TORONTO WANTS FIRM TO LURE TOURISTS

Toronto is ramping up efforts to bring tourists back to the city, including a search for a major PR firm, as the World Health Organization lifted an advisory against travel to the Ontario capital city of 2.5 million on April 30.

"We remain open for business," Mayor Mel Lastman said in a statement, although he estimated it could take a year for tourism to recover from the city's outbreak of SARS.

A $25 million fund from federal and provincial coffers has been set up to promote tourism and the city is looking for a PR firm to oversee the efforts, according to city hall sources of the Toronto Star. Companies have also stepped up their marketing to promote travel to Toronto.

International Assn. of Business Communicators said last week it would go ahead with plans for its annual conference in Toronto in June but reports say concerts and other events continue to be cancelled, even after the WHO advisory was lifted.

COHN, OVERSTREET EXIT GCI

Cohn & Wolfe founder Bob Cohn and former C&W vice chairman Jim Overstreet have left GCI/Atlanta to form their own firm, Cohn, Overstreet & Parrish with Amy Parrish, a GCI Group veteran.
Cohn and Overstreet joined GCI Group following the February 2002 acquisition of 360 Thinc by Grey Global Group. Cohn had joined 360 in 2000. Grey and 360 had won a joint pitch for the $150 million BellSouth ad/PR account in December 2001.

360 had counted Coca-Cola, Chick-fil-A and Southern Co. as clients. They were merged into GCI.

Cohn told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he would not again consider selling a firm to one of the large ad/PR conglomerates.

Ken Willis, who heads the Atlanta office, noted that Cohn and Overstreet had done "part-time consulting" to GCI over the past six months.

Bill Marks has rejoined GCI as executive VP after a stint as VP-PR at Coca-Cola Co.

Fleishman-Hillard, Burson-Marsteller, BlinnPR and Hill & Knowlton are among firms that have responded to the RFP issued by the Library of Congress for communications strategy, media relations and special events. Ruth Nelson (202/707-8610) is contracting officer. May 12 is the deadline.

PN DROPS OUT, FOUR PITCH ALF

Porter Novelli has dropped out of the pitch for the $3 million PR account at the anti-smoking group, American Legacy Foundation. Fleishman-Hillard, MWW Group, Magnet Comms. and MWW parent Golin/Harris International still vie for the account.

Rob Gould, PN GM in Washington, D.C., told this NL his firm had worked for ALF since its inception in 1999.

The new firm will "provide implementation and tactical support, but little strategic counsel." ALF's in-house team will now develop overall strategy, said PN. Julia Cartwright is ALF's VP-comms.

The PR review comes at a crucial time for the group. ALF received a $300 million final payment from the tobacco companies on April 14 to fund its "truth" anti-smoking initiative. Those payments account for 80 percent of the Foundation's funding.

Cheryl Healton, president of ALF, has warned that the group may be forced to severely cut the public education campaign because of the funding drop-off. Under the Master Settlement Agreement negotiated with the states, tobacco companies have spent $1.4B+ since 1999 for anti-smoking campaigns.

CORDIANT MAY SELL

Cordiant Communications, which owns FD Morgen-Walke, has held merger discussions with other companies as one of a "number of options" that are being considered. Publicis is viewed as the best fit for Cordiant. FD M-W had 260 staff at its peak and now has less than 100.

BYRUM WON'T BLOCK JUNE ASSEMBLY

Reed Byrum, president of PRSA, said that while he does not favor making the June 20-21 "leadership rally" in New York also serve as an Assembly, he and the board will not campaign against it.

Decoupling of national offices and Assembly seats from accreditation was unanimously urged by the strategic planning committee of the 1999 board but the board rejected the decision and campaigned against it. The committee urged discussion at the 1999 Assembly but the board blocked it.

Byrum said that if the needed 75 signatures of delegates come into h.q. by the May 20 deadline (30 days before the meeting) he will order an Assembly.

The leaders' meeting is costing PRSA about

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CPRF DUES, MEMBERSHIP DECLINE

The Council of PR Firms reported a 19% decline in dues to $988,193 for the year ended Dec. 31, 2002, from $1,219,806 in the previous year.

The number of members declined to 107 from 121 a year earlier. The peak in membership was reached in 2000 when there were 126.

Net assets declined 35% to $292,561 from $452,218.

