The middle is dropping out of one of L.A.’s biggest independent P.R. agencies.
The “Goldman” in Bender, Goldman & Helper is defecting to Hill & Knowlton and taking BGH’s TV division with him certainly not a killing blow for West L.A.-based BGH, but one that’s got to smart a little considering the agency’s flat growth in recent years.
Larry Goldman founded BGH 12 years ago, along with partners Dean Bender and Lee Helper. The agency specializes in entertainment P.R., a notoriously low-margin business but also one of the most important games in town.
Together, they’ve grown BGH into a company with satellite offices in New York and London and 50-something employees. In the Business Journal’s recent list of P.R. agencies it ranked No. 9, dropping from No. 7 the year before. That’s because most P.R. agencies in L.A. had a very good year in 1997, but BGH’s $4.7 million in fee income was identical to its reported 1996 figure.
Goldman says he’s leaving because Hill & Knowlton represented an irresistible opportunity.
“You know that old line about an offer I couldn’t refuse?” Goldman said. “Hill & Knowlton affords a much, much bigger playing field. It was an opportunity to develop different types of relationships, like between Madison Avenue and Hollywood.”
Goldman has sold his ownership stake in the agency to partners Bender and Helper. He leaves to run a new operation that is splitting off from Hill & Knowlton’s product-placement subsidiary, Showcase Placements Inc., which is run by Goldman’s longtime friend Richard Taylor. In fact, Goldman said Taylor gave him his start in the P.R. business in the mid-1970s, and first discussed the career move for Goldman months ago over lunch.
Goldman’s operation, to be called Showcase Entertainment Marketing Communications, will focus on TV publicity and general entertainment marketing, in addition to product placement.
“Hill & Knowlton is probably a safer haven for him,” speculated Michael Saltzman, head of entertainment P.R. firm Saltzman Communications. “Three guys on their own constantly have to worry about overhead, and at Hill & Knowlton that’s not a concern anymore.”
At BGH, Goldman was in charge of the TV division, with such brand-name clients as DirecTV Inc., Twentieth TV Corp., King World Productions and Carsey-Werner Productions. All those clients are going with him to Showcase, plus five BGH employees.
Bender says the clients represent only about 20 percent of the agency’s overall revenues. The “Goldman” in the middle of the agency’s name will remain, at least for now, although that may change down the road, Bender said.
P.R. insiders say BGH has been heavily courted as an acquisition target recently by bigger agencies or holding companies, notably Gray Advertising’s P.R. subsidiary GCI Group. Bender, in fact, says every one of the international communications holding companies has knocked on his door in the last year and a half, but so far no deal mainly because the partners have been unable to get a satisfactory answer about how their agency and its entertainment specialty would be integrated into a larger company.
“Many of these public relations firms, when they want to open an office in L.A., want a relationship with the entertainment industry,” Bender said. “We want to get a true definition of how these companies want to integrate with the industry.”
Guerilla marketing
Santa Monica ad agency Colby, Effler & Partners is demonstrating this month a very sneaky way to get someone else to do your creative work for you stage a contest.
At the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Barrington Avenue in West L.A. stands the latest installment in Colby, Effler’s long-running billboard campaign for the Beverly Center, in which the words “Don’t Blend In” are disguised by clever camouflage. But this billboard wasn’t designed by Colby, Effler.
The latest installment was designed by photographer and documentary filmmaker David O’Dell. His design, which makes the sign look as if it’s made up of peeling sections of old billboards, was the winning entry in a contest held by Colby, Effler last year.
Joan Goldfeder, vice president and management supervisor in charge of the Beverly Center account at Colby, Effler, said using someone else’s idea wasn’t quite so simple for the agency as it might seem. There were a lot of legal issues involved in producing the sign, because it uses little pieces that look like other well-known billboards produced by local agencies.
For example, the yellow background and black type on part of the sign look suspiciously like TBWA Chiat/Day’s signs promoting ABC, and the blue sky and white clouds look an awful lot like the billboards for rival mall Century City Marketplace.
“Those aren’t really their clouds, we shot our own,” said Goldfeder, explaining the subtle differences that were necessary to avoid liability. “The fun is to make it reminiscent without harming anyone else’s efforts.”
So what did O’Dell get for his winning design? A framed photo of the billboard and a year of free parking at the Beverly Center, which would probably be a lot more useful if he’d been paid any money to spend at the high-end mall.
“But I bet his mother’s proud of him,” said Goldfeder.
News Editor Dan Turner writes a weekly column on marketing for the Los Angeles Business Journal.
