PR agencies extend their reach through global partnerships

When Mosaic Co., the Twin Cities-based fertilizer giant, needed crisis communications and media training for its managers, it turned to the veteran public relations agency Padilla Speer Beardsley for help.

But Mosiac's worldwide footprint was more than Padilla Speer could cover. So the Minneapolis-based shop turned to a global network of like-minded public relations agencies to provide the boots-on-the-ground at Mosaic sites in Canada, South America and India.

"We developed the training here," said Matt Kucharski, Padilla's executive vice president, "and worked with our partners in those countries to provide the training there."

Padilla Speer has been turning to its global partnership, known as Worldcom Public Relations Group, for two decades. It's a network of 100 independent public relations firms in 133 cities on six continents.

"The need to operate internationally is not just for big global clients anymore," Kucharski said in an interview from Padilla's offices overlooking the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis. "The majority of our clients now have some international aspect to them."

For Mosaic, the worldwide partnership offered by Padilla was important for teaching plant managers how to deal with such potential crises as worker injuries or deaths, breach of data, labor unrest or outside political protesters.

"This is a great asset for us. We're a global company with customers in 40 countries and employees in eight countries," said Mosaic spokesman Rob Litt. "It's critical for us to regionalize our message and reach the right people."

Padilla has provided communications work through Worldcom for H.B. Fuller Co. in China, for an Apogee Enterprises acquisition in Brazil and communications training for Valspar Corp. in Europe.

Padilla is not alone among independent Twin Cities public relations agencies involved in an international public relations network, where expertise and geographic location can work to a client's advantage while eliminating the cost of a bricks-and-mortar presence in a market.

The Bloomington-based communications agency Tunheim belongs to an organization called IPREX, which just added partners in Mexico City and Warsaw, Poland, bringing that network to 104 offices in 32 countries.

LaBreche, another Minneapolis-based marketing agency, belongs to PROI, which stands for Public Relations Organisation International.

"We just opened a manufacturing facility for a client in Mexico," said CEO Beth LaBreche. "We did everything from here using our Mexico partner. There's no way we could have done that alone."

"When work leaves our shop, the responsibility does not," Kucharski said. "It's our reputation as well."

Padilla, a 50-year-old agency with 2010 revenues of $17 million, has 120 employees in its Minnesota headquarters and 12 in its New York office.

It has domestic partners in every major market in the U.S. and counts its international business as a growth sector.

The agency is seeing a "significant uptick" in South American business, Kucharski said, as well as eastern Europe and Middle East counties such as Israel and Dubai. Egypt, with its recent political unrest, is a bit of a dead zone for new business these days. A Beijing office was recently added to the network, and a new partner in India just came on board.

The emergence of such global partnerships also has the added benefit of preserving an independent agency's business model.