AAL Group Core Business: Public relations for technology firms Revenue in 1991: $500,000 Revenue in 2000: $5.3 million Employees in 1991: 1 Employees in 2000: 7 Goal: To provide effective public relations strategies for clients Driving Force: The need for cost-efficient and effective public relations for tech firms in a slow economy Public relations firm with technology specialty finds it takes more and more imagination to make clients’ phones ring Barbara Lopez knows all she needs to about the tech industry’s declining fortunes. “What else can you say? It’s just plain bad,” Lopez said. But not so bad her AAL Group in Woodland Hills can’t do something about it. The public relations firm specializes in providing advice to technology firms. And making lemonade out of a lemon-like economy is becoming status quo in the company’s recent efforts to bolster its clients’ brand names and products. Take Santa Barbara-based Blue Nile Technology and its AdiX system, a new Web-based software application geared for advertising firms. “We knew the client didn’t have a big budget for advertising, so we had to figure something out,” Lopez said. Just days after a story appeared in Advertising Week magazine claiming that many agencies did not have the computer-based management tools they need to deal with clients or field offices, Lopez saw a way to capitalize on it. “We sent an e-mail out to the CEOs of the top 25 advertising agencies in the United States with the news release referencing the Ad Week story,” she said. Within days, ad agencies were calling Blue Nile. The application, dubbed AdiX, for Advertising Information Exchange, allows clients and employees alike to access a company Web site to check for messages, the status of accounts, updates on projects or other vital information by merely logging onto the site. The system also automatically e-mails company departments about the completion of various stages of a project, thus improving productivity. “Nobody had anything like that and it struck a chord,” she said. The company is now in the midst of negotiating with a major multinational advertising firm to use the application in all of its offices worldwide, Lopez said. Dean Benjamin, Blue Nile’s COO, said he was surprised by the effectiveness of AAL’s campaign. “We hadn’t done PR before and there was a reticence about how effective it was going to be, but I’m a believer now. I’ve seen it work,” Benjamin said. Likewise, Sarah Waffle, a marketing specialist with EnGenius Technologies of Costa Mesa, said AAL was pivotal in the marketing of the company’s new long-range cordless phone, the FM90. With AAL’s help, Waffle said, the company’s new phone, with a range of eight unobstructed miles, was featured in the June issue of Playboy magazine as part of a feature on gadgets for Father’s Day and graduation gifts. When CNN, CBS and Fox Broadcasting followed up with taped segments for their morning shows, sales increased dramatically, Waffle said. The AAL Group has grown since its inception in 1991 from a staff of two to seven now. It had $170 in net income on revenues of $500,000 its first year, $44,198 in net income on revenue of $5.3 million in 2000. Born in Detroit, the then-Barbara Boyle moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s to join what was then Chiat/Day where she learned the ropes from advertising gurus Jay Chiat and Guy Day. By the mid-1980s, Lopez had left to go into business with a colleague and then in 1991 she had her own company, hoping to take advantage of what she thought was going to be the future. “I wanted to handle tech firms from the beginning,” she said. But as last year’s tech downturn became a nosedive, Lopez knew she had to adjust. “We had smaller budgets to work with and a tougher job of marketing these brands,” she said. Lopez had to let one staff member go and look forward to decreased revenues. She also knew more imagination than she had ever exercised before would be required if she was going to push her clients’ brands. And it worked. Westlake Village-based Chatsworth Products Inc., for instance, had trouble selling its rack and network connecting systems through its usual trade-show channels. “We saw their trade show booth and saw the problem,” she said. “People would see all this network equipment mounted and they thought they made the server when in effect they made the rack and cable management products.” AAL staff members came up with a solution: feature large, poster-sized photographs of the networking equipment, showing it before and after the racks and network cabling equipment were installed. “People immediately got it,” Lopez said. Peter Jancourtz, director of strategic planning for CPI, said his company relies on public relations now more than ever. “Barbara is a risk taker and she knows this business,” Jancourtz said.
