Firms continue to grow their offerings for advocacy clients as Congress and the Biden administration push more major legislation and regulatory actions.
Global Strategy Group last week was the latest to reveal a new offering with an eye toward the upcoming corporate and non-profit legislative advocacy pushes. On Wednesday, the New York-based public affairs, communications and research firm announced the opening of its in-house digital creative and media agency called THE L@B, which “offers high-level creative direction, full-service video production, and digital.”
“We’ve seen increasing demand and expectation from our clients for turnkey solutions,” said Emily Williams, who has been GSG’s head of digital for the past seven years.
Williams is now partnered with Rob Lee, GSG’s newly hired creative director, to help lead THE L@B. The goal of bringing in Lee, who helped create brand ad campaigns like Capital One’s “What’s in your wallet?” and served as the global creative director at Newsweek, was to “bring Madison Avenue-style advertising to the public affairs issue advocacy space.”
“I think there’s an opportunity for creative to be more engaging and more effective at telling a story. Sometimes things need to be straightforward, but there are innovative ways to engage people in a piece of content,” said Williams. “This was more meant to service our communications and public affairs clients who we were already doing a fair about of digital strategy for.”
GSG’s move follows a clear trend line. Back in February, comms shop ROKK Solutions announced it was formally teaming with long-time dial-tester Engagious on a co-marketing agreement to pitch advocacy clients on a way to navigate the new Washington. The announcement came after the two shops had teamed during the pandemic on the Back to Normal Barometer, which used focus groups to gauge consumer sentiment.
At the end of last year, Phone2Action made a couple of headline-generating acquisitions. In December, it acquired KnowWho, “the world’s largest directory of public officials and influencers.” That followed its November acquisition of GovPredict.
Both moves were fueled by Phone2Action’s link up with Frontier Growth, a Charlotte-based growth equity firm.
“With the addition of KnowWho and GovPredict to the Phone2Action family, we are the company best positioned to help our customers identify opportunities, while also navigating and mitigating federal, state, and local legislative and regulatory risks,” Jeb Ory, CEO of Phone2Action, said at the time. Ory’s comments came in the wake of DSPolitical’s launch of Castable Solutions, a play for the Democratic tech shop to expand its advocacy market share.
