Industry Watch: World Class Public Relations
October 2006

Q&A with Gini Dietrich, President, Arment Dietrich Public Relations

Q: Tell us about Arment Dietrich Public Relations - how it got started, how long you've been in business, who your clients are, and the size of the agency.
How did we get started? You want the real story or the external story?
The real story is that I'm the oldest of six. Most eldest children are type A personality but I've been consistently called double type A. I'm strong-willed…okay, stubborn…and I have trouble with authority.

After working for Fleishman-Hillard in Kansas City, I moved to Chicago to help build the PR department for an ad agency. This was during the "integrated marketing era" and we were extremely successful with organic growth through existing advertising clients. But then 9/11 happened and marketing budgets went away. I suddenly was fighting internally for PR dollars and felt like I was beating my head up against the wall every day. I thought I was trying to do right by the client and couldn't get the funds to do what we needed to do. I had a lot of advertising people, who were older than me and had a lot more experience, telling me how to do my job. That's where the authority issue came into play. I figured I had more PR experience and knew what I was talking about than they did.

So I made the jump to open Arment Dietrich. It will be four years in November that I bought my first laptop and started marketing myself as a freelancer. After a few Chicago winter months of working out of my second apartment bedroom, I started to go a little nuts. So I subleased office space, hired an intern, and began building the firm.

Today we're 15 people and we have 12 clients, half of whom has been with us since the beginning. We work in the hospitality, lawn and garden, and consumer packaging businesses. We work with GardenTech Lawn & Garden, GE Capital Solutions, Franchise Finance, Gettys, Hotel of Tomorrow, among others.

Q. On the surface, your clients seem to have little in common. Do your strategies differ greatly for each client depending on their core business?
In my opinion, public relations is public relations. Once you have a strong strategy for getting placements, it works across all industries. And because media relations is the backbone of our business, the process is similar for most clients.

We look for ways to show big ROI on public relations dollars spent. Placed stories still come out on top because people will say, "I read you in such-and-such." We also have our clients do a ton of speaking engagements because they see immediate ROI from those.

Our clients like the diversity of our clients because it means we can do the job, but we don't have a conflict of interest. They like that they don't have to compete with our other clients.

Q. Your website states that client service is first and foremost in everything you do. Whatever it takes to help your clients achieve their goals is what you do. What is that?
I've always been a big believer in client service. It was a core value instilled in me at Fleishman-Hillard and I'm instilling it in my staff now. It's our number one value because, without our clients, I wouldn't have a business to run and my staff wouldn't have jobs. I hear so many times, "We don't know what our PR team is doing," or "We never hear from our PR team." Things like that blow my mind. Our clients hear from us daily, whether they like it or not

Q. Do you ever get into any kind of crisis communications for your clients?
No, we've been lucky and haven't had to do any crisis communications since I started the business. But when I was at Fleishman-Hillard, one of their clients, Hostess, found asbestos in a Twinkies' plant. We all sat in the FH office over the weekend and called everyone who had bought Twinkies to tell them about this. It was really tactical crisis communications, but it averted a serious issue because we stayed on top of it.

For each of our current clients we have an emergency crisis communications plan that we keep up to date.

Q. Let's talk about you for a minute. You have an illustrious educational background, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a bachelor's degree in English. Of the doors open to you, you stepped through the one labeled Public Relations. What brought you to our profession? And do you ever think, oh darn, I wish I'd become a teacher instead?
No, I never yearned to be a teacher. What I set out to do was go to law school and, after that, become a sports agent. I'm very much an introvert, however, and at that time, I was painfully shy. When I told my Mom what I wanted to do, she said she didn't think it was a good idea. She advised me to go into a business that would help me break out of that shyness. So with my degree in hand, I went to Fleishman-Hillard, who must have seen something in me because they hired me. They not only taught me public relations, they taught me how to talk to people, gave me self-confidence, and helped me change some of my weaknesses into strengths.

But I'd still like to be a sports agent or NFL reporter…someday! I think PR translates very well.

Q: What's been thus far the high point - and the low - of your public relations career?
Almost every day is a high point for me - there's always something new, a new challenge. This year my advisory board disagreed with my projections for the business, urging me to push for more business. Even though it was a challenge, it was also a high for me.

As to the low point - there's really no one thing, but things happen, such as wanting a piece of business and not getting it, watching it go to a bigger agency. But when that happens, even though it's really disappointing, I try to find the silver lining.

Q: Your agency is featured prominently on the WOMMA website - can you tell us what WOMMA is and Arment Dietrich's connection with it?
WOMMA stands for Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which was created two years ago. It's about how you use word of mouth for public relations through activities such as blogging and podcasts. We're small and lean and could jump on. Bigger agencies are interested in this too and are signing on, but for them it becomes part of their longer-term plans.

Q: What's in the near and far term for Arment Dietrich? You seem to have grown pretty rapidly. Do you expect more of the same?
In the near term we're doing outstanding business - we expect to go beyond our projections this year by three quarters of a million dollars. In the long term...I thought at one point I might sell the business by the time I was 40, but I've changed my mind. I want to build it into a mid-size firm of about 100 employees. Then step back and advise how it's run.

Q: What advice do you give to those fledgling PR professionals out there?
For those just graduating - do your research. I get emails from young people just out of school asking if we're hiring and it's evident they didn't do their research. It's not hard to figure out who to send an email to and what we want to see in a resume. If I receive an email from the "contact us" page on our Web site, I delete it.

And to those young professionals who have been out for a couple of years, I advise them to learn, learn, learn as much as they can. And to see that no job is too small - that each job is an opportunity. It's hard to see now, but in a few years, they'll see how all of those clip reports translate to strategy for bigger pieces of business.