Valerie Glenn

By Mark Hansel

Friday, April 3, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Valerie Glenn is chief executive of the Glenn Group.

In 2008 her company, the Rose–Glenn Group, merged with DRGM Advertising to form the Glenn Group, an advertising, media and public relations firm with offices in Las Vegas and Reno. The company’s diverse customer base includes clients in the casino, hospitality and health care industries.

Glenn talked to In Business Las Vegas about the company’s business model and how the current economic downturn has affected the advertising industry and the business community.

IBLV: How was the Glenn Group formed?

My husband started a company called DRGM Advertising in 1975, and my father started a company called Phil Rose Advertising in 1979. In 1989 I decided I wanted to get back in the advertising business — I was in sales for 10 years before that. My husband and I knew that we probably couldn’t work together because it probably wouldn’t be good for our marriage. So I decided to join my dad in his advertising agency and effectively went into competition with my husband, with his blessing. He was very supportive and I give him a lot of credit for that. I joined my dad and we renamed the company the Rose-Glenn Group.

For 19 years I ran that company, and we grew it from five people to more than 30 people. We really expanded our scope of work with different kinds of clients and offerings for those clients. In the meantime, my husband was running DRGM — he had offices in both Reno and Las Vegas. My husband is about 10 years older than I am, and about a year and a half ago he came home and said, “You know, I really don’t want to do this anymore. Why don’t we think about merging our companies and you run them and I’ll retire?” On Sept. 3, 2007, we announced our merger and renamed the company the Glenn Group, and it became effective on Jan. 1 of last year. We brought together our two companies and it’s been very successful.

Individually, we all bring different things to this new company in terms of synergies and efficiencies. DRGM Advertising was very deeply involved in the gaming and hospitality industries, in terms of client base. It’s really been a core competency of DRGM for its entire history, having worked with more than 50 gaming properties across the country from the big Strip properties here in Las Vegas to tribal casinos and riverboat casinos. We’ve opened properties like Mandalay Bay and MGM Grand. The Rose-Glenn Group, my company, was much more involved in every other industry. We worked in financial services, health care, master-planned communities, homebuilding, insurance, retail and pretty much any other category you can imagine.

It really was kind of nice to bring the two companies together because we each brought different experiences to the table. The Rose-Glenn Group was highly involved in public relations, which DRGM was not, so we were able to bring that service to the new company. We are very involved in Web design and development, digital marketing and social marketing. It’s been a really wonderful combination of two companies that have been successful in business for almost 40 years. They are all family businesses. My father, my husband and I, and now our daughter, are involved in our businesses, so we have three generations involved.

What does the Glenn Group bring to the table for its clients?

We bring a full integration of marketing communications to our clients. There are so many communications opportunities out there, it’s ridiculous, and it’s a highly fragmented communications world. By virtue of offering that full integration of services under one roof to our clients, we can really explore the most efficient and effective way for or clients to reach their target audiences. Sometimes that is very traditional advertising where we create and produce television, radio, outdoor or newspaper advertising. Sometimes it is very nontraditional, very much related to the interactive and digital world.

Public relations has been a huge offering for our clients because it’s a wonderful balance to paid advertising. When you combine advertising and public relations it’s a pretty powerful combination in terms of how you can communicate effectively. Involvement in Web site design and development and search engine optimization and search engine marketing helps recognize all of the tools that really bring people into that funnel that is your Web site. We can then utilize that information to make an effective marketing campaign and we can track people and understand what they are doing in a site so we can really turn that into a lead.

How do you distinguish yourself in such a competitive market?

It’s a good question and we obviously are always trying to find ways to distinguish our clients in a competitive marketplace, and we try to practice what we preach in that regard. The way that we have really positioned ourselves as a company is first to offer all of the services one might expect from a firm like ours. What makes us a little bit different, and is communicated through our brand identity, is that we are just a group of good people doing good work and getting good results for our clients. We have fun doing what we do and we are very passionate about it, and that comes through in our relationships with our clients. We want it to be a very productive two-way relationship.

What is your approach with clients? Is there a lead person on an account or is it more of a team approach?

We definitely take a team approach to pretty much everything we do. When we work with a client in a fully integrated fashion, it’s really important to us to bring together the different disciplines we represent into one room to basically help a client solve a problem. We have to be very strategic in what we do, and that’s truer now than it ever was, not only due to the fragmentation of the communication options out there, but budgets are tighter now. We have to be very efficient and very creative in the way we approach things. By virtue of all the different people within our organization representing different points of view, we can come together to form a very holistic standpoint and really understand our client’s problem.

We take a lot of time to really understand their consumer because we always want to make sure we are representing the consumer’s point of view. I really believe that it’s not so much about what someone is trying to sell. It has everything to do with what somebody wants to buy, and if you are selling something that nobody wants to buy then everybody is in trouble. We need to understand what will resonate with the target audience and the consumer to compel them to buy what a client is interested in selling. So we do take a team approach and try to be media neutral in terms of the decisions we make for our client.

