Reflecting several key personnel shifts in recent years, San Diego’s top billing public relations agency, Stoorza, Ziegaus & Metzger, Inc. officially changed its name to Stoorza Communications, Inc.
According to Stoorza president and CEO David DePinto, the revamped identity had long been a part of the company’s strategic plan for the year 2000.
DePinto expects the new name will in part rebrand the firm, which tends to be more known for its public affairs specialty than its other marketing and communications work, he said.
“The name really needed to align more with the way the agency had grown and evolved, to being a full service agency,” DePinto said.
With billings of $4.1 million in fiscal 1998, Stoorza currently ranks highest among locally operated agencies.
The new name completes a series of company changes over recent years for the firm chairwoman Gail Stoorza-Gill founded in 1974.
Among them was the hiring last August of DePinto, formerly a partner of New York-based Ketchum.
DePinto took the CEO position vacated by Stoorza-Gill, and the presidency handled by former partner Alan Ziegaus.
After 20 years with Stoorza, Ziegaus left the firm in February to launch a PR firm, Southwest Strategies LLC, with his son in law.
Bobbie Metzger, who left the firm in 1996, after 11 years of involvement, had been a partner with the firm’s Sacramento office. Other than San Diego and Sacramento, Stoorza has three offices, in Los Angeles, Riverside and Fresno.
Metzger, who could not be reached for comment, retired this month as executive director of strategic communications for the California State University System, a position she had held since 1997.
