and David Preston of McMahon
Preston Communications.
Area advertising and public relations agencies are reacting to the economic slowdown in different ways.
There is a new partner at McMahon Preston Communications in Providence — Joshua Fenton, a former partner at RDW Group. During his three years with RDW, Fenton founded the agency’s technology group and oversaw campaigns for brands such as New England Coffee, Cybex, Standard MEMS, InfoTech and the award winning Roger Williams Park Zoo campaign. Before RDW he was with the now-defunct Leonard/Monahan.
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Fenton said there were no hard feelings about his departure from RDW.
Fenton’s role with McMahon Preston will be to add an advertising component to the agency’s government relations and public relations concentrations, which Frank McMahon and David Preston have been practicing for eight years.
Fenton spoke to the trend of agencies becoming one-stop marketing factories.
“Communications doesn’t stop at any one door,” he said. “It’s critical that your message is consistent across all the mediums and you can’t do that by working with nine different agencies on nine different issues with nine different expressions of your brand.”
“The more experienced you become in this business you realize that you have to use different tools and that there are different strategic requirements of getting your message out,” he said, “and you have to find a way to develop partnerships to buttress whatever skill-set you don’t have.”
Frank McMahon spoke of McMahon Preston’s specific niche.
“When David (Preston) and I began what we referred to as government relations business back in the mid-nineties we recognized that business was changing nationally and internationally,” he said. “And it also fit because there is a certain way that government relations in Rhode Island have always been done, and we weren’t necessarily a part of that crowd, so we had to find another business model to be able to develop business and survive as a business entity.”
With clients such as Verizon, Verizon Wireless, Narragansett Electric, Walgreeens and Algon-quin Gas, McMahon said 40 percent of the agency’s business is government relations, 40 percent is public relations, and 20 percent is advertising. In the past two years, McMahon Preston’s business has grown 100 percent each year, and moved headquarters from a smaller space in the Grinnell Building to the sixth floor of the Foundry building, off Promenade Street. Before the Grinnell Building, McMahon Preston was located in a windowless basement office in the Foundry Building.
“So we’ve moved on up, literally,” said David Preston.
The company has also increased its staff from five to 14 in the past year. Preston is optimistic in the face of the current economic climate.
“It may reduce the rate of our growth, but we have no indication that it’s really hindering us in any way,” he said. “We’re continuing to see nothing but growth on this end.”
Meanwhile, Mike Doyle, president of RDW Group, said things at his agency have leveled off for the time being, but he said the worst is behind RDW.
“We’ve certainly seen a bump in the road,” he said. “Our billings are down from what we realized and we’re down a net 10 positions, but based on our projections we’re going to do okay at that level.”
Doyle said the agency has picked up some new business and is seeing modest account activity. He is predicting the downturn will level off and RDW will coast through the summer, and business will inevitably pick up in September.
“If we get new business we’ll be hiring again,” said Doyle. “People have pulled back and I’m really not expecting any more pullbacks with the revised numbers.”
“I think our industry is the first to feel it,” he said, “and we’re also one of the first sectors to come back.”
Across town at Duffy & Shanley, Robert Hart, Steven Maurano and Karen Schuster have been named partners.
Both Hart and Maurano joined the agency in 1984, while Schuster arrived in 1993. D&S President Jon Duffy said these promotions were an action within the economic downturn, not a reaction to it.
“They were three very important people to the agency and we wanted to reward them,” he said, “The scope of our partner group also reflects a key strength of our total marketing approach.”
The total marketing approach, said Duffy, is what is keeping D&S in business, and if the agency were just doing advertising it would not be doing as well.
“Advertising is kind of a bellwether in the downturn,” he said, “but how we’re set up as a company, we have a lot of disciplines, so when ad budgets tend to get cut, other budgets pick up the slack.”