A client may walk in and say, “I need some ads,” and we might say, “Well, let’s take a big step backward for a minute and talk about what you are trying to accomplish, because that may or may not be the best solution for you.” We’ve got such an incredible team of people that have such depth in their expertise of these various areas that it really makes it fun to kind of sit down, be creative and figure out what that best solution is.

What is your vision for the company?

Our vision is to continue to grow in a thoughtful and reasonable way. We have such depth in the gaming industry that, of course, we want to continue to grow our gaming clientele because we have so much experience and creativity to offer in that industry. One of our priorities is to grow our Las Vegas clientele outside of the casino industry. As I said, our company has great experience in many different categories, so we are really looking to diversify our client base in the Las Vegas market much as we have done in Northern Nevada. So that’s a high priority and we are looking for those opportunities as we move forward.

You’ve been in the Las Vegas market for quite a while. How has it changed?

It’s really grown up. I’ve been doing business in the market for about 30 years now and it’s obviously changed a lot. I remember 25 years ago when I was in advertising sales and we used to represent Nevada Magazine, which had a corporate rate at the Hacienda Hotel. The Hacienda was way out in the boonies, but now that’s Mandalay Bay. It’s grown tremendously and it’s always been a dynamic business environment.

I’ve always enjoyed doing business in Las Vegas because there’s an attitude and a feeling of proactive — making things happen here. It’s very entrepreneurial and, being an entrepreneur, I guess I relate to that. It’s been interesting to see the changes in the last year or so, looking at so many of the changes and the companies that are struggling right now. I believe that Las Vegas is an incredibly dynamic community and it will probably bounce back faster than most, maybe because of that entrepreneurial approach and spirit that this community has.

You mentioned social marketing and the social network, that’s still a big part of how people do business here. How do you integrate that into the strategy you employ for clients?

That’s actually a big part of what we tuck under that umbrella of public relations, which we refer to as community relations. We are big proponents of the effectiveness of creating brand awareness for your company by virtue of the things you are associated with. We look for opportunities for our clients, to sync them up with organizations or events or programs that will be beneficial to them. One of our goals is often to get our clients on the podium as opposed to sitting in the audience. If there is an event that we can get our client involved with, that makes sense from a brand awareness strategy and brand awareness standpoint, we try to do that.

We also look for cause-related marketing opportunities — ways that we can pair a client with a nonprofit organization that creates a win-win opportunity for the client and the nonprofit. For example, it may be something that will raise dollars or create awareness of the nonprofit organization by virtue of a cause-related marketing program on behalf of the client. We really look for a lot of those opportunities because we think that community relations is a really important piece of the puzzle.

How client-specific is your approach?

Well, first of all, every client is different, but there are many tools that we use that would cross and transcend all client needs in some regard. I think one of the things that’s been very beneficial to us is the fact that we have worked in so many industry categories. It may be that you take an approach for a particular client in an industry and there is something in that approach that could actually apply in another industry. It’s certainly not proprietary — it’s nothing that couldn’t be used in one place or the other, but had we not worked in that other category, we might not have come across that approach. I think by being diverse in our client experience it has actually benefited all of our clients in some regard or another, because we can apply a lot of those tactics to different clients. The approach is often similar, we are very strategic in the approach. We need to think about helping our clients establish communications goals and objectives and then think about how we achieve them.

Then you get into the fun part, which is getting into the tactics of how you are going to do it because there are so many options now and ways to help our clients communicate. When I started in the business, there were basically a handful of television stations, and cable was starting to become fairly prominent in a few markets and there were a few newspapers and magazines, but it was fairly finite. It’s endless now, between not only the traditional media options, but public relations opportunities and nontraditional online marketing opportunities; the sky is kind of the limit.

Who are some of your biggest clients?

(International Game Technology) is one of our clients both from an advertising and public relations standpoint. We handle tribal casinos, for instance Buffalo Thunder Resort in Santa Fe, N.M. We have a riverboat casino in Elgin, Ill., and Chicagoland called Grand Victoria. We work with a major medical complex in Northern Nevada, Renown Health and Renown Medical Center. We work with the workers’ compensation insurance provider, Employers, which is corporately located in Nevada, but national in scope. That has expanded our scope to 29 states across the country.

Is it challenging to recognize what clicks in all of the different markets across the country?

It’s often very market-specific. We have so many tools to be able to really get to the heart of each of those markets. Demographically, they are different. Typographically they are different, but we have the ability to understand and profile different groups of people so that we are much more successful in reaching them. Yes, very often markets are different. They can be different just because of the region of the country they are in. For instance, the way we approach the market in Battle Creek, Mich., is very different from what we do in Santa Fe, N.M., as you can imagine. There are different dynamics and different media options and different attitudes, so it’s very important that we understand that. We have very sophisticated tools that let us dig deep and figure those things out.