All but the biggest members, who pay a maximum of $50,000 each in dues, were allowed to subtract 20% from their dues payments because of the decline in the economy.

Regular dues are .065 percent of U.S. revenues or just over one-half of one percent. A firm billing $2 million would pay $1,300 yearly.

CPRF's revenues declined 30.6% to $1,106,426 from $1,466,201.

The group noted that 2001 revenues were increased by the one-time addition of $221,591 from the November 2001 "Global Summit" meeting of the International Communications Consultancy Organization in San Francisco.

CPRF said that the revenues were passed through CPRF's books as a convenience to ICCO, which is a worldwide association of PR firms. Attending the meeting were 140 principals of PR firms from 22 countries.

Attendances was less than half of what was expected due to the meeting's proximity to 9/11.
David Drobis, chairman/senior partner of Ketchum, was chairman of ICCO at the time. He is the founding chair of CPRF and is the current chair of the Arthur Page Society.

Cash declined to $292,224 from $630,431 partly because of the one-time addition of ICCO cash in 2001, CPRF said.

Expenses for the year of $1,176,083 exceeded income of $1,016,426 by $159,657.

A non-GAAP summary of the financials is on the group's website (www.prfirms.org). A complete financial report is to be put on the site shortly that will also be accessible to all visitors.

FRANKLIN, SPLETT TO HONEYWELL UNIT

Julie Franklin, manager of internal communications at Andersen Corp., has taken a director of marketing communications post at Honeywell Automation and Control Solutions, based in St. Louis Park, Minn.

Lawrence Splett, a VP at Padilla Speer Beardsley and corporate communications supervisor at Graco Inc., moves into a top spot as director of marketing communications at the ACS unit. Both were placed by New York-based Heyman Assocs. and report to Dan Harrison, VP of comms. for the Honeywell unit.

ACS is a manufacturing unit of Honeywell that produces products like thermostats and switches for industrial, commercial and retail equipment. The parent company had revenues of $22 billion last year.

PUBLICISTS ARE 'BAD GUYS' IN MOVIES

Al Pacino plays a publicist in "People I Know" who has spent a lifetime "cleaning up messes made by other, more important people," says reviewer Adam Sternberg of the New York Times.

Colin Farrell, meanwhile, stars in "Phone Booth" as a Broadway press agent who lies and cheats practically everyone around him, including his wife.

The latter show has grossed $40 million as of April 27 and had been among the top ten earners for the month.

"People I Know" was just released last month. Sternberg found that, in contrast to Farrell, who is a fast-thinking wheeler-dealer, Pacino plays a character who is a "professional bootlicker, a sad and regretful man whose potential has been frittered away..."

Sternberg wonders why publicists have become such targets of Hollywood.

"Sweet Smell of Success," a 1957 movie that recently was revived as a Broadway play, portrayed both journalists and press agents as cynical manipulators of images.

The publicity industry could use "a good publicist," says Sternberg, noting that Lizzie Grubman recently gave the industry a black eye when she plowed her SUV into a crowd one night in the Hamptons.

New York Post reviewer Lou Lumenick said, "Pacino has rarely been better than as the self-destructive hero, who is described by his doctor as 'like something out of Yellowstone that could blow any moment.'" The character has both drink and drug problems.

Pacino gets "a steady supply of witty repartee, most of which he delivers gleefully," said Lumenick.

He adds that "People" was completed in 2001 but was withheld presumably because it bashes a client who sounds like former mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

It also had a sequence about the World Trade Center towers that has been deleted.

RF NAMED AS VICTIM OF SCAM

Ruder Finn was named as one of the swindled buyers in a nationwide telemarketing scheme that allegedly bilked more than $23 million from private and non-profit health clinics, a university and businesses.

U.S. Attorneys Patrick Meehan of the Eastern District of Pennylvania and Christopher Christie of New Jersey, announced on April 30 the filing of an indictment that also included money laundering and related fraud. A total of 31 people from around the U.S. have been charged as the result of an investigation authorities called "Operation Duct Tape."

Those charged allegedly used money orders, gift certificates and offers to stay in top-rated hotels as bribes to employees if they purchased from them "massive quantities" of maintenance and lighting supplies at "grossly inflated prices," authorities said.

Federal authorities said the telemarketers sold everything from $29.99 light bulbs to $200 cases of toilet paper and trash can liners for about a dollar each.

