Public affairs shop Mercury and lobbying firm Clark & Weinstock are merging their operations to create a D.C.-based agency with operations in six states. Both firms are part of Omnicom.
The combined firm will operate as Mercury/Clark & Weinstock under Mercury CEO Kieran Mahoney and will be managed by a four-member operating committee under Mercury president Kirill Goncharenko, a former Burson-Marsteller and corporate communications exec.
C&W managing partner and former Congressman Vin Weber, who becomes co-chairman of the merged entity, said Mercury’s capabilities like grassroots mobilization, crisis communications, digital and polling will “create tremendous leverage” for C&W’s government relations specialty. C&W chairman Davis Weinstock said it gives his firm a “national platform.”
The two firms have collaborated on client work in the past.
Omnicom in 2008 combined C&W with Ketchum’s lobbying unit The Washington Group.