Gerald Murray is merging his firm, Murray Communications Group Inc, into the Financial Relations Board in Chicago. FRB lays claim to being the biggest investor relations agency in the world, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, DC.
Murray, 50, has been 25 years in the business. He began his corporate communications career as public affairs officer for Allstate Insurance and as PR manager of Toyota mid-America before moving over to the agency side of the business, working for Golin/Harris and spending 13 years with Burson-Marsteller in Chicago. ‘I began at Burson as an account executive and by the time I left I was executive vice president and deputy general manager of the Chicago office,’ recounts Murray, who has also done stints as chairman of Ruder-Finn’s Chicago office and as executive vice president of Porter-Noveli Public Relations.
A year and a half ago, however, Murray decided to change tack and opt right out of the world of big, full-service agencies. ‘It struck me that the cost to clients was starting to out-run the value we were giving them,’ he says. ‘I think $250 an hour is pretty steep for many clients.’
So he set up his own business, specialising in financial and corporate work and delivering a service at a lower cost than the full-service Michigan Avenue agencies.
Murray says the venture has been a great success, so why is he now packing it in to join a large agency again? ‘Ted Pincus put forward the idea of merging my business into his at the end of last year and he’s pretty persuasive,’ answers Murray. But he also points out that FRB, although big, remains a specialist agency, concentrating almost exclusively on IR. ‘It’s not like the full-service firms which are typically not all that interested in IR,’ he says. ‘They have too many other fish to fry. But Ted Pincus has seized the high ground on investor relations and FRB’s market intelligence is unrivalled.’
At FRB Murray will be a vice president, responsible for account program direction and top level counselling in IR, corporate communications and crisis management. ‘I’ll be bringing most of my business with me – including clients like the Sweetheart Cup Company and Administaff – but I’ll be involved on a number of existing accounts, too, as well as working on new business.’
