LAW FIRM: Foley & Lardner LLP
CATEGORY: Overall Excellence in Media Coverage
PR AGENCY: Weber Shandwick
BUDGET: $150,000
WEB SITE: http://www.foley.com
In a bid to highlight their firm's expertise with the furiously debated Sarbanes-Oxley (Sarbox) law, the PR professionals at Foley & Lardner gave life to an often-overlooked truism: that the best PR is the result of a truly superior product.
Having successfully conducted and promoted a survey in 2003 regarding the financial impact of Sarbox, the firm sought a repeat performance the following year. However, rather than just polish up the old effort, they stripped it down and rebuilt it to be better,
smarter and stronger.
"Our task was to take something that was no longer fresh and make it fresh again," says Eric Miller, a senior vice president and director of the professional services group at Weber Shandwick, which served as the outside PR firm on the effort.
Foley's first Sarbox survey had received a lot of bites from the media largely because it was the first such survey out of the gate. In 2003, "no one had really put a figure on what Sarbanes-Oxley was costing public companies," says Jocelyn Brumbaugh, senior PR
manager at Foley.
Still, the firm had to take the survey to a new and more visible level.
First, to widen the pool of potential respondents the PR team made its survey cleaner and more user-friendly. Of the 9,000 corporate financial executives surveyed, 115 responded - an increase of more than 280% compared with the previous year. They augmented
those responses with hard data culled from some 908 proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the prior fiscal year.
Perhaps most important, PR executives decided to broaden the scope of the survey to include private companies (as well as public), reaching out to thousands of private enterprises and asking them to take a short survey online.
The move to include private firms represented a departure from the usual Sarbox fare. Private organizations are not required to abide by Sarbanes-Oxley rules and they have, been largely overlooked in discussions about the impact of the law.
All told, the efforts grabbed the media's attention. In a Wall Street Journal editorial, John Thain, president of the New York Stock Exchange, cited Foley & Lardner's study.
During the next five months, the study generated some 170 media placements, reaching an estimated 25 million people. Coverage in top-tier outlets included stories in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Associated Press, Dow Jones
Newswires and the front page of the Financial Times.
By significantly enhancing the content of their offering, PR reps were able to keep their program percolating at a time when the media might have been ready to move on.
"I still get a couple of calls a week from people who want to see last year's study and who want to know when this year's study is coming out," Brumbaugh says. "We've really struck a nerve with this."