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Oct. 1, 2010 |
PITNEY BOWES UNIT SHIFTS PR ACCOUNT |
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By Greg Hazley
Shift Communications has picked up PR duties for Pitney Bowes Business Insight, a location and geographical information software unit of the mail services giant, following an agency review.
Schwartz Communications had the account.
The PBBI unit provides location and GIS, or geographic information systems, data for business customers and was formed with PB’s 2007 acquisition of Troy, N.Y.-based MapInfo Corp. for $408M.
Tech-savvy Shift was hired to broaden awareness of the company’s software offerings.
Matt Broder, VP of external communications at PB, cited Shift’s reputation in PR and social media as working hard to understand the “nuances of businesses like ours.”
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Responses: |
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Ron Levy (10/01):
Schwartz has 175 people, including PR superstars who are awesome, and Schwartz has some of the world's most PR-savvy accounts. So it's ridiculous--and gratuitiously insulting, I hope unintentionaly--to imply that the new firm was chosen because of understanding nuances which Schwartz geniuses did not. Shift is a fine firm but most ssuredly so is Schwartz. P-B might be doing better if it took more care before making comments like the one above which may have been written and released too hastily by a subordinate.
Sometimes when an account shifts from one excellent firm to another, it's because of PR nuances that both agencies underwtand but that the client may not understsand nearly as well.
Veep (10/01):
Ron, youre making some serious assumptions. Schwartz is a good firm but good firms get fired for better ones or for fresh ideas all of the time. I also have a hard time believing the VP of communications at Pitney Bowes hastily said anything.
Joe Honick, GMA International (10/04):
Ron, yours is a fine professional comment.
Ron Levy (10/13):
Veep, an agency-client relationship or an employment relationship is less than a marriage but more than a date. More even than a fun weekend or even a romantic week in Puerto Rico or Paris. It's not "till death do us part" but is it only until one side rins into an attracti e potential substitute who seems to be "working hard to understand the nuances?" A VP of external communications--this or any other one--may be wise or unwise, superbly insightful or a schmuck. Sometime there's an agency review, althogh the agency work has been excellent, because a review makes a VP feel important. Veep, judge for yourself: when an anouncement says a new PR firm has been brought in because it was "working hard to understand the nuances" of the client's business, do you get the feeling tht the old PR firm may also have worked hard, perhaps even harder than the VP, to understand the nuances? And that maybe an important client-agency relationship was ended, and the experience of the former PR firm was thrown away, unwisely? He who fires is not always right nor is he who is fired always wrong. This is one reason why any top companies, more successful than Pitney Bowes, are very cautious before they firm corporate officers or great PR firms.
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