Salt Lake advertising firms Harris & Love and Scopes Garcia Carlisle said Monday they have agreed to merge their operations in a deal that will create one of Utah's largest independent marketing, communications and public relations companies.
Harris & Love will emerge as the surviving organization. The merger is expected to be completed by early summer.Financial terms of the deal between the two privately held companies were not announced, but the merger will boost Harris & Love's annual billings to some $40 million.
Noting that the two firms have shared several client interests in recent years, Harris & Love president and chief executive officer Mickey Gallivan said the merger is "a natural and exciting fit of clients and agency professionals" that will assure continuity of service.
Harris & Love currently has 42 employees with offices in Salt Lake City and Phoenix. The staff will be boosted by 10 when the Scopes employees come on board.
Leslie Scopes, who with her late husband, William J. Garcia, founded the firm, will not join Harris & Love, said Gallivan. He said that since the death of Garcia in a January 1996 airplane crash, Scopes has been distancing herself from the company and is no longer financially involved.
But SGC president Greg Carlisle will become an account group director at H&L, overseeing the team that handles the SGC book of business. Other SGC employees will be immediately integrated into the account management, creative and media departments of H&L.
SGC was a much larger firm at one time. It has lost a number of its largest accounts in recent years, including the Swire Coca-Cola business that moved to H&L.
H&L will remain considerably smaller than the two multi-national ad firms with operations in Utah, Publicis Dialog (formerly Evans Group) and Euro RSCG DSW Partners, formerly Dahlin Smith White, but could become larger than FJC&N and Penna Powers Cutting Haynes, the other two major independents in Salt Lake City.
Gallivan said the advertising business in Utah is currently running at about three-quarters of capacity. He said mergers involving major companies in Utah, such as the spate of bank mergers or the acquisition of Smith's Food & Drug by Fred Meyer, are devastating to local ad firms and other service businesses because those accounts usually go to the larger, out-of-state company.
He said the hot sector for advertising right now involves interactive services on the Internet, for which H&L organized a division six months ago.
"The Web is still a small part of the business, but it's the fastest growing," said Gallivan. "We expect it to produce 30-40 percent of our revenues in the next two to three years."
Harris & Love's client list includes Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah, Regence BlueShield of Idaho, the Utah Travel Council, Kennecott Utah Copper, Deer Valley, Swire Coca-Cola USA, US WEST, Casino Arizona, McDonald's in Boise and southern Oregon, Idahoan Foods, Hogle Zoo, Thanksgiving Point and the Utah Shakespearean Festival.
Scopes Garcia Carlisle's current clients include Lagoon Amusement Park, the Utah Travel Council (winter), Ski Utah, Insight Eyeworks, Goldenwest Credit Union, the Utah Department of Business and Economic Development and Walt Disney Pictures.
Harris & Love is the Utah representative of Worldwide Partners Inc., a network of independent ad agencies with some 90 members around the globe. Gallivan is chairman of the group.