PUBLICATION TO COVER IRAQ'S REBUILDING

A new publication covering reconstruction business opportunities in Iraq will be published twice a month by Dow Jones Newsletters and WorldTrade Executive Inc.

This is the third new publication started by DJN and WTE.

The other two-Latin America Energy Report and Dow Jones China Energy Report-cover those fast-growing energy markets.

Iraq Reconstruction Report will provide information for companies seeking to become actively involved in the restoration efforts in Iraq, including the construction of roads, bridges, airports, hospitals, power plants and irrigation systems, as well as chemical decontamination and weapons destruction.

"The role of private-sector companies will be critical to the reconstruction effort," said Lyn Perl-muth, director of Dow Jones Newsletters.

By some estimates, the cost could reach $100 billion. "The reconstruction has been compared to the post-World War II Marshall Plan in Europe," said Gary Brown, president of WTE, a publisher of international business, finance and tax information services.

Kathy Rosenblum is editor of the IRR. She is based in WTE's Concord, Mass., office: 978/287-0301.

NEW EDITORS NAMED AT TEEN PEOPLE

Angela Burt-Murray has been named articles director of Teen People and Zena Burns was appointed music editor.

These are the first hires for new managing editor Amy Barnett, who recently joined TP from Honey where she was editor-in-chief.

Burt-Murray also joins from Honey, where she was executive editor. She had been TP's beauty director for a short time in 2000, before joining Barnett's launch team at Honey.

Burt-Murray moves into the new position of features director where she will head up the magazine's coverage of news and feature stories. She will report to Tina Johnson, who is executive editor.

Burns, a regular contributor to the magazine's entertainment section as a staff writer and entertainment director for TeenPeople.com, moves over to become music editor on May 12.

Ariel Foxman, previously senior editor at Time Inc.'s In Style, was named editor of Conde Nast's still-untitled male version of shopping magazine Lucky.

PLACEMENT TIPS

The Kansas City Star's revamped Sunday edition has two new sections-"House & Home," edited by Cindy Hoedel, and "Simply Food," a recipe section-plus a new column by fashion editor Jackie White that covers trends in fashion, beauty and home.

Boston Magazine's associate editor is looking for a local chef to comment for an article on newlyweds and cooking that will run in the "Elegant Wedding" issue. Contact Jill Waldbieser at jill@philly mag.com.

The Associated Press' San Jose, Calif.-based correspondent Rachel Konrad is back covering the Silicon Valley beat after a four-month sabbatical. She covers everything newsworthy in the Silicon Valley, with roughly 50-60% of her stories revolving around technology, business, workplace or economic news. The other 40-50% are non-business spot news stories. She prefers e-mail pitches. [email protected].

Latino Voice's first New York State edition has been published.

Enreique Lopez, who is editor-in-chief, said he started the publication to "inform, entertain, educate, and hopefully inspire Latinos to get involved in life." Lopez can be reached at [email protected].

Women's Enews, a New York-based feminist news service, has begun an Arabic site aimed at Arab and Muslim women in the Middle East and the U.S. Mona Eltahawy is managing editor of the Arabic site. She is based at 146 W. 29th; 212/244-1720.

GLOBAL FINANCIAL NEWS SERVICE FORMED

Marketwatch.com, AFX News and Xinhua Financial Network, three real time business news providers from North America, Europe and Asia, have created the "World Business News Alliance," a news service for the financial community.

The service, which will debut on the financial terminals of Thomson Financial and Moneyline Telerate, will be one of the largest international news gathering networks with about 5,000 journalists producing 10,000 news items each day to its customers.

Each partner of the alliance will create regional content and local insights.

MEDIA BRIEFS

Worth, a personal finance magazine, has suspended publication. The April-May issue and a summer issue have been cancelled.

Utne Reader is scaling back its use of reprinted material from other sources in favor of original writing, expanding its cultural coverage and dropping "Reader" from the title.

MOVED: Media Industry Newsletter (MIN) has moved its editorial office to 110 William st., 11th flr., New York, NY 10038. For now, the phone and fax numbers will remain the same-212/983-5170 and 983-5144, respectively.

The Hearst Building at 959 8th ave. was shut down on May 2 for renovations which should take three years. Hearst Magazines president Cathie Black has relocated to 1345 Sixth Avenue of the Americas. Good Housekeeping, which was in the Hearst Bldg., moved into Hearst-owned 250 W. 57th street.

