Chad Giron Joins Atomic PR New York As Account Director
Friday, 23 July 2010
Atomic New York's newest account director, Chad Giron, likes games. As a native Pittsburgher, he can't help but build his autumn Sundays around Steelers games...and then there are the Penguins, too. (He doesn't like to talk about the Pirates - we can't blame him.) Chad has brought his considerable consumer tech, digital entertainment and public affairs game to Atomic New York - adding even more depth to Atomic's already deep bench of tech PR pros.
Chad comes to Atomic with more than a decade of diverse communications experience. He started off at Edelman in Washington, DC (and was a White House intern before that) then moved on to the firm's LA office. At Edelman Chad worked on a selection of blue chip clients including Toshiba, Warner Home Video and the Motion Picture Association of America. He then moved in-house as Director, Global Media for publicly-traded Syntax-Brillian corporation - better known for making Olevia-brand HDTVs and Vivitar digital cameras - and a marketing sponsorship with ESPN that Chad helped to manage.
Chad has a BA in History from Penn State and also studied in a Masters of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. He also claims to play a mean game of Trivial Pursuit. With his diversity of experience with major clients and across sectors - and his new media and digital content development skills - Chad's a great addition to the growing team at Atomic New York.
Update: AtomicPR's work for The Trust For Public Land to save Cahuenga Peak - the home of the iconic Hollywood Sign
Monday, 19 July 2010
Sean Mulholland originally posted about this project in February when AtomicPR's L.A. office had just unveiled the first phase of a stunt to cover up the Hollywood Sign, which generated major international media and blogosphere buzz - Atomic's "Hollywood sign" stunt for the Trust for Public Land. We don't always get multiple news helicopters to turn out for all our programs, but it's pretty cool when they do. :-)
By covering up the Sign, the Save Cahuenga Peak project went on to capture the imagination of a wide variety of organizations and people, from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, to Dame Elizabeth Taylor and Ellen DeGeneres, to Governor Schwarzenegger and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Even the Vatican got in touch- and Hugh Hefner jumped in as the surprise punctuation mark at the end.
The AtomicPR - designed Save the Peak campaign mixed insightful research and strategy with a high-level celebrity and politician evangelist program, strong media relations, a micro-site, active social media interaction, a donation widget, video and real world events. The Save the Peak campaign successfully raised the $12.5 million needed to set aside Cahuenga Peak as an extension of Los Angeles' Griffith Park, and will be enjoyed for generations to come. A detailed description of the campaign and results is here: The Trust for Public Land: From Hollywood to Save The Peak, and Atomic's teams in L.A. and San Francisco had a blast working on it.Media and blogger event showcasing the Art of Managing Digital Media for new Atomic client: NETGEAR
Saturday, 10 July 2010
Recently, Atomic PR won the NETGEAR account - stand by for a formal announcement. In our first major launch and kick-off event this past Thursday, we took to our favorite San Francisco art gallery and nightclub 111 Minna to showcase NETGEAR's first-of-its-kind ReadyNAS Ultra, which along with partners Intel, TiVo, Orb and Skifta, brings a bit of art to the management of digital media.
The innovative network storage product does away forever with those ever-accumulating and capacity-escalating USB storage devices in favor of a central unit from which users simply stream and media-shift content from one device to another, anywhere in the house. Even better, it's the first solution to provide nearly limitless capacity to all TiVo's, putting an end to domestic warfare over what to delete next.
After a short intro from Chairman and CEO Patrick Lo, a couple dozen local media, bloggers and analysts had the opportunity to speak with NETGEAR executives, see the products in action, and hear from partner executives who also had demos running at the event. All with a DJ groove in the background to keep things lively throughout the night.
The following morning, more than 40 stories appeared in media and blogs, with headlines like "NETGEAR aims to make home storage hip" (CNET), "How NETGEAR's ReadyNAS Ultra Redefines the Role of Network Storage" (PC World) and "NETGEAR tries to kill off local storage with its networked media servers" (VentureBeat). And the press release hadn't even hit yet. Here's some of the coverage on Google News: http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=ReadyNAS+Ultra
Great product, fun night - keep your eye out for more.
Atomic PR wins Pioneer Electronics account, and gets blown away at 2010 Pioneer Sound Build-off
Sunday, 04 July 2010
In April 2010, Atomic PR was selected as agency of record for Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc., following a competitive review involving some of the top public relations agencies in Los Angeles and the US. Our first assignment was to attend the electronic leader's fourth annual Pioneer Sound Build-off event in La Quinta, California.
We came, we saw, and were blown away by the sound and the enthusiasm as twelve of Pioneer's top audio specialist retailers displayed fully outfitted vehicles with Pioneer's Stage 4 reference quality products. These speakers, subwoofers, amplifiers and in-dash head units are devoted purely to sound quality and reproducing the artist's original intention. Many of us at Atomic had never heard a sound system that wasn't factory installed, and just sitting in these specially designed cars was like hearing a CD or watching high definition TV for the very first time. You don't realize what you're missing until you experience it.
To this crowd, having an ear for the intricacies of balanced, high-fidelity sound is like having the palette to discern the terroir of a fine wine. We spoke with reporters who've owned Pioneer products for decades, refusing to get rid of them. Not many industries, or brands, have a following so devoted, and while we're still in the process of hammering out our plans for helping shape Pioneer's image, media coverage and online conversations into the future, we're looking forward to leveraging the incredible loyalty of the brand's enthusiasts.
What a great assignment.
Are PR people becoming the new spammers?
Friday, 04 June 2010
Jason Mendelson, a venture capitalist who blogs on venture capital topics and other things, posted a pretty negative piece about Atomic this morning, Why AtomicPR Sucks Ass and How They are Breaking the Law, Too. He also recently posted a piece titled Are PR People Becoming the New Spammers?. I've reached out personally to Jason to talk it over.
He's certainly entitled to his opinion and to air it openly. But Atomic doesn't practice or condone "carpet bombing", and we've had very few complaints or "stop" requests over the 10 years we've worked with high profile start ups and their VC firms.
Obviously he's pretty frustrated. It's unfortunate that our agency gets to serve as the current example in his coverage on the topic; in practice, we try pretty hard to target specific kinds of content only to individuals who are interested, and invest in rather expensive journalist and blogger databases like that from Cision, as many other top firms do.
Our good intentions aside, after looking into Jason's complaint, I found that he has indeed told a few of our people over recent years to stop contacting him. Though each has attempted to comply, his name has popped back up again on other teams' lists of relevant contacts. This is partly due to a process/technology disconnect and clearly, we need a solution at agency level to make certain that no one here, on any team, ever emails him again. Or others as cases may arise. Our tech team is working on a solution as I post this.
Jason's current listing in the Cision journalist & blogger database
Aside from our need to avoid contact with Jason, part of the reason that he (and others) may be receiving contact from PR firms is that he's listed as a blogger who covers venture capital related topics in the Cision database; an industry standard that communications professionals use in an attempt to target content and individual interactions with journalists and bloggers that are interested in receiving information on specific topics. Here's Jason's current Cision profile and contact info:
We contacted Cision today, and a rep told us that their team actively contacts journalists and bloggers to confirm that they want to be listed in the database, and that many of those listed fill out questionnaires detailing their areas of interest as well as their contact preferences.
According to the Cision rep, bloggers or journalists can opt out of their service by emailing their request to Changes.us@cision.com and Cision will delete them from their database with no questions asked within 48 hours.
Please get in touch with questions or comments to this post or email me: andy@atomicpr.com.
