Homeward bound: Manhattan public relations executive Laura Sturtz boards a train at Grand Central Station for Peekskill.
In the public relations industry whose seat of sophistication is Manhattan, Laura Sturtz is both memory keeper and take-charge mentor for a new generation.
A Peekskill resident, Sturtz has worked 30 years in the business of marketing clients and their products at both public relations and advertising firms. She remembers the days before cell phones and fax machines and quick-print copy shops, when as a young account executive, her office phone line dead, dashed to her Manhattan apartment to resume her long-distance reassurances and advice to a client in crisis mode.
Now she communicates online with the boss and company colleagues in Los Angeles, Chicago and Louisville. She trains for success young employees raised, for better and for worse, in the visual virtual world and steeped in celebrity culture rather than in the books that fed Sturtz”™s thinking and writing skills in her Long Island youth. The integrated marketing strategies she develops for clients can bridge traditional print media and social media like Facebook and Twitter.
Sturtz remembers the days before corporate conglomerates, most of them European, ruled the industry and owned its big American names: Young & Rubicam, Ogilvy & Mather, Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, J. Walter Thompson. She recalls a time when there was more joy in her business of communication. In her new job and professional challenge, she wants to bring that back.
A rapid rise
In November, the 53-year-old Sturtz was named president of CarryOn Communication Inc., a 10-year-old, small to mid-sized, independent public relations agency whose focus is consumer brands. Its clients include New Balance, the Boston-based athletic footwear and apparel company, MillerCoors and Razor USA, the fast-growing California scooter manufacturer. The company was founded in Los Angeles by CEO Kevin Grangier, who, with Sturtz at the helm, will concentrate on CarryOn”™s sister branding and interactive media companies from his hometown of Louisville, Ky.
Sturtz came to the company with a long and impressive resume that dates to 1978, when, armed with a degree in applied semiotics from Brown University and still harboring ambitions as a novelist, she took a technical writing job at Young & Rubicam in New York, translating the resident computer guru”™s exotic language for agency staff at the start of the computer age in business. From there she moved to the creative side at Burson-Marsteller.
Her rise in the industry was rapid. In 1984, she became a vice president at Hill & Knowlton, moving on after three years to venture into advertising as a vice president at Hill, Holliday. She spent seven years at Ogilvy & Mather Public Relations, where she was a senior managing director. She left to become chief operating officer at The Rowland Co. and later held the same post at Rowland Communications Worldwide. In her last position before moving to a small company, she was chief marketing officer and chief creative officer at Euro RSCG Worldwide Public Relations.
Sophistication at a price
At CarryOn, Sturtz aims to build and grow the company by building new headquarters in midtown Manhattan and building out the agency”™s Chicago office while continuing its “very successful” business in Los Angeles. She took on the job too because “I wanted to be able to create and drive a different kind of offering for clients” with a more integrated approach to marketing. “My primary focus always is on the clients, what they need and what I need to do to give something of value to them.
“The industry has changed significantly over the last few decades,” Sturtz said. “I think our industry, because we are intertwined intimately with the communications industry, we have changed as dramatically as the communications ”¦ I think the business in many ways is a lot more sophisticated than it used to be.”
That sophistication has come at a price. Over three decades, Sturtz said, the public relations world has lost the “individuals who started agencies and were the lifeblood of those agencies,” many of them writers and journalists. As those people retired or left the business, “The brands have not always remained as creative as they were. They”™ve become victims of American business and acquisitions by European firms” more focused on the financial bottom line. “People may be business managers but they may not necessarily be people who have the passion for communication in their veins.”
At the large firms with stellar reputations built over the years ”“ where Sturtz built her own reputation ”“ “There isn”™t as much joy and there isn”™t as much courage,” she said. “They know that. They know they”™re tethered to their financial managers.” Even before the recession, where the first budget blows and layoffs have been felt on the advertising side rather than in public relations, “The very large agencies were having their own issues ”¦ They have a lot of handcuffs on them.”
Getting through the clutter
“In today”™s market, a business is so challenged to justify its expenses” by delivering results, Sturtz said. With those challenges, “Agencies have to share the responsibility with their clients for the success of their brands. Whether the client asks for it or not, that”™s part of the work ethic of people who are successful in this business. You have to take it on and embrace it as your own.”
Getting a client”™s message to its audience “is not easy. We live in a very cluttered world. This is the challenge for all marketers today.” Doing it well for a client “is an art. I don”™t think everybody has that ability.”
“Those of us who have been in the industry a long time are challenged by training the next generation,” said Sturtz. “They absorb information differently. They are a reflection of the consumer environment themselves, which is, they are very fragmented in their attention and they have a lot of distractions.” Raised in a celebrity culture, they think it only natural “to put a celebrity out there to get out the message.” Sturtz thinks there is more to her art and business than that.
In her executive role, she tries to lead actively by example and engagement. In public relations, “So much of what you do is interpersonal skills that unless you”™re modeling that for your team and taking them with you, they”™re not going to be successful on their own.”
At the same time, “I want the people to have fun. I want to put the joy back in the business. I think people can do better jobs and be more creative if they”™re in an environment that”™s stimulating and inspiring.”