(Media news continued on next page)

WEB EDITORS WELCOME PR PITCHES

These are excerpts from a transcript of remarks made by four website editors who spoke at a recent meeting of the Publicity Club of New York on the subject of "Why the Web Matters":

-Elizabeth Shepard, editor-in-chief of Epicurious.com and Concierge.com:

"Epicurious is the longest running and the largest food site on the Internet. We receive more than 20 million page views a month; we publish all of the recipes from Gourmet, Bon Appetit and Parade magazine in addition to our own original content.

"We have restaurant reviews, cookbook reviews, and profiles of chefs.

"Concierge is our travel site and the online home of Conde Nast Traveler. We also have original content on Concierge.

We publish the 'Insider Guides' where we send writers out into some of the top-rated destinations to give people an insider's guide to what goes on in that area.

"We actually do a lot of work with PR people, more so in Epicurious than in Concierge because we have a more robust original content in Epicurious.

"People contact me about new restaurant openings or special tasting menus; new wines that are launching in the U.S. or special distribution of wines in certain areas.

"I do a lot of work directly with our ad clients, too, so there's always that kind of overlap between editorial and the PR and the advertisers.

"Most people contact me by e-mail or regular mail. Since I'm not the person who does a lot of traveling for Concierge, I have to give trips or opportunities away to members of my staff."

-Dean Wright, editor-in-chief, MSNBC.com:

"My site reaches more people on a daily basis than the largest newspaper in the U.S. Four million people look at MSNBC each day.

"No one would seriously suggest that the daily newspaper is irrelevant. But the web is something that can't be ignored.

The message I have for PR pros is, if you want to reach out to a highly desirable demographic-people at work-then you must include the web in your plans.

"At my site, content comes from a variety of places. A lot of it comes from our partners at NBC, Newsweek, The Washington Post, but we also do a great deal of original content that many of your clients would be interested in.

"The journalists who work for us, particularly in 'Tech,' where we have a very robust channel, and also in 'Health,' 'Entertainment,' 'Business,' and 'Science,' are areas where your clients would find a true welcome."

-Jon Friedman, media editor, CBS MarketWatch:

"I cover all the media subjects that MarketWatch pursues put out by colleagues in L.A., Chicago, San Francisco, and D.C.

"We have offices all over the world, in fact, we try to cover everything both in the media, which I specialize in, and everything else from government to personal finance to entertainment.

"Webcasts are about five minutes long and people come into the office in New York, where we do videotaped interviews with newsmakers, authors, CEOs, fund managers, and people who have opinions others want to know about.

"My favorite method of contact is through e-mail, not phone calls because they do mount up. I'm at [email protected].

"The key thing we try to find in our work is, of course, breaking news. In terms of features, we try to pursue investor-oriented subjects when possible. Stories that might influence a company's stock price or give our readers and viewers some idea of what's going on in their companies.
"Anytime you have story ideas, we want to hear them."

-Heather Perram, executive director, creative programming, AOL:

"One of the ways to reach us is through me and to let me know the kinds of things that you are seeing. You're on the street and that's of great interest to me. I'm thinking a lot about next fall.

"How do you reach us? Well, we are aggregators of content, so if you have relationships with Time Inc. magazines, or magazines like Travel & Leisure, with whom we do the American Cities survey, and also Food & Wine, you're reaching AOL.

"So be sure when you talk to those editors to let them know that it's something you would really like to see pursued, and it's a double whammy for you. Think about video because people are excited about seeing it."

MARKET TRENDS

Tweens, as children between the ages of 8 and 14 are known to marketers, have emerged as an influential demographic.

According to the U.S. Tween Market, a new research report published by Packaged Facts, the spending power of this group totals about $39 billion, but the influence these young people have as arbiters of "cool" give them a greater value in the marketplace.

Households with tweens have more positive atitudes about shopping in new places, and take more time to browse while they are shopping. Households with tweens are also more likely to own computers and subscribe to online services, making them the perfect target audience for online ads and promotions, said the report.

Consumers spent $68.7 billion on spirits, wine and beer products in restaurants and bars in 2002, according to the just-released Cheers On-Premise Handbook 2003 published by Adams Beverage Group.

Premium and super premium spirits, wines and beers were largely responsible for the 7.7% gain in on-premise sales last year.

