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United Way Worldwide has unveiled a new for-profit subsidiary, UpPurpose, a cloud-based technology platform and creative agency designed to meet the content needs of nonprofits and the social good sector. UpPurpose will provide content services—ranging from multi-platform digital campaign creation to real-time data-driven campaign performance analysis—for local United Ways, nonprofits, foundations, CSR organizations and other social enterprises. Led by former Conde Nast vice president, emerging projects Arlie Sisson, UpPurpose will be based in Denver. The launch of UpPurpose follows United Way’s launch of Salesforce Philanthropy Cloud last year.
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WPP and Waze, the global social navigation app owned by Google, are collaborating on a project to make it simpler for retail brands to run campaigns on the app, which the company says is used by over 100 million monthly active drivers. WPP will work with Waze to help WPP’s clients directly reach and target drivers via the in-car platform. The project will launch in Canada, France, Italy, the UK and the US. “This is the first collaborative relationship Waze has undertaken with agency partners to explore and identify shopper marketing-specific creative solution needs,” said Waze Ads global director Samuel Keret. The initiative was developed following a Google and WPP SWARM session. SWARM is a series of regular hackathons aimed at meeting client challenges with solutions powered by WPP expertise and Google engineering.
 Jim Rocco |
PRCG | Haggerty LLC is launching a sports marketing group, PRCG | Sports. The new group is intended to enhance the firm’s presence in sports-related fields by offering strategic public relations and marketing services that will include reputation management, brand positioning, product launches and events, and individual representation of athletes and other high-profile sports figures. PRCG | Sports will also focus on sports-related crisis communications and litigation communications. To lead the new group, PRCG is bringing on Jim Rocco as senior consultant and director. Rocco was previously at HBO Sports, where he worked with programs such as Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, On The Record with Bob Costas, Inside the NFL and Hard Knocks. He has also served as director of marketing for Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY. PRCG account supervisor Isaac Benjamin will also play a key role on the PRCG | Sports team.
DJE Holdings, parent of Edelman and Zeno, launches RUTH as an independent shop named after Ruth Edelman, mental health advocate, wife and longtime business partner of Dan Edelman.
New York City PR firms make up the largest slice of O'Dwyer's 147 firm overall ranking with 33 of 40 in the New York/New Jersey area either calling Manhattan their home or having a presence there.
Subject Matter+Kivvit, which joined forces in May, has rebranded as Avoq, an integrated shop with more than 200 professionals in Washington, New York, Asbury Park (NJ), Miami and Chicago.
While PR pros stationed at in-house comms. teams and those working for agencies share many of the same objectives, they also have markedly different top priorities, according to a recent report.
Edelman is cutting 240 employees or about four percent of its workforce to cope with the cooling down of the PR sector, according to a memo from CEO Richard Edelman.
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