Burson Cohn & Wolfe

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Burson Cohn & Wolfe
legal form LLC
founding 2018 (1953)
Seat New York City United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
management Donna Imperato ( CEO )
Number of employees 4,000
Branch Public relations, lobbying
Website bcw-global.com

Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW) is a global public relations agency . It was created in 2018 from the merger of the two agencies Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolfe , both of which belonged to the WPP group. With around 4,000 employees worldwide and offices in 42 countries, BCW is the world's third largest PR agency. In Germany, BCW is represented in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Hamburg and Munich.

history

History of Burson-Marsteller (1953-2018)

The founders Harold Burson and Bill Marsteller

The predecessor agency Burson-Marsteller was founded in 1953 by Harold Burson and Bill Marsteller in the USA and was active in more than 50 countries. In 1979 the company was taken over by the Young & Rubicam agency , which in turn was taken over by the British WPP Group in October 2000 .

The first overseas branch was opened in Geneva ( Switzerland ) in 1961. In 1997 the Swiss agency Jäggi Communications was taken over .

Burson-Marsteller won more than 125 prizes for his work in 2003. In June 2003, BM received the PRSA's (Public Relations Society of America) Best of Silver Anvil Award for a campaign the company designed for the United States Postal Service . The American postal company had to struggle with a loss of customer confidence after the anthrax attacks in 2001.

In May 2017, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkish administration became a client of the agency.

History of Cohn & Wolfe (1970-2018)

The predecessor agency Cohn & Wolfe was founded in 1970 by Bob Cohn and Norman Wolfe in Atlanta , Georgia, USA.

History as BCW (2018–)

In February 2018, WPP announced the merger of Burson-Marsteller with Cohn & Wolfe. The agency has several locations in the DACH region. In Germany, BCW is present in Berlin , Frankfurt am Main , Hamburg and Munich , in Switzerland in Bern , Zurich and Lausanne (BCW Sport). BCW withdrew from its first location in Switzerland, Geneva, in 2018.

profile

The company serves a large number of companies from the nuclear energy , the aviation , the transportation , the tourism and from the consumer - and IT industry . Customers include HP , Novell , SAP , Sony Electronics and Microsoft . The company also advises governments and in the past it also advised dictators such as Nicolae Ceaușescu and Augusto Pinochet .

The company offers what is known as crisis management . After the Bhopal accident, in which thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands were seriously injured, Burson-Marsteller supported the public relations work of the chemical company Union Carbide . Furthermore, the company was responsible for the public relations work of various retail chains that wanted to win back their customers as quickly as possible after cases of salmonella infections. BM also supported a worldwide product recall campaign by the mineral water manufacturer Perrier and advised McDonald’s after the first BSE cases occurred.

Burson-Marsteller GmbH is a member of the European Movement Network .

Criticism and controversy

The company will u. a. criticized for the fact that it supervised the public relations work of various regimes and dictatorships, for example the Argentine military junta or the regime of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu . According to Nina Katzemich from Lobbycontrol , the company would stop at nothing. BM also received "numerous new privileged access points" through cooperation with EU governments, which could be converted into money "in the event of further orders from customers in the private sector". During the Polish EU Council Presidency, for example, the agency acted as an advisor to the Polish government in order not to regulate fracking across the EU, but to promote it. At the same time, the oil company ExxonMobil was a customer of BM, which operates fracking in Poland. The agency did not respond to media inquiries about what activities BM provides for the Turkish government (BM has been a customer of BM since May 2017).

Burson-Marsteller has also often been targeted by environmentalists who accuse the company of carrying out propaganda for environmentally destructive and unhealthy projects and techniques on behalf of large companies. BM helped found the Global Climate Coalition , an interest group whose goal it was to prevent government measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Burson-Marsteller also came under fire for the use of so-called astroturfing , which simulates the impression of a spontaneous grassroots movement . In 1999, for example, Burson-Marsteller hired a group of demonstrators to protest for the use of genetic manipulation on behalf of the biotech company Monsanto . The incident came to light after a report in the New York Times interviewing some of the protesters.

In May 2011 it became known that Burson-Marsteller USA had accepted a covert contract from Facebook for a campaign against Google with the help of seemingly neutral press reports. For example, a well-known US privacy activist was anonymously contacted by BM and asked to write a guest comment critical of Google in various major newspapers.

Burson-Marsteller was also commissioned by Fraport AG , Lufthansa AG and Condor Flugdienst to start a counter-initiative to the aircraft noise protests at Frankfurt Airport. This should take the form of a counter-demonstration under the motto Yes to FRA! respectively.

In 2015 Burson-Marsteller came under fire in Switzerland for his lobbying activities for the Kazakh party Ak Shol . Based on e-mails published by strangers on the Internet, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung showed that Burson-Marsteller had asked FDP National Councilor Christa Markwalder over 7,000 francs to organize a parliamentary proposal . At the request of the Kazakh client, Burson-Marsteller removed the word human rights from the draft for the advance. It is controversial how comprehensively the politician was informed about the actions of Burson-Marsteller.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ PR-Journal (February 28, 2018): Forced marriage: WPP merges Burson Marsteller and Cohn & Wolfe .
  2. ^ BCW: Offices in Germany
  3. ↑ burson-marsteller.ch, section "About us" ( Memento from May 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), accessed May 14, 2015
  4. ↑ PRSA press release on the presentation of the Best of Silver Anvil Award 2003 ( Memento from July 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ a b Public Relations for Despots: How PR Professionals Clean Erdogan's Image. In: Spiegel Online . Retrieved June 14, 2017 .
  6. ↑ BCW Switzerland - our offices. Retrieved May 17, 2019 .
  7. ↑ The weekly newspaper: The master manipulators . No. 51/2006 of December 21, 2006
  8. ↑ Jürgen Ahäuser: "Yes to FRA" commissions controversial PR agency , Frankfurter Rundschau Online, February 21, 2012
  9. ^ Member page in the EBD ( Memento from July 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). (Accessed May 13, 2011).
  10. ↑ RTL : "They don't stop at anything" - how lobbyists in the EU get involved , from January 3, 2013
  11. ↑ BUND : Burson Marsteller washes himself green / greenwash . Retrieved September 3, 2013
  12. ↑ BUND: Burson Marsteller - Isn't climate change a problem? , dated August 2, 2001
  13. ^ The Guardian : Anti-GM warrior Melchett joins PR firm that advised Monsanto , January 8, 2002
  14. ↑ Der Spiegel : Seed Company Monsanto: Aggression in the Genes , May 31, 2013
  15. ↑ Greenpeace Magazine: Genbirnwashing , accessed on September 3, 2013
  16. ↑ Konrad Lischka , Ole Reißmann: Facebook slides into PR disaster , Spiegel Online, May 12, 2011
  17. ^ Netzpolitik.org : Burson-Marsteller in the paid anti-Google campaign , May 13, 2011
  18. ↑ T3N Magazine : Embarrassing PR War: Facebook tries to denigrate Google ( memento from July 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), from May 12, 2011
  19. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung : PR debacle: whisper campaign against Google , from May 13, 2011
  20. ↑ Jürgen Ahäuser: "Yes to FRA" commissions controversial PR agency , Frankfurter Rundschau Online, February 21, 2012
  21. ↑ Kazakhstan Affair - “the long arm of lobbyists into the Bundeshaus” NZZ, May 6, 2015
  22. ^ Statement by Burson-Marsteller, May 6, 2015 ( Memento of May 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  23. ↑ FDP boss Müller on the Kazakhstan affair - «please be more careful with lobbyists» NZZ, May 7, 2015