How does the advertising business in Reno differ from Las Vegas?

If you are talking from the gaming standpoint it is very different. Obviously, the gaming impact in Las Vegas is like nowhere else. Reno has become less and less reliant on gaming over the years. I think Northern Nevada has worked hard to diversify the economy as best it can because, with the proliferation of gaming everywhere, it’s tougher to compete. There are some very successful, forward-thinking, aggressive gaming companies in Northern Nevada that do great, but there are some that have foundered over the years. I think the reliance on gaming as an industry has been reduced over the years, but is still a very big part of that economy and will continue to be into the foreseeable future. Lake Tahoe relies on gaming, especially at the south end of the lake. Here in Las Vegas, obviously, the gaming impacts are huge in terms of the number of companies and properties and just the whole offering. I think we have also done a great job here in Las Vegas of diversifying the economy as well, which is really important. We need to have lots of different companies and industries that thrive and all contribute to one another.

You employ some unconventional methods, both internally and for your clients. Can you talk about that?

We are very creative; that is what we do. If we weren’t, we should probably get out of this business, and I’m very proud of the level of creativity that our staff brings to our clients and, frankly, ourselves. We are looking for ways to promote our company in creative, compelling ways that will be memorable and stand out and get noticed because we need to practice what we preach. But I would say that we work very hard at not being creative for creative sake. It’s very important to communicate with each client in the way that makes the most sense. For some clients, taking an unconventional approach is absolutely what we need to do, but it can be very inappropriate for some clients. We look at each client very individually, and we need to make sure the approach is customized for each client because each client has its own goals and objectives and problems to solve. It has its own target audience and consumers it is trying to reach out to and a set of competitors it is trying to distinguish itself from. We work very closely with our clients in a partnership to determine the best way to approach that.

What about internal promotions, such as the Resolution-a-thon?

Each year we, as a company, try to do something good in the community around the holidays. We developed our own cause-related marketing campaign for the Glenn Group this year called the Resolution-a-thon. All of our employees made a New Year’s resolution of some sort and some were very straightforward. Mine, for example, was to see how many times I could walk on the treadmill during the month of January and February. Some were a little more unconventional. We had one person in our Northern Nevada office decide she was going to run the equivalent of Lake Tahoe on her lunch hour and she completed that. Our creative director was challenged to shave his head into a Mohawk and wear big, gold Mr. T chains around his neck for the month of February. Our creative director travels every week between our Las Vegas and Reno offices, so he had to get on a Southwest airplane once a week, with that little outfit on, but it raised money. We all got pledges for whatever we were doing and we are raising money for Three Square in Las Vegas and the Food Bank in Northern Nevada, so it was a classic cause-related marketing campaign. By virtue of all of our employees getting very involved in this thing, I’m not sure exactly where we are going to end up, but we probably will be making a contribution to Three Square of between $10,000 and $12,000.

We’ve had loads of fun with it from our own marketing standpoint because we have employed the strategies and tactics that we also recommend our clients to use. We’ve done direct mail, e-mail, social marketing, videos on YouTube; we’ve got it on Twitter. It’s a great way for us, as a company, to be able to creatively market ourselves on behalf of a great organization and do a good deed in the community and engage all of our employees at the same time.

What was the response from your clients?

They think we’re nuts, but you’d better be creative if you are in our business.

How much of your business is referrals?

I don’t know that I can quantify it, but I would say, over the years a good portion of it has been referrals in some way. Sometimes that is actual referrals from another client, which, of course, is the best referral you can get. We love it when we have happy clients who tell somebody else about us. Another form of referral is making sure that we have good awareness of our company out in the marketplace because if somebody were to ask another person to recommend a good advertising and PR firm, I want to be one of the companies that is named. I want to make sure that the Glenn Group is at least on that list.

Referrals are a very important part of our business, whether it’s very personal or it’s just a case of somebody being aware of what we’ve done out in the community or from a communications standpoint.

How has the merger worked out?

We’ve come together really wonderfully. It’s been a pretty interesting experience for me. Obviously, I’ve never merged companies before. It was really fun to let your intuition and instincts kick in and help do some of the things that you need to do as a company to integrate and make two cultures come together. How those cultures merge together and evolve determines the way you are going to operate as a company. I have to say it happened really quickly and smoothly. The bumps in the road had more to do with things like pulling accounting systems and IT and phone systems all together. In terms of the culture and how we operate as a company, the transition was awesome.

Were you familiar with the Reno market before the merger?

