Valley Agency Taking on Formidable Marketing Task

This is the first in a series of stories detailing how a branding/marketing campaign is conceived and nurtured. It will be presented as a case study: Risk Control Strategies, a Westlake Village security and investigations firm for corporate and affluent clients, is working with Woodland Hills advertising/marketing firm Glyphix to create an awareness campaign. Glyphix owner Larry Cohen took part in this series to educate business owners on what happens when working with an agency and what an agency needs from a client to make a campaign work. “The good clients get the good work at the end of the day,” Cohen said. It’s an hour into a meeting between the creative team of Glyphix advertising and two top executives from security and investigative firm Risk Control Strategies. Brad Brizendine and Brad Wilder of Glyphix cannot get enough of the stories they are hearing. There was the angry executive plotting to phone in a bomb threat to his employer – and then run his co-workers down in the parking lot when they evacuated the building. Mentions of extortion and kidnappings; eavesdropping; breaking into a CEO’s computer via an unsecure wireless connection. Brizendine called them fascinating. Wilder offered that Risk Controls was the first Glyphix client that could be the subject of a television show. “Give me some more stories,” Wilder asked. Risk Control President Doug Kane and Vice President of Operations Anna Winningham look at each other. “The cyber stalking?” Winningham asked. “I was thinking the Internet cyber stalking case,” Kane agreed. A female employee of a large manufacturing company was receiving thousands of e-mails every day to the point where it took an hour for them to download, Winningham related. RCS had to be careful starting its investigation, making sure that it didn’t appear the employee had alerted management. Delving in, Risk Control investigators determined it was an inside job. The only person who could pull it off was the head of the information technology department. Top executives were in disbelief. Kane promised he could get the employee to confess in a half hour. He did it with five minutes to spare. Then the executives put the employee on administrative leave but still struggled with how they had been fooled. “He had the trust of the whole company in his hands,” Winningham said of the IT department head. When the meeting wraps up it is stories like that one that Brizendine (who goes by the nickname Briz) and Wilder and their boss Larry Cohen will fashion into an awareness and branding campaign for Risk Control. Started by Kane and partner Paul Michael Viollis in 2003, the business plan for Risk Control was scribbled on some napkins. Headquarters is in New York City, with the local office in Westlake Village, and others in Florida and Nevada. Wilder has a point with his observation that Risk Control could be the subject of a television show. The background of Kane and Winningham and their RCS colleagues, with resumes boasting of long careers at the FBI or other law enforcement agencies working in anti-terrorist squads and SWAT teams and doing electronic surveillance and polygraphs, read like they could be characters from “24.” The company, however, doesn’t do much advertising, and what advertising it has done has not been effective. There are potential clients in Southern California, law firms and business managers especially, they are not reaching. This is what led them to Glyphix. Risk Control runs a simple, understated ad in Los Angeles Lawyer magazine but Kane called the ad “boring” and admitted it didn’t bring results. Neither does the company website. A quarterly newsletter goes out to just existing clients and RCS staff often do speaking engagements at the behest of one of their insurance company partners. Risk Control is not for everyone, Kane told the Glyphix team. If a potential client comes in knowing exactly what they want, Kane tells them the firm won’t be the right fit. Instead, RCS looks to remove the root cause of security breaches, workplace violence, extortion attempts and other threats to the safety and well being of corporations and wealthy individuals. We are the company that should be in everyone’s rolodex in a crisis situation, Kane said. If you are getting screwed over, they want to be called. “We can put a big billboard on Sunset (Boulevard) with ‘Got Screwed?’ and your phone number,” Cohen joked. RCS specifics Brizendine and Wilder knew little about Risk Control when Kane and Winningham came to the Glyphix offices, located in a nearly century old home in West Hills with two large palm trees in a front yard with a white wooden fence. They asked for the elevator pitch – a quick overview of what the company does – and Kane gave a half hour response of how the company started and their approach of solving the underlying problem a client faces. It is just not enough, for instance, to send a surveillance team to watch a disgruntled employee. Kane also stressed the confidentiality given to their clients. Never, ever will RCS share its client list. Cohen likes to interview client customers but understands that won’t be possible with this particular project. In the week following that initial meeting, Cohen and his staff would get around that hurdle by contacting potential customers who would be interested in the services Risk Control offers and asking how they would go about finding a security and investigations firm. It’s not a large market that Kane wants to reach, which Wilder said was good. The goal was simple – to get into markets where the company has not yet reached to find new clients. But it had to be the right clients. Past advertising had brought in bites but not the right bites. “We have to start somewhere,” Kane said. “We don’t know how,” Winningham followed. “Maybe that is something you should steer us toward.” Where Cohen and Co. were steering was toward the stories. Figuring out how to make the stories part of the awareness campaign was one angle the Glyphix team would pursue. It was one they had used before with client 21st Century Insurance with a campaign based around customers’ stories. The stories, Cohen said, can bring a brand to life and begin a dialogue with a potential customer that leads to a final sale. In the next issue: The importance of branding.