Name: Michael M. Doyle
Position: President, RDW Group, Rhode Island’s largest advertising/public relations/marketing agency. Doyle has been named the person of the year by the Ad Club of Southeastern New England. He, along with Phil Rivers and Michael F. Trainor founded the agency in January 1987. Thomas Walsh joined the agency later and is a partner, and Trainor left in 1994 to start a new agency, Trainor Associates.
Background: Chief of staff to former Gov. Edward DiPrete; director of the Department of Administration in DiPrete’s administration; director of administration in the City of Cranston; director of marketing and communications at the United Way; administrative assistant to Claudine Schneider.
Education: Bachelor’s from Assumption College and master’s from University of Massachusetts in communications.
Age: 49
Family: Married, with one child.
MICHAEL M. DOYLE: Looking to add a Boston connection.
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PBN: What prompted you to open the agency in 1987?
DOYLE: I always wanted to get into this business. It’s why I went to graduate school and it was my goal to do that. When I came to Rhode Island I started out as a press secretary for Jim Taft, who was running for governor at the time, and I got sidetracked into politics and administrative government and didn’t get a chance to get into the agency business until I really started it. Ironically, when I left Claudine(Schneider, former congresswoman from Rhode Island) I said I had had enough of politics and I wanted to try and get into the business at that point, and I couldn’t get interviewed in places. I had a master’s degree in communications, I’d worked in a newspaper, print, radio background and I couldn’t get a PR interview. The only way for me to get into the business was to own the agency. Mike Trainor had worked with us on campaigns and I got to know him through that. Phil Rivers and I had been friends since I came to Rhode Island, so we three met and plotted out creating an agency that would largely replicate the experience we had in politics, which was in politics you win or you lose, you don’t get market share. The stakes are high. Because of that, research is a tremendously important part of what you do. Doing research was the foundation for what we started to do as an agency. Then just as you do in politics you integrate. You’re doing events, press and paid advertising and you’re doing direct mail. We thought there’s an efficiency in communications, which Phil and I understood from the political side, and which Mike understood from the industry side that we thought we could bring to clients that was a bit different from the experience they were having with other agencies in the state. We were not the first ones that were thinking it, but we came along at the right time to offer that service in a way that was a bit different than other agencies (were doing) at the time.
How fast was your company’s growth?
Every year we’ve grown. Every year we’ve made money. The big burst has literally been since ’95, when we acquired Dubois Patch in Worcester there are three ways we grow the business. One is new clients. Two is to grow existing client relationships. And three is through acquisitions. We practice all three of those here. In ’95, Dubois Patch brought in a whole new market place to us, a lot of business to business experience, so that was a step forward. In ’96 we began discussions with Fern Hanaway, concluded the deal with them in ’97, that nearly doubled the size of the agency. At the same time we picked up Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Amica as major clients, so we took a big jump forward at that point. And then it’s been a mad rush since then. We went to about 60 employees at that period. We’re now at about 105.
You have offices here and where else?
And Worcester. We had a service office in Needham, which we closed. We are actively pursuing now the acquisition of a Boston agency. I was looking at an article that we did at the time we announced the Fern Hanaway merger and we said within three years we’ll be in the hunt again for another agency, and it’s three years and we are. I would hope within the next year, year and a half we will successfully acquire or merge with a Boston- based agency.
Expectations of how large that would make the agency at that point?
We’re looking at an agency that is about half our size. It should get us to a point where we’re at 150 employees and about $110 to $120 million in billings.
If you look at the agency landscape today versus five or 10 years ago, is it healthier?
In terms of total employment, we’re probably up, but most of that’s here. The industry has changed and communications will continue to change. Our industry is about change, so I think the kinds of agencies that could exist and flourish in the ’80s could not exist now in this new century and flourish. Fortunately we believe in that concept up front of offering integrated communications, and I think that’s what you need to do today. We get our information in fragments and we get them from a lot of different sources, so on the delivery side it is very fragmented and on the receptors it is very fragmented. So you can’t be a creative boutique shop anymore and be around for very long, I believe.
Last year we invested heavily in creating our Internet department, interactive communications. That was brand new to us, required an enormous investment, but we know that’s the future and that’s part of the equation that you have to offer clients, so I think you’ll see agencies come and go that will specialize in public relations, that may specialize in the Internet, and I think by and large they will be relatively short-lived. That’s why even the more successful agencies that had niche skills and expertise are now merging and consolidating so that under one roof you are able to offer these greater services.
How much of your business is Internet related?
We’re holding it back. It’s important for us to grow it, and everything we do has to be done well. We are in the fortunate position of being able to say to clients we’re going to take you when we can do it and do it right for you. We’re regulating the growth of that division. Right now, there is literally a two-month backlog of what we can even take in the door. We’re recruiting for two new positions, which will grow that division from six to eight. I think if I took the regulators off it could double or triple in a matter of months, but we’d suffer in terms of quality and I don’t want to do that. Right now it’s a fairly small percentage of our overall business. It’s about two and a half percent of our business.
Do clients now expect something different or more from an agency now?
What they want is to communicate their message or sell their product. That hasn’t changed. What has changed though is the way that is done. You can no longer create a great television spot and buy 1,200 gross rating points and have your product known and understood. People are watching cable television, satellite television, they’re on the Internet, they have voice mail, they have so many varied sources of information that you can’t go to one vehicle any longer and have any certainty at all that your message will be heard and understood by the folks that you’re trying to communicate with. So clients who understand that come to us. Some clients who don’t understand that still go to a boutique agency and say I want to do a direct mail piece, or I just want to do a newspaper ad. I don’t think you can be successful communicating with people that way anymore.