Douglas Carmichael, chief auditor of the new Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, has rapped CPA firms that are "saying the right thing in their ads, but I haven't seen the follow-through in [that] they're actually doing it."

Quote is in Advertising Age 4/28. He could be referring to PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has a nine-part ad campaign touting the highest of principles, including "principles-based accounting."

PWC is being sued for $2.5 billion on charges it created phony "special purpose entities" for client Amerco (4/30 NL).

Carmichael is also angry that some CPA firms are fighting "new industry regulation" while at the same time running the idealistic ads. Ads are not supposed to "fool people," he told Ad Age.

We hope Carmichael will take the Big Broom to accounting, getting rid of rigid forms of reporting results that don't serve the needs of laypeople who want to understand them. Balance sheets, laden with boxcar figures, hide a lot. A direct cash flows statement, long urged by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, would be better than the traditional cash flows statement. Every financial report should have phone numbers and e-mails of people prepared to answer questions about them (just like press releases have contacts).

If the Catholic Church can switch to English from Latin after hundreds of years, the high priests of numbers can come down from their altars, face the public and stop talking to each other in mumbo-jumbo almost nobody else can understand. The SEC has had a futile "plain English" movement for 30 years.

The day of the computer having arrived, financial reports should stop saying "incorporated herein by reference" (i.e., go get it yourself) and instead do a hot-link to the document. This phrase appears about 100 times in Interpublic's current proxy statement.

Federal income tax forms have gotten so complicated that few people with any sort of income can fill them out on their own.

Since PR groups are looking for issues to get involved in, advocating for a user-friendly accounting system could be one of them.

Omnicom's annual stockholders' meeting will be in Los Angeles on May 20 this year at TBWA\Chiat\Day. We won't be able to attend it. The meeting, usually held in New York, was our one chance in the year to put questions to CEO John Wren and CFO Randall Weisenberger. Taking pictures was forbidden. IPG will hold its meeting in New York as usual on the same day.

PR is the worst performing category by far at OMC, IPG and WPP, and this has held true for a couple of years. PR people are starting to think the purchase of almost all of the big PR firms by the conglomerates has been a disaster for both the buyers and sellers.

The character played by Al Pacino in "People I Know" has been described as a "publicist" and not entitled to be called a PR professional.

However, we have seen the movie and would call the Pacino character, based loosely on New York's Bobby Zarem, a consummate PR pro. Like such larger-than-life PR figures as Bob Gray of Washington, D.C., and Benjamin Sonnenberg of New York, the Pacino character knows just about every important person in town and can bring them together for one reason or another.

He's out every night socializing and politicking, not drawing up strategic plans or studying for a PR test.

Pacino closely tracked Zarem, 66 and still active, for several months in preparing for the role.

Zarem is listed in the credits as a consultant and has pitched the film on "Entertainment Tonight."

The Pacino character has alcohol and drug problems but a Zarem assistant told us Zarem is a diabetic and has never drunk nor ever had a drug problem.

This dark and depressing Miramax movie, oddly playing in only two theaters in New York, has numerous scenes and characters that PR pros will recognize as having much truth in them (especially the role of the PR assistant).

There is a long speech (among many) by Pacino on the value of publicity.

The $100K PRSA "leadership rally" June 20-21 in New York, if made to do double-duty as a spring Assembly, could bring democracy to PRSA by allowing any member, whether APR or not, to run for office and an Assembly seat this year. The APRs have ruled for 30 years and are fighting both the spring Assembly and any move to decouple national offices.

The non-APR "freedom fighters" want nominations this July to be open to any member, campaigns to be conducted on issues and not on how many PRSA committees the candidate has served, and chapters to have the right to send anyone they want to represent them at the Assembly (including the 58 of 116 chapters whose presidents are non-APR).

The Assembly itself is a near-fiction since no one knows who will be on it until August (although delegates are supposed to be elected by Dec. 1 of the previous year).

Chapter leaders point out that no one can predict his or her status 11 months in advance including whether they will still have jobs in PR or even be members of PRSA. As pointed out by Sobel & Co., PRSA's new auditor, the membership of PRSA is "transient" (30% or about 5,500 members fail to renew each year).

Members thus have no elected representatives that they can write to for most of the year. Eighty percent of members not only can't vote in the Assembly or hold office, they don't even know who their elected representatives are.

--Jack O'Dwyer