I’m very familiar with Reno. I work out of the Reno market every week. Most of the clients we work with are not really specific to either geographic area in terms of their marketing. Certainly, we have some clients that only focus on local markets, but most of our clients market either throughout the state of Nevada or regionally or nationally. We have clients who are physically located here in Las Vegas or Northern Nevada, but we also have clients all over the country, in places like Michigan, Illinois, New Mexico and California.

How important is branding to your clients?

I think it’s the most important thing. If you think about the value of a brand, and we can establish a brand communication for a client that especially gets consumers to want to do business with your company because of what you stand for, that’s pretty powerful. If you are always competing on the features and benefits level, you may win a few of the battles, but you are never going to win the war. Any company can change their prices, for example, and so can its competitors. So unless a company creates loyalty to your brand, it will not ultimately have a customer for the long term. We believe it’s extremely important for clients to understand the distinction of their brand and make sure that is a big part of their communication. That’s not to say they shouldn’t advertise features and benefits as part of that communication, but it’s really important that the brand stands out. Ideally, we want our clients’ customers to literally do business with them because of what they stand for. If we can help a client understand that and communicate it, a big part of our job is done.

What local charities and civic groups are you involved with?

Obviously, we are very involved with Three Square right now because of the Resolution-a-thon. We’re involved with the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and the Henderson Chamber of Commerce and I’ve made a few presentations at the chamber. We are using that as a networking opportunity, obviously, but being a business organization, it’s nice to be involved with other companies in that way. We’re involved in a number of our industry organizations, for example, the AD Club here in Las Vegas and Public Relations Society of America because we really support our employees’ involvement in the community. That’s a very important part of our business and our culture. As a company, one of the things we can offer is our company. We have gotten involved in a number of pro bono projects over the years and we look for those as well.

Have you made any changes to your business model because of the economy?

We have always been very focused on new business development and continue to be. In these economic times that’s probably more important than it ever has been because everybody is spending less and doing less. To continue to grow your company, you’ve got to be out there and you’ve got to have new prospects in the pipeline. I don’t know that we’ve changed, it’s just a way of doing business for us, it’s always at the forefront of what we do and we always try to do that in a thoughtful and paced way. We are not looking to double the size of our company in six months because that’s not fair to us, our existing clients or our new clients.

I know the PR community has been hit hard, has the advertising business been hit hard as well?

Absolutely. From our business perspective clients are spending less. For the most part, our clients are quite savvy and they understand the importance of marketing, especially in a down economy. There are all kinds of statistics that show that through all of the recessions of the last 40 years, the companies that continue to market and, frankly, become more aggressive are the ones that come out on top of the heap. The reality is that everybody’s business is off and when you are laying people off, you look at all of your expense lines and as much as some do not want to cut their marketing expense, they are forced to cut back on that like everything else. So we have definitely seen a difference; it’s a challenging time.

Do customers enlist your services and then want to do it their own way?

That happens sometimes. We hope that we all go into this knowing what we all do best. Most of our clients respect the fact that we are marketing communications professionals and we all have a role here. We rely on our clients to make us as knowledgeable about their business as we possibly can be, but ultimately they are always going to know their business better than we will. In most cases it’s a really wonderful relationship, but, frankly, it’s the client’s money and we provide our advice and counsel and if they choose to do it a different way that’s their choice and we will support them in any way we can.

You hear the word spin a lot. What does that word mean to you?

The word spin connotes manipulation and that’s really not what we try to do. From a PR standpoint, if we are dealing with a crisis with a client, it’s really important to manage communications in a way that the media will understand clearly and help us communicate. When our clients have had the foresight to bring us in as a part of a potential crisis or a problem area, where we can sit down with the media and explain it, that’s really our goal. It’s about getting the information out and managing it and ensuring that both sides of a story are told.

Looking forward, what do you see in the near future for your company and for Las Vegas?

I am the eternal optimist. These are difficult times for every business. I haven’t come across too many business owners who aren’t struggling in one way or another. There are very few businesses that are immune from this economic downturn, but I believe that we will be resilient and Las Vegas, in particular, is going to bounce back from this faster than most. I think it’s sort of the nature of this community and there is so much entrepreneurial spirit here that I’m sure we will come back strong.

As for our company, I’m looking forward to playing a bigger role in as Las Vegas in terms of our community involvement and working with more Las Vegas-based companies in helping with their marketing. There are some incredible companies here. Some have been in business for many years, some are newer to the community, but I think our company brings such a level of expertise in terms of our depth and breadth of experience in so many categories that we have a lot to offer.

I’m just really proud of who we are as a company and our staff. We really have a lot of fun doing what we do and we care about it. It sounds kind of hokey, but we really genuinely enjoy our business and working with our clients to help them achieve success. I think the goal for us is just to continue to grow as a company — there are not a lot of companies that have had our longevity and we are pretty proud of that. We are just looking forward to continuing to help Las Vegas grow and for its return to growth and economic prosperity.