Many P.R. Agencies Seeing

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There’s a saying in the news business that if something happens three times, it must be a trend.

If that’s true, then there’s a turnaround trend at the top of L.A. public relations agencies. Several have gotten new chiefs in the last year, including three in the past few months.

The three are Stoorza, Ziegaus & Metzger; Ketchum; and most recently, Edelman Los Angeles.

Stoorza’s new head is David DePinto, who formerly was at Ketchum’s L.A. office. He was named the San Diego-based agency’s president and CEO last summer, and now splits his time between headquarters and Los Angeles. Cathy Ann Connelly remains the L.A. office chief.

DePinto was replaced at Ketchum’s L.A. office last month by Sean Fitzgerald, former vice president of corporate responsibility with Mattel Inc. And earlier this month, Edelman chief George Drucker announced he was stepping down and has been replaced by former Warner Home Video marketer Gail Becker.

“I can’t recall seeing a year when there’s been this much change at the senior-most levels of all these major agency offices,” said P.R.-industry consultant Jerry Swerling. “These are all individual stories, so you can’t generalize. But there’s never been so much pressure on these folks, both at the top line and the bottom line, to grow, because the business is doing so well that everyone expects dramatic growth. And at the bottom line, profit-wise, everybody’s squeezing a buck.”

Those pressures had a lot to do with the departure of Drucker, 51, who is leaving Edelman to pursue other opportunities.

“The typical multinational, global agency likes to see billings increase faster than the market (in Los Angeles) will allow,” Drucker said.

After four years as head of the L.A. office, he got tired of working in a city that, for international P.R. agencies like Edelman, remains something of a backwater.

“I kind of miss painting on a big palette,” said Drucker, who was a top executive at Edelman offices in New York and Chicago before coming to L.A. four years ago.

L.A.’s shortage of Fortune 500 headquarters means continually scrambling for relatively small accounts. And despite the dearth of big clients, Drucker believes the P.R. industry here is even more competitive than it is in other markets. The result is that P.R. executives work just as hard if not harder in L.A., but they end up with less to show for it.

He’s currently scouting out job opportunities, and even looking at positions outside the communications industry.

If there’s pressure to perform, there’s little question that the explosion of business from dot-coms is partially to blame. John Stodder, newly named deputy general manager of Edelman, says it’s leading to a shift in personnel because it requires different types of experience, relationships and expertise.

“It does seem there is a new kind of wind blowing through this industry,” he said. “Something happened about June of 1999. All of a sudden, all of us have a lot more business, and in an area (new media) that was really unexpected.”

The Other Ratings War

Even as Walt Disney Co.’s ABC network rises in the ratings, Disney is fast building an audience in an area where it was previously seen as a laggard: the Internet.

Recent ratings from Media Metrix show that Disney’s Go.com is by far the most-trafficked Web site based in Los Angeles. And to think, the company only had to lose $1 billion before that milestone was achieved.

Go.com became an independently traded stock last month after Disney completed its acquisition of Infoseek Corp. and combined the studio’s own Internet properties into the new spin-off. Disney still owns 72 percent of Go.com, and the company has not had a positive impact on the Mouse House’s bottom line. According to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Go.com lost $1.06 billion in fiscal 1999.

Media Metrix says Go.com had 2.3 million “unique visitors” during the week ended Dec. 5, compared with 1.7 million for L.A.’s second-biggest site, GeoCities, which is now owned by Yahoo Inc.

Go.com also beat out GeoCities during the last two weeks of November, even though GeoCities had more visitors than Go.com in the month of October.

Also in October, Go.com was the seventh most-visited Web site in the nation. GeoCities was No. 6.

All of these ratings, of course, have to be taken with a very large grain of salt. The Internet was supposed to be the most measurable medium because of the ease of tracking “hits” to a Web site, but a morass of complications has developed that makes rating Internet sites even more uncertain than rating the size of TV or radio stations’ audiences.

Media Metrix has emerged as the most widely accepted measurement service, though companies like NetRatings Inc. (which is partially owned by Nielsen Media Research, the TV-ratings company) and PC Data Inc. are trying to give it a run.

Local e-commerce companies have been plenty busy during the holiday season, but most of them are still too small to be measured by Media Metrix. L.A.’s highest-profile e-commerce site, though, appears to be having a merry season so far: Santa Monica-based eToys had 384,000 visitors in the week ended Dec. 5, up sharply from 201,000 for the week ended Nov. 21, according to Media Metrix.

The other local Web companies big enough to show up on the rating service’s list of the top 50 sites in the nation are Pasadena-based GoTo.com (No. 24 in the U.S. in October), Pasadena-based EarthLink Network Inc. (No. 34) and Warner Bros. Online (No. 50).

Obituary

Rolland S. (Rolly) Going, a veteran Los Angeles P.R. executive, died of cancer on Dec. 12. Going, 52, was executive vice president at the Terpin Group for eight years.

Assistant Managing Editor Dan Turner writes a weekly column on marketing for the Los Angeles Business Journal.

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