EPR Editorial Team3 min read
Edited on Jun 17, 2026.
The Hollywood PR firm that launched in 1950 with Paul Newman, Cary Grant, and Rita Hayworth dissolved in November 2025. Michael Nyman's Acceleration Community of Companies absorbed the survivors.
Rogers & Cowan, founded in 1950 by Henry C. Rogers and Warren Cowan, is gone.
In November 2025, parent company Interpublic Group dissolved R&CPMK — the entity created when Rogers & Cowan merged with PMK*BNC in July 2019 under IPG's Octagon Sports and Entertainment Network. Seventy-seven R&CPMK staff and the majority of the firm's clients moved to PMK Entertainment, a new agency launched by Michael Nyman's Acceleration Community of Companies.
Henry Rogers opened the firm in Los Angeles in 1950, joined shortly after by Warren Cowan. They represented Paul Newman, Cary Grant, and Rita Hayworth. The firm was the first to house entertainment talent and corporate clients under one roof — a structural innovation that became the template for modern entertainment PR.
In July 2019, IPG merged Rogers & Cowan with sister firm PMK*BNC into a single 350-person agency under the Octagon Sports and Entertainment Network. Cindi Berger chaired the combined firm. Mark Owens served as CEO. Alan Nierob ran the entertainment division. Clients spanned Denzel Washington, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere, Anthony Hopkins, Eddie Murphy, Quincy Jones, Mick Jagger, Elton John, and Katy Perry on the talent side; Activision, Audi, Mastercard, McDonald's, Microsoft, Samsung, Verizon, and YouTube on the brand side.
In October 2024, R&CPMK CEO Mark Owens exited. Senior executives Lindsay Galin and Jeff Raymond left with a group of colleagues to launch 2PM Sharp, an independent firm. R&CPMK sued the departing staffers. The litigation set the public tone of the firm's final year.
By late 2025, R&CPMK was no longer viable as a standalone IPG entity. Michael Nyman — co-chairman and co-CEO of PMK*BNC until he left in 2018 to start the Acceleration Community of Companies — engineered the absorption. ACC welcomed in 77 R&CPMK staffers across PMK Entertainment, ACC Advisory, and DKC, the influence-marketing firm ACC owns.
PMK Entertainment is run by Cindi Berger as CEO, reporting to Nyman. It represents talent, music, sports, premium content companies, corporate entertainment, and crisis communications. Most of the same faces. Most of the same clients. New parent, new entity, new economics.
Alan Nierob, the longtime entertainment division chairman, framed the move with a nod to the original firm: when Rogers and Cowan launched, they were the first to house entertainment and corporate clients together. Nierob is on what he called the next generation of brand marketing, PR, and entertainment.
Three reasons. First, holding-company consolidation — IPG's sale to Omnicom created pressure to simplify the portfolio. Second, the Hollywood PR market has compressed under the dual labor strikes, studio layoffs, and AI's disruption of celebrity media cycles. Third, Acceleration Community of Companies — independent, founder-led, structured for talent retention — was a more attractive home for senior practitioners than a sub-brand of a holding company in transition.
The name Rogers & Cowan now lives only in the company history sections of LinkedIn pages. The Henry Rogers and Warren Cowan archive — 75 years of Hollywood publicity — is part of the industry's institutional memory, not its present tense. PMK Entertainment, 2PM Sharp, and the boutique firms that picked up R&CPMK alumni are the present tense.
The first firm to merge entertainment and corporate publicity is gone. The discipline it built is still being practiced — under different ownership, in different rooms, with the answer engines now sitting alongside the trades as the audience that decides what becomes culture.
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The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
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