How or when should companies be approaching agencies about crisis public relations?
The best time to handle a crisis is before it occurs, not when the wolves are at the door. We try to preach that to clients. A lot of planning and preparation can help you avoid a crisis. By avoiding a crisis, I don’t mean the underlying event can necessarily be avoided, but it becomes something that is handled in the normal course of business, rather than handled poorly and taking on disproportionate proportions in the media. And yet that is not always a realistic objective for a smaller company. Larger companies should have crisis communications plans written, in place, ready to execute when and if an emergency occurs. We used to run a crisis communication workshop for the Chamber of Commerce at the Business Expo, where all the tools were laid out there so there are opportunities for businesses to avail themselves of the process they need to go through.
Do you find that companies do that?
No. I don’t think they do. I think all of us hope the crisis never occurs. I think they put it off until they’re in the throes of a dilemma. Very frequently we’re called in by the attorneys, more so than the client, who recognize that there is a need to disseminate information and somehow accurately portray their client’s position without bringing on undue concern.
Does the agency do any more political work?
No. We stopped doing political work in 1990. I think some people still think of this as a political shop. We haven’t done a campaign literally since 1990. We did do a referendum in ’96 for the University of Rhode Island. We wanted to do it because we thought it would be fun. And it was. It’s not something we want to do as a steady diet. But it was fun to get our hand back in a little bit.
Why did the agency choose to move away from politics?
When you’re in the throes of a political campaign you become totally focused on that, and agency resources have to be devoted to it because you’re dealing with a very defined period of time. As I said earlier you win or you lose. So Phil Rivers and I at the end of those periods of time would be working 90 hours a week, we’d be physically exhausted and unable to handle other client work during that period of time, which is six or seven months. Once we started to have real clients, we recognized we couldn’t be master to both.
Do you have certain requirement in selecting clients for the agency?
Unlike other agencies our goal has been to do a couple of things. Our goal is to try to build relationships, so we don’t go after these jumbo, gigantic accounts. In general we’d rather have smaller, mid-size accounts with 20-year relationships than a five-month relationship with a huge advertising client. We are purposely focused on upper end clients within the middle market.
Any geography?
We’re principally in Southeastern New England, and that’s why geographically we want to be able to spread ourselves by replicating what we have here (and) in Worcester, by going to Boston. Then eventually Western Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire would be on the horizon. We have over 100 clients. We have clients who are very small to some fairly large clients. To achieve that we need to be experienced in a number of disciplines, and we do that through our acquisitions, in large part. With Fern Hanaway we picked up some retail experience, some business to business experience, in manufactured goods, similar kinds of things with Worcester. Worcester had no PR before we were involved with them. Fern Hanaway had some PR, but not broad-based consumer, not institutional kinds of clients.
By sector we want to be diverse. We also want to be diverse geographically. We are able to handle national television campaigns for our clients. We’re doing some international work now for GTech. For years we’ve done an international newsletter. In today’s world with computers you can do almost anything from little old Rhode Island. But to have that hands-on contact you have to be out there, in close proximity to the kinds of clients we serve, which tends to be small to mid size.
You have considerable diversity in clients.
It’s good for us because we have stability. It’s good in terms of employment. We have stability financially. We don’t have to lay people off and hire people every time we get a new client. Our largest client is 14 percent of our business. That client leaves – and we pray to God it doesn’t happen – it’s not the end of the world. That’s very different from the agency model in the ’80s when you had Leonard Monahan, a hugely successful agency, at their height had probably 12 clients. When one of their clients – which is what happened when Polaroid left– that put such a dent in their billings that they weren’t able to survive. That can’t happen here. We’re not a pure service business. We’re very much like a manufacturing business because of the amount of capital we have to lay out on behalf of our clients. Our inventory is creative product, which is very expensive. We need to be well capitalized. Most people in advertising don’t understand that concept and don’t capitalize their businesses. We have a lot of cash in this company, because we need to have that to get the best deals for our clients. We own our property. We own this building and our lease to ourselves is about $9.56(per square foot). If you’re a small boutique you’ll pay $15 a square foot and you’re paying for parking. Our price includes parking. We recognize you have to run this place efficiently and run it like a business and I think we do that and part of doing that is having a diverse client base, geographically, by sector, and by numbers of clients. That brings stability into a business in an industry that isn’t always that stable.
How much of your business is based on a good economy, and if the economy goes sour do companies cut their public relations/advertising/marketing budgets?
Marketing is almost always one of the first places to cut, which is not a good idea, but nevertheless in many companies is considered to be the softer part of their operating budget. Public relations, ironically, does well in a down economy because it is less expensive. It’s one of the more cost effective ways of continuing to communicate at some level. We’ve bucked the trends. There was a time when we were smaller when I could kind of feel the economy, because you’d see people backing off on their advertising budget. We’ve grown every year we’ve been in business. We grew in the early ’90s when everybody else was shrinking or going out of business.
In today’s world if clients back off on their budget, what advertising agencies have to do is back off on their expenditure side, and in our case that’s people. We run a very tight ship. We have a line item operating budget. We reconcile that budget to revenue every month. We’ve done that since the day we opened our doors. We spend against projected revenue based on booked income, not on what we hope will be income. We’re very focused on paying attention to those kinds of details. If we have to have a layoff, which thank God we haven’t had to do in seven years because of economic circumstances, we’ll do it. We’ll do what’s necessary to maintain the financial integrity of the company.
