PT Insights

Apr
29

The Good Old Days Really Were FILL IN THE BLANKS

Sheila Tate

When I graduated from college 46 years ago (hear me shrieking in disbelief in the background), I had three job offers.

I took the cushy corporate PR job that paid $500 per month, and within two years I had moved to the agency side for big money ($9,000) and big assignments. Need proof? Well, I booked and then drove a professional model around the Mid-Atlantic for several months while she appeared on morning TV shows demonstrating how to use Rockwell power tools to refinish furniture.

We even scientifically measured the resonance of our effort by having viewers send the local station 25 cents (and a stamped, pre-addressed envelope) for a copy of our brochure of refinishing tips. I wrote and supervised the production of the brochure. I knew nothing about refinishing furniture — I didn’t even own any furniture. Come to think of it, I have still never refinished a piece of furniture. But I still have one of those brochures!

Yes, that was the state of our art in 1964. Fast forward to 1981 when I walked into the White House as Nancy Reagan’s press secretary. There were no cell phones, no personal computers. Only the secretarial staff had word processors. We recorded the first lady’s daily schedule on a dedicated phone line that reporters knew to call after 5 p.m. the night before. There were three networks and an amateurish non-union startup called CNN, plus the well-known print media.

By 1988 when George H. W. Bush asked me to be his campaign press secretary, we were still without cell phones — all we had on Air Force 2 was a fax machine and secure phone lines with telephone operators. The vice president refused to use a computer because one had eaten one of his speech drafts and, according to him, they were nothing but “communist conspiracies.”

By then, the media landscape had changed quite a bit, and that pesky CNN was pushing the networks with round-the-clock news coverage.

These days we have the most sophisticated devices with technology that lets us to do all sorts of things we didn’t even know we wanted to do. Powell Tate has seen a lot of changes over the 21 years of its existence as a top-notch communications and public affairs firm, and we’ve faced plenty of challenges along the way. The worst was the loss of Jody Powell last year, a man who could put all this change into perspective.

There have been many “bests” – great triumphs for our clients and copious awards that make us proud. Mostly, great people who become part of a never-changing Powell Tate culture that makes it all make sense.

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Apr
26

Welcome to PT Insights

Pam Jenkins

Launching the new Powell Tate website reminds me of how far the Web has evolved.

For one, website is now a real word, according to the new AP Stylebook. Thank goodness we no longer have to capitalize and split it into two.

But language aside, the basic function of a website is vastly different than the sites we designed for ourselves and clients in the early to mid 1990s. My first site was for a medical society. The executive director was a young progressive doctor who was an early adopter of technology.

He rightly sensed that there was value in having a presence on the Internet, even though few medical groups had discovered the Web. We gave them a site to post their conference news, medical breakthroughs and membership information. It was a conduit of static information rather than a dynamic exchange.

Today, what excites me about communicating on the Web is that we’ve broken out of our confines. Content is rich and changing. We can let our personalities show though. And our hair hang down a little (some of you will know that expression — I keep dating myself).

I hope you find insights on Powell Tate.com that make you want to come back again. And again.

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