When Starbucks closed more than 7,000 stores last year for a three-hour emergency barista training, its lost latte sales were more than counterbalanced by free media buzz.
And what buzz. “It’s certainly a symbol of a company that cares about quality,” Bloggingstocks gushed at the time.
That effort to retool Starbucks’ image as a company focused on quality at all costs - and not incidentally, to reverse its downward-spiraling stock price - was conceived in part by Edelman Public Relations, the largest independent public relations firm in 2008 with $449.2 million in billings, according to O’Dwyer’s Public Relations annual survey.
At a time when many agencies are flat-lining, Edelman Public Relations just keeps on growing. Advertising Age reports that the 56-year-old, family-run firm, with 3,000 employees in 51 offices worldwide, anticipates a revenue increase of more than 12 percent this year.
More remarkable in the current economic climate, the agency hadn’t lost any of its top 40 clients in the past year, among them, General Electric, Burger King, Johnson & Johnson, the Shell Oil Company and H.J. Heinz Co. That’s a feat it has pulled off three years in a row, according to the magazine.
While some agencies still sell a press-release and media-outreach service, Edelman has kept ahead of the competition, at least in part, through overseas growth and pioneering use of new media. In 2007, the company established a separate division, Me2Revolution, dedicated to incorporating new media into appropriate campaigns.
CEO Richard Edelman, the Havard Business School-educated son of founder Daniel Edelman, has been blogging on the company’s website for several years.
A recent post about the ways in which the public relations business might have contributed to the current economic meltdown is typical.
First, we facilitated a cult of personality around business leaders, particularly those in the financial services sector. The paeans to captains of private equity and hedge fund CEOs in 2006-2008 were eerily similar to articles only a decade earlier on dot-com entrepreneurs and New Economy darlings such as Tyco and Global Crossing. The business press wanted heroes and we helped to create them.
Of course, there has also been criticism, not to mention some downright embarrassments.
In 2006, the company was exposed as concocting a fake blog for Wal-Mart.
Richard Edelman did what any good spinner would: He distanced himself from those involved in the fakery, said it would never happen again and then put the whole thing in the past.
“In every step forward, you have to make sure you’re constantly educating your staff, that we have a checking process,” he said in an interview later. “If you fall down, you have to get up. People respect that. We’ve proved our commitment to doing it right. Retreat was not an option.”
More recently, the agency has been lambasted by environmental groups in Europe after it was hired by E.ON, the world’s largest investor owned energy provider, to promote “E.ON’s interests across the gas, coal, nuclear and renewable sectors.”
On July 16, 2008, activists with Oxford Climate Action blockaded Edelman’s headquarters in London, arguing the firm was engaging in a campaign to ‘greenwash’ E.ON’s continued investment in burning coal.
Not surprisingly, though, UK CEO Robert Phillips got the public-relations advantage when he broadcast a videotaped appeal to have a conversation from inside the besieged building.
“Please,” he said, “there are better things for our police forces and ambulance forces to be doing than standing around outside waiting for you to fall through a glass roof.”
And while the company has been at the cutting edge of marketing trends, it has been adamantly resistant to one – the merger and acquisition frenzy.
“So far for us, the best thing is to be independent,” Richard Edelman told Advertising Age last year. “It’s allowed us to be agile, to be creative, to be edgy in a way we arguably couldn’t have been.”
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