What’s Happening at Lippe Taylor, HomeAway, and WeWorks
Lippe Taylor Adds Several New Execs
Lippe Taylor (LP), founded by Maureen Lippe more than 20 years ago, is known for innovative PR and ad campaigns for health, fashion, lifestyle, and beauty sector clients. Lippe is a former editor for both Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines. LP is transitioning more to a creative next-gen communications firm and, as part of that process, adding new leaders such as Fred Gerantabee as chief digital officer. They also added George Wright (VP of digital) and Michael Hansberry (insights manager).
Gerantabee worked previously at Grey Advertising building their innovation and tech areas. While there he supported Apple’s recently hired VP of Marketing Communications, Tor Myhren (when he was an employee of Grey). He worked with clients including Marriott Hotels, Pantene, Eli Lilly, and CoverGirl. Wright left 360i where he oversaw NBCU business, 360i’s largest entertainment account that included subsidiaries such as USA, Oxygen, and Bravo networks. Before that, he worked for internationally known clients including Visa, Johnson and Johnson, and Pfizer. Hansberry worked at Deep Focus leading their qualitative research work, and their global digital panel. He brings expertise in data and analytics.
HomeAway Searching for New PR Agency in U.K.
HomeAway is an online holiday rental firm allowing customers to rent homes in locations around the world whether their vacation takes them to Asia, Australia, Europe, the U.S. or beyond. HomeAway’s PR work globally has been led by Freuds, one of the eight largest PR firms in the U.K. But, HomeAway recently issued a request for proposal from eight firms for their U.K.-only business — and they didn’t include Freuds.
HomeAway also hired a new internal PR guru, Gretel Perera who will be working on global PR. They will continue their work with Kwittken in the U.S.
WeWorks Moving Away from PR Agency Representation and Building Internal Team
WeWorks (WW) was only founded six years ago but has grown enormously since. WW is currently valued at $1.6 billion and just moved into the Asian market this year with plans to expand into Latin America soon. They currently have 121 offices in 38 cities. With all that expansion, they have still been paring staff down in many areas, but not so in their communications and PR efforts.
As part of those plans, they’ve hired Jennifer Skyler as head of global public affairs and communications. She came on board at the beginning of 2016, leaving her job as consumer communications director at Facebook. Since then, she’s brought several others to work in the tech and corporate sectors. These include Hillary Klein, previously at Edelman as Sr. Dir. Of corporate communications for North America, Canada, and Mexico; Louis Ma as Sr. Asia-Pacific manager of communications; Becky McLean (previously at Joele Frank) as Sr. Corp. communications manager; and Padden Murphy (previously at Lyft) as public policy director.
WW continues working with PR agencies as it goes into new areas and for other functions as needed.
