountain Ranch.
KCNC/Channel 4 Officially Dumps Hughes, Goes High-Def
KCNC/Channel 4 finally confirmed that Karen Leigh will replace Molly Hughes as Jim Benemann’s co-anchor. Hughes will become a “special correspondent” for the station, presumably spending most of her time mailing audition tapes to TV stations across the country. Additionally, KCNC/Channel 4 announced it will begin broadcasting in High-Def starting April 21.
‘Green Zygotes and Ham’
What does Dr. Seuss think about his book Horton Hears a Who being used by the anti-abortion group Colorado for Equal Rights to argue that life begins at conception? Well, not much. He’s been dead for 16 years.
Great Moments in Journalism … III
Illiteracy can be a tough hurdle to overcome when you are a teleprompter-dependent television sports anchor. If you can actually watch all four minutes of this clip without shuddering, you have the empathy level of a serial killer.
GroundFloor Lands Two New Clients
GroundFloor Media has picked up two new clients: Fuser and Rally Software.
Denver PR Jobs
Among those hiring this week: Frontier Airlines (didn’t they just lay off a bunch of marketing people?), Heedum Agency, Kaiser Permanente, NREL, Pure Brand, Colorado Restaurant Association, Brightstar Education Group, VisiTech, RNL and United Dominion Realty Trust.
Avenue A Razorfish Releases Its Annual Digital Outlook Report
Ayers PR Clients Start to Make Moves
The shake-out from Sydney Ayers’ decision to leave her own firm to take the MD job at Arment Dietrich’s new Denver office appears to have started. Floor-care company BonaKemi USA has left Ayers PR after approximately eight months and selected LeGrand Hart as its agency. LeGrand Hart seems like a natural fit because it previously rep’ed Orange Glo, but curiously it appears based on its Web site that most of the team members who worked on the agency’s Orange Glo account have since left the firm.
Public Relations
Husted: Minneapolis’ Leigh to Replace Molly Hughes at Channel 4
Bill Husted has the scoop on one of the longer-running rumors in town: that Karen Leigh of Minneapolis’ WCCO-TV has been tapped to replace the irrepressible Molly Hughes as co-anchor at KCNC/Channel 4. Expect a mid-March start date.
Philosophy Communication Lands Cherry Creek Condo Project
Denver-based Philosophy Communication has landed the Monroe Pointe account to promote the luxury condominium development in Cherry Creek.
Someone Tell Hub Cap Annie About Andrew Hudson’s Jobs List
From selling hub caps on East Colfax to a career in public relations. That’s probably a lateral career move, right?
Big Oil Enters Boulder County
After all the speculation about tech giants Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, it turns out that a boring old oil company bought the former StorageTek campus. ConocoPhillips plans to use the site as a “global campus” and will make a major push in renewable energy.
Bronson Hilliard
Sure, life was tough for CU-Boulder spokesman Bronson Hilliard when Buffalo Chip decided to go gangsta, but let’s all take a moment to appreciate that we don’t have his job today. Among his current challenges:
- 10 CU fraternity pledges were arrested after trashing a Super 8 Motel in Estes Park.
- A staff editor at the CU Campus Press authored a column headlined “If It’s War the Asians Want … It’s War They’ll Get” stating that all Asians hate whites and that “it’s time we start hating them back.”
- The CU-Boulder campus has split over the selection of oil mogul Bruce Benson as the president of the CU System.
Gawker vs. Edelman
Sadly, the Gawker vs. Edelman catfight seems to be petering out. Gawker started the fireworks by accusing Edelman of telling new employees that as flacks “sometimes you just have to stand up there and lie.” That hardly seemed in the spirit of CEO Richard Edelman’s public comments on the importance of transparency, but Edelman also pimps Wal-Mart, so it’s hard to tell who is telling the truth.
GroundFloor Client Village Inn Tries to Go Upscale
GroundFloor Media client Village Inn is testing a retro-diner concept in Wheat Ridge as it tries to woo new diners without alienating its existing customer base. The Rocky notes that the stakes are high: the chain “has heavy debt and interest payments, and sales have suffered in the face of a sputtering economy.”
KUSA/Channel 9’s Preheim Delivers Baby Boy
Congratulations to KUSA/Channel 9 weekend anchor Cheryl Preheim, who just had a baby boy named Joshua.
Denver Hispanic Chamber Announces Award Recipients
The Denver Hispanic Chamber of Commerce is honoring several Denver executives at its annual awards luncheon on March 7. Among them:
- Coors Brewing Co.’s Olga Garcia as Business Woman of the Year
- Solera Bank’s James Perez Foster as Business Man of the Year
- State Sen. Abel Tapia as Public Official of the Year
- Allstate’s Mimi Bell as the Chamber Advocate of the Year
Four-Hour Erection? Bingo!
Joanne Ostrow has the details of MGA Communications’ Side-Effect Bingo game.
So Much for the Low-Hanging Fruit
So who is suffering most from the increasing trend of newspapers such as the Denver Post folding local business coverage into other sections? Readers interested in local business dynamics, of course. But Ad Age speculates that small, local public relations firms also will be harmed because “they may have trouble securing news coverage without them.”
Denver PR Jobs
Among those hiring this week: Dumb Friends League, Jeppesen, Reed Elsevier, Regis University, Republic Financial, Seagate Technology, Turner PR, LeGrand Hart and VisiTech.
Au Revoir, Wick
Congratulations to former CU-Boulder dean and current KBDI-PBS president and CEO Wick Rowland, who has been invited to serve as a visiting professor of communications at the University of Toulouse.
