Selling Washington as Place to Be

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Her Toughest Pitch: Selling Washington as Place to Be

Monday, March 26, 2007; D01

When Cary Hatch came to MDB Communications 26 years ago, it was a three-person marketing firm that designed corporate logos. No Internet, no cellphones, not even a fax machine. She bought the company in 1987 and gradually added a couple of dozen employees.

But it took some convincing to recruit those workers.

Washington may be the Hollywood of issues campaigns, but for everything else the top advertising and marketing talent has long gravitated to the traditional media hubs of New York and Los Angeles.

"The idea was that D.C., while it is high on the list for political work, just didn't have the edge to market consumer goods," Hatch said from MDB's 17th Street NW offices. "We were strictly a government town."

In sheer numbers, Washington's advertising, marketing and public relations workforce still trails New York and Los Angeles. But for the past eight years, according to the Greater Washington Initiative study, it has grown four times faster than the national average. In one year alone, from 2004 to 2005, the region's advertising industry added 5,000 jobs.

Now, the area has a higher per-capita concentration of such workers than any of the study's other five metropolitan areas -- New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco-San Jose -- evaluated in the study. PR specialists here outnumber those in the other markets 2 to 1.

Since Hatch's early days in Washington, such household names as Discovery Communications, Capital One and Geico have located in the area. Hoteliers, retailers and other businesses seeking to tap the region's increasingly wealthy, sophisticated and diverse population looked for marketers with local expertise. And the rise of new advertising platforms -- podcasts, blogs, MySpace -- meant new chances to harness the area's telecommunications strengths.

Hatch seized the opportunity and landed some plum accounts, including National Geographic, Ritz-Carlton and Sprint. But hiring is still a problem: She has to work to persuade cream-of-the-crop talent that Washington is the place to be.

In August, she went after Richard Coad, the whiz behind the Subway ads that featured Jared Fogle, the man who lost 235 pounds eating low-fat subs. Coad was being courted by firms in Seattle, Portland, Atlanta and Dallas, not to mention some players on Madison Avenue and Rodeo Drive.

"I showed him around, talked a lot about the cultural draw and highlighted the major brands in our area," she said. Hatch finally beat out firms in the other "old-school" cities, and Coad became MDB's creative director. On a roll, she then lured an account supervisor from New Orleans and a production director from Chicago.

At RTC Relationship Marketing, a Georgetown firm, president Jeff Ross says he's trying to fill 50 open slots as soon as possible. The firm hired 100 people last year and 50 in the past three months. He's hiring people right out of college, he said, which he didn't do as much just a few years ago. RTC has three full-time recruiters.

"People come here from New York and are surprised to find a firm of this size here," Ross said. "It's not a typical ad town."

Many of the people he hires come to the area because a spouse was transferred here, he said, not because they thought it would be a great place to launch an advertising career. But when they get here, they find themselves not working on the political ads they might have expected but on campaigns for blue-chip clients like Microsoft and Time Warner Cable.

So how can advertising executives, who make a living selling their clients' ideas, sell the city to potential employees?

"We have to be our own best advocates," Hatch said. "Self-promotion is key."

-- Kim Hart

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