Last year saw one of the more dramatic hostile takeover bids in L.A. history, a bruising contest that swept away the city’s second-biggest thrift and left the first looking red-faced and vulnerable.

Long before the shareholder’s vote that ended H.F. Ahmanson & Co.’s efforts to acquire Great Western Financial Corp., a memo to Ahmanson employees from Chairman and CEO Charles Rinehart surfaced in the press. Rinehart was trying to reassure his workers by telling them that if the acquisition were approved, no Ahmanson employees would be laid off.

The clear implication: Great Western workers would be toast. Rinehart sought to undo the damage by sending a conciliatory letter to Great Western chief John Maher expressing the hope that most positions would be eliminated through attrition rather than layoffs, but that was like closing the barn door after the animals were gone.

It was a turning point in the battle for public opinion; overnight, Ahmanson had become the Bad Guy.

How did that memo find itself in the hands of reporters? A copy was distributed to major media outlets by Great Western, along with a written response from Great Western management.

The opinions of the public, Wall Street analysts and most of all, shareholders about the competing sides in a hostile takeover bid will often mean the difference between success and failure.

Great Western’s communications team, led by former Senior Vice President Ian Campbell and New York-based P.R. agency Abernathy MacGregor Frank, are credited by analysts with contributing to Ahmanson’s ultimate failure by capitalizing on the hostile bidder’s mistakes.

Which makes it all the more interesting that Campbell, who left Great Western last October following its acquisition by white knight Washington Mutual Inc., has taken a job with Abernathy MacGregor Frank heading up its new Los Angeles office.

“(Campbell) is the one who turned the hostile takeover around,” said one Wall Street journalist who covered the story. “Great Western definitely won the P.R. battle.”

Abernathy MacGregor Frank is a boutique financial P.R. agency of a sort found more often in New York than L.A. An independent agency with about 60 employees in New York, it specializes in such areas as investor relations, bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions, and initial public offerings areas in which it helps to have connections with analysts and underwriters, the vast majority of whom are based in the East.

That’s why there aren’t many L.A. agencies known for their expertise in this area. Although there are plenty that offer financial P.R. services, local stockbrokers and investment bankers say few L.A. agencies (with the exception of Century City-based Sitrick & Co. and a handful of smaller local boutiques such as Pondell, Parsons & Wilkinson) are really the first choice when looking for experience in areas like hostile takeovers.

“Sitrick is where you go for bad news, Abernathy and Kekst are where you go for good news,” is the way one L.A. investment banker puts it, referring to Sitrick’s reputation for crisis communications and bankruptcy work.

It is perhaps emblematic that during the hostile takeover battle, Great Western turned to Abernathy MacGregor Frank for P.R. council, while Ahmanson hired Kekst & Co. another New York boutique known for its Wall Street experience.

Abernathy’s new L.A. office on Sixth Street downtown is the agency’s first venture outside New York. Campbell, executive vice president and director of the operation, oversees five employees and is so far servicing mostly pre-existing Abernathy clients who are based in the West.

He hopes to attract more L.A.-based clients by offering them teams of P.R. counselors located both here and at Abernathy’s New York headquarters.

“The central premise of this venture is that there’s a substantial hole in the West Coast marketplace that we can fill,” said Campbell. “Most firms in the East with a strong specialty in these areas don’t have West Coast offices.”

Of course, there is a reason for that. L.A. doesn’t have a big supply of large public companies. But Campbell thinks the agency can attract plenty of business by going after the small and mid-sized companies here, as well as the giants located up and down the West Coast.

“I think there are enough Fortune 500 companies on the West Coast to keep us real busy for a long time, if we worked for them,” he said.

Mall madness

There are certain seasonal events that lure reporters like a dead wildebeest in hyena territory. A case in point is the annual pack of cameras and scribes descending on American malls on the day after Thanksgiving to cover the holiday sales outlook.

Smith Asbury Inc., a five-person P.R. agency in Pasadena, has been taking advantage of this phenomenon for years, but this year its strategy to promote the Glendale Galleria beat out hundreds of other marketers from around the world to win an award from the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Every year, accounting firm Deloitte & Touche publishes a holiday retail sales forecast that is widely quoted in the media. So Smith Asbury called up the firm three years ago and convinced the accountants that they could get more exposure for themselves by discussing the forecast at a huge press event staged at the Glendale Galleria. It’s been an annual event ever since.

Before the event, Smith Asbury goes to the mall to counsel merchants on how to talk to the media. So when reporters show up and over the last holiday season, the event attracted dozens of TV and print reporters including such national outlets as the NBC, CNN and the Wall Street Journal they can give intelligent quotes without worrying about getting fired for saying something embarrassing.

So out of all the malls in the United States, why are these national reporters coming to Glendale? Because, believe or not, nobody else seems to have thought of this. By putting the analysts, the shoppers and the merchants together in one place, Smith Asbury has made it incredibly simple for reporters to do their jobs and guaranteed big-time exposure for its client.

“The media are going to do these stories, it’s just a question of where they’re going to do it,” said agency principal Judy Smith, who started the firm 11 years ago with partner (and husband) Greg Asbury. “They choose the Glendale Galleria because we make it easy for them.”

News Editor Dan Turner writes a weekly marketing column for the Los Angeles Business Journal.