Golly Gee, We’ll Show Them Some Real Denver Spirit
The Denver Business Journal covers the activities that the “seasoned” Sharon Linhart and her downtown Denver task force have planned for the 1952 2008 Democratic National Convention in late August. Among them:
- An “original orchestral score is being composed and will be performed by an orchestra from Denver.”
- An event called Artocracy, “in which people will stand in a central spot downtown and read portions of the United States Constitution, Bill of Rights or Declaration of Independence.”
- A four-minute commemorative film “to show faces and places downtown.”
The DNA Knows How to Bury Stories at the End of the Week Too
David Milstead at the Rocky has the latest Denver Newspaper Agency (DNA) numbers. Overall, it’s not good. Revenue for Q4 2007 dropped nearly 11 percent to $94.3 million. The DNA, attempting to put lipstick on the pig, points out that the 11 percent decline was less than the 12 percent decline the previous quarter.
Coors PR: Umm … Pete’s ‘Chairman’ Title is Largely Ceremonial
Pete Coors has the public relations departments at both Coors and Miller working overtime to distance the companies from his claim that neither Denver nor Milwaukee will be considered for the headquarters of the soon-to-be MillerCoors. Reportedly, Dallas and Chicago are the frontrunners (deja vu of the United and Boeing searches for new headquarters), but both Denver and Milwaukee have vowed to fight for it.
Memorial Scheduled for Westword Co-founder
The Denver memorial for Westword co-founder Sandy Widener, her husband and their daughter has been scheduled for Feb. 29 at 1 p.m. at the Buell Theatre.
5280 vs. Denver Magazine vs. Colorado Expression
Aldo Svaldi at the Denver Post covers the high-end Denver-area magazine battlefield.
PRACO Names New VP & CFO
Trudy Rowe has been appointed vice president and chief financial officer at PRACO, where she will manage the firm’s IT, operations, HR, legal and financial functions. Her previous experience includes Deloitte & Touch, Magellan Health Services and ValueOptions.
Great Moments in Journalism … II
Deep down, we all knew that news anchors hate reporters. This clip gets fun at the one-minute mark.
Denver Newspaper Defections Expand Beyond Reporting Ranks
To date, the mass exodus from the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post has largely been limited to reporters, but the departures continue and now include titles such as Web developer. It’s bad enough to lose reporters to PR firms, but when you begin losing your staff to the likes of photobucket.com, it is clear that the challenges facing newspapers are unlike anything they’ve faced before.
104 West Partners Hires One, Promotes One
104 West Partners has promoted Jennifer Dunlap Roane to vice president and hired MacLean Guthrie as account director. Guthrie is one of a string of people who has held the dreaded “Director of Corporate Communications” position at Quark recently.
It Turns Out the Gelatto Business Is Not Like Publishing …
If you are waiting to hear back from that freelancer for Shine magazine, don’t bother. It has folded after a single issue. Better start pitching 5280 again, or, if you’re feeling lucky, the trendy new Denver Magazine. And for those bettors out there, Denver PR Blog has set the over/under on Denver Magazine at six issues.
Denver Named Fourth ‘Greediest’ City
Forbes has crunched the numbers and calculates that Denver is the fourth greediest city in the nation. A look at the formula, however, shows that “greedy” is more of a Forbes marketing gimmick than a realistic representation of the cities mentioned. To identify the “greediest” cities, Forbes calculated the number of Forbes 400 members per 100,000 residents. Denver landed behind San Jose, San Francisco and Seattle.
Former ABC Reporter McWethy Dies in Skiing Accident
Sad news — retired ABC News national security correspondent John McWethy died Wednesday in a skiing accident at Keystone.
Feel-good Legislative Moment of the Day
Colorado Rep. Larry Liston (R-Colorado Springs) apologizes for calling unwed teenage parents “sluts.”
ARCADIS Issues Public Relations RFP
ARCADIS VP of Corporate Communications Andrew Hudson has issued an RFP for public relations services. Details are here: pr-agency-rfp-finali.doc
A Few Other Denver PR Wins
- GroundFloor Media announced it won the VICORP Restaurants (Village Inn and Baker’s Square) account.
- ProConnect announced it won the Unity Business Networks and Innovative Sound Solutions accounts.
- InterPro announced it won the Metro Denver Automobile Dealers Association and 2008 Denver International Auto Show accounts.
Schenkein Announces Client Wins
Schenkein announced it has added the Colorado Ballet and the Colorado Nonprofit Association as clients.
Denver Post Drops Standalone Business Section
Changes continue at the Denver Post, and they don’t portend good things for the paper’s business reporters and editors. The Post today confirmed that it will combine its weekday “Business” and “Denver & The West” sections due to a lack of advertising support for the business section.
Ayers Leaves Her Own Firm for MD Job at Arment Dietrich
Sydney Ayers has walked away from Ayers PR to take the Managing Director job at Arment Dietrich’s new Denver office. Ayers’ partner in her old firm, her father Rendall Ayers, will continue Ayers PR as its sole owner.
Denver Zoo vs. Skyline Vista Elementary School
Denver Zoo PR Manager Tiffany Barnhart attempts to diplomatically explain that the point of a zoo is to allow people to see animals they wouldn’t otherwise run across in their backyards.
PRSA Colorado Media Roundtable
Interested in understanding reporters’ pet peeves when it comes to pitching? Or, better yet, want to understand what they are actually looking for? You can talk to more than a half-dozen local print and online journalists at a Colorado PRSA luncheon on Wednesday, February 20 (details are here).
Denver PR Jobs
Among those hiring this week are VisiTech, Webolutions, Western Resource Advocates and Xcel.
Denver Public Relations Blog 