Marketing Firm Reduces Staff, Picks Up New PR Accounts
by Tanya Rodrigues
Staff Writer
Matthews/Mark, a local public relations and advertising firm in Downtown San Diego, laid off five employees earlier this month.
The layoffs were confirmed by Scott McGaugh, executive vice president of the company’s public relations department.
According to McGaugh, the employees laid off were a creative team of two people. They also included one account planner, one clerical support employee in the media department and one person in the agency’s traffic department, which manages the production side of the creative work.
He attributed the layoffs to the slumping economy.
“Given continued reduced spending by many of our clients and an at least temporarily reduced workload, we needed to adjust our staffing accordingly,” McGaugh said.
A loss of clients, such as the San Diego Union-Tribune account, which last month informed the agency it was leaving, was not as much of a factor, McGaugh said.
“It’s more of a flat market situation rather than departures,” he said.
McGaugh said the agency recently won two new accounts. One of them is Encad, Inc. , A Kodak Co., a locally based division of Eastman Kodak Co., which is headquartered in Rochester, N.Y. Matthews/Mark will work on Encad’s local division business-to-business brand development.
The other new account, also in town, is RC Networks of San Diego, Inc. Matthews/Mark will create a national PR and branding campaign for the company.
The spending for each account had not yet been finalized, McGaugh said.
Matthew/Mark has 40 employees, he said. At the beginning of October, when the company had 65 employees, including free-lancers, it laid off eight employees. Since then, nine staff members left and have not been replaced. Also, beyond this month’s layoffs, there are three fewer free-lancers, McGaugh said.
