Erwin Penland adds a new chapter

By Dick Hughes  

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011 11:34 a.m. (0)

They grew together, did Erwin Penland and Greenville, from a start-up advertising agency in a town reinventing itself to one of the South’s hottest agencies in one of the South’s hottest towns.

Now, that combination takes on the advertising and marketing capital of the world with Erwin Penland creating, with a little help from its friends, a major presence in New York City that draws core strength from its Greenville base.

Virtually overnight, Erwin Penland grew from around 300 employees to about 400 in the two cities, three-fourths of them in Greenville.  Some New York personnel are or have moved to Greenville and vice versa.

“It’s a very exciting time around here,” said Joe Erwin, who with his wife Gretchen and Allen Bosworth established Erwin Penland as a local agency in Greenville 25 years ago, just as the city was beginning the urban renewal that transformed it into the vibrant regional center it is today.

“Nationally, it is like my long-time business partner, Allen Bosworth, said, people are going to ask where in the world did this half billion dollar ad agency come from overnight, ” he said.

“That’s because the growth here in Greenville has been organic for 25 years, and then suddenly there is this sudden adrenaline shot that gets captured in the trade press and around the country.”

“With Erwin Penland having a major presence there, bigger in fact than many known New York agencies, it gives us a chance to tell our story nationally in a different kind of way.”

While Erwin Penland already holds a strong base of national clients such as Verizon Wireless, Michelin, Uniroyal, GM, L’eggs, Dunkin’ Donuts, Denny’s and BMW Performance Center, “leading advertisers still want solutions and partners that have resources they can access in New York City,” Erwin said in an interview.

As an example, he said, Erwin Penland is making a final presentation for a national client with 1,100 locations across America.

“It is a business I do not know if we could have competed for if we hadn’t been able to present the unified and enhanced Erwin Penland with a major New York presence. They wanted New York to be a part of their advertising agency solutions.”

Although in the works for several months, the transformation took place when Erwin Penland last week acquired 100 employees from its Boston-based parent, Hill Holiday, to create an office under the Erwin Penland nameplate in shared offices on 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.

Hill Holiday, in turn, is a subsidiary of Interpublic Group, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing conglomerates with 41,000 employees among its many independently identified agencies operating in 90 countries.

Under the new arrangement, Hill Holiday keeps media buying teams and client and creative services for its pharmaceutical clients in New York but “most of the employees there will be Erwin Penland going forward,” Erwin said.

“This is the nicest thing about having a parent company that will allow another brand within its network to have a brand identity,” he said. “We can take advantage of some combined shared resources. It is just really, really smart.”

As Ad Week, a major trade journal, put it: “Call it New York on a budget. South Carolina shop Erwin Penland is entering the world’s largest advertising market, but rather than swallow the high rental costs associated with the Big Apple, the agency will share space with Interpublic Group sibling Hill Holiday.”

As Erwin sees it, that’s the point – creating “almost a new model” that shares resources between Greenville and New York “without having to pay additional cost” of a stand-alone operation in Manhattan.

He said the “absolute driver” in Erwin Penland’s success with national advertisers is its ability to deliver from Greenville the ”same kind of talent, experience and resources they could get at the biggest, most expensive agency in New York or Chicago” at 30 percent less cost.

“A lot of CEOs and CFOs are saying it is great to have hot, pizzazz agency partners, but, by gosh, we also are looking at the bottom line in other ways than we used to. So we want agencies that have the chops to be able to produce winning results, but we want those agency partners to do it for us for less money.”

Creative teams will be in both cities, but the digital practice, which Erwin described as “the hottest thing in marketing,” will stay in Greenville, where it was built “from scratch 10-12 years ago to one of the most robust digital units in all of the country, right here in South Carolina. It surprises people when they find that out.”

For Erwin, who will oversee both Greenville and New York offices, it is a return of sorts to where “I cut my teeth.“

He and his wife started in the business in New York and moved to Greenville as a more comfortable environment for childrearing.

“If not for that desire to start a family, I think we would still be in New York City.”