Ketchum Bows 'Personalized Media' Practice

Public relations firm Ketchum, a unit of Omnicom, rolled out a global practice to help clients integrate emerging online and wireless media channels with their total PR efforts.

The new offering, called “Ketchum Personalized Media,” is focused on five buckets: Weblogs, RSS, podcasting, search engine optimization and mobile marketing. Executives said the service will evolve as new media channels surface.

The unit will independently recruit clients, while also servicing existing Ketchum accounts. At launch, the Personalized Media team is working with Cingular, Kimberly Clark, and the Canned Food Alliance.

Other firms already offer services across a few of these channels. Most prominent among them is CooperKatz, which launched its Micro Persuasion practice in February. Ketchum maintains it’s the first global PR agency to bring all five channels together under one roof.

“About six months ago we thought about the best way to approach this space and saw that within a year’s time, all of our competitors would offer at least one of these tools,” Paul Rand, partner and managing director at Ketchum, Chicago, told ClickZ News.

Rand said the group would emphasize the importance of a consistent message across all media, and he cited GM and Sun Microsystems’ successful corporate blogging efforts.

Ketchum is taking some of its own medicine, experimenting internally with some of the media its new practice will evangelize. Podcasts have been sent around within the firm, and the company has produced a house blog over the past five months. Executives said the firm will begin a public podcast immediately.