Agencies Tagging New Services With Commercial Monograms
If you think M&A's are the hot PR trend, February certainly provided ample evidence of the competition to bring in new communications businesses. But lest you miss the forest for the trees, a more understated but no less pervasive PR trend is emerging: the launch of "new" PR services branded with catchy new names.
The Weber Group, for instance, is plugging Hemispheres, an "operational account management practice," and Precision, "a series of customized, value-added services."
"These names do have a kind of appeal for clients, but it's not as if we're selling Crest toothpaste," said London-based Gregory Levendusky, executive VP of global account services. "It helps us focus our minds internally, but we don't view these services as products."
There is no question that for a PR firm, this kind of labeling can set internal protocol concerning handling clients and structuring services. But as the industry debuts a wave of these new "services," it doesn't take much analysis to discover what these services really are - usually a bundling of tactics - Internet monitoring, sharing information between offices, market research and "best practices" - made possible by real-time technology and sold with a new label.
It's too soon to tell whether this kind of repackaging will serve firms well. Ever since Burson-Marsteller began promoting itself as an agency which manages perception, the profession has tossed around cliched taglines and slogans with great glee.
In the business world at large, these taglines can be likened to the claim that a business is knowledge-based - if you employ humans, of course it is.
Nonetheless, press releases about these newly labeled offerings keep pouring in. Chicago-based PR house L.C. Williams & Associates, Inc. is busy promoting its Stratmap research/analysis program with this definition: "No longer do people have to struggle to understand 'what the numbers mean' or what kinds of correlations are appropriate. StratMap literally makes the information come alive, ensuring a cross boundary understanding and acceptance."
Of course.
When Enough is Enough
Other agencies are testing these marketing angles as well. When Avax Technologies, Inc. selected Rowland-Wang Healthcare, a division of Rowland Worldwide, as its agency of record to promote its autologous cancer vaccine technology, Rowland-Wang issued a press release. It read, in part:
"Emerging companies are responding favorably to our Science First approach, as we apply our Point-of-Entry Communications model to leverage the opinions of thought leaders in the medical community to validate the science behind a company and then communicating these to Wall Street."
Both terms were tagged by trademark symbols.
Or consider Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, which is knee deep in courting the trade press to announce BrandShield - a name which may conjure up deodorant or other personal care products far more than PR services.
But according to Ogilvy CEO Bob Seltzer, BrandShield represents the wholistic approach the firm is using for global clients, including Kentucky Fried Chicken in Hong Kong which lost 35 percent of its sales after news of the Asian bird flu panicked customers.
KFC rebounded in the hands of Ogilvy's broad-stroke campaign, which included PR and advertising promotion of an 800 line with instructions on cooking poultry safely. "BrandShield is about protecting brand stewardship," said Rob Shimmin, managing director of Ogilvy's Brussels office.
Ogilvy promotes BrandShield as a "proprietary combination of information-age tools, proven methodologies and professional experience." Among its backbone applications, however, is Lotus Notes' Sunflowers database, a commercial, not a proprietary, application.
Beyond that, BrandShield - which can run $50,000 or higher if a communications audit is part of the mix - has a staff of about seven technical people in the firm's Washington, D.C. office who are making sure its technology infrastructure enables Ogilvy's crisis experts to quickly access information.
Ogilvy execs also promote the ability to put up a new client Web site within hours of a crisis surfacing. This is the same philosophy Edelman PR unleashed last year when it announced its Crisis Preparedness Response (CPR) Internet service. In essence, CPR is a fire-walled "dark" site which can go live as soon as a crisis necessitates.
Ogilvy may have BrandShield and Edelman in its CPR revenue stream, but we can't ignore another catch phrase: Hill & Knowlton's Prompt Reputation Protection System (RPS). H&K says the service helps businesses assess their "vulnerability to potential crises" and creates systems to combat them.
According to H&K, Prompt RPS is based on expert advice from legal, finance, communication, security and risk management and health, safety and environment authors captured in a software-based crisis planning system.
(http://www.hillandknowlton.com, BM, 212/614-4000; Ogilvy, 212/880-5330; Rowland-Wang, 212/527-8813; LCWA, 312/565-3900)