By: Kristen Krupski

Today was our first full day in Los Angeles and it was nothing short of jam packed. We had meetings at Edelman, Paramount Pictures, and Magical Elves and still had plenty of free time to explore Los Angeles.

Edelman is a global communications marketing firm and the top PR firm in the world. While at Edelman, we spoke with Heidi Esepjo, human resources coordinator for their Western region, Ali Tager, senior account supervisor, and Lauren Curtis, VP of creative content planning. The overall Edelman entity has multiple companies that focus on specific areas and/or companies, such as Assembly for Microsoft and Krispr for Kellogg’s.

Edelman showed us one of their most recent campaigns for one of their top clients, Netflix, that shows the range of their skill sets and their standards when it comes to projects. Their campaign for “Netflix Cheating” was to show how couples cheat on their spouses when they watch ahead in a show they are bingeing. They created this campaign by having an outside accounting firm conduct surveys on how people felt about their spouses/partners watching ahead on Netflix. The survey confirmed their idea and took that data and ran with it. They had articles, videos, news reports, and most importantly, a global conversation.

I remember this campaign when it first released and I never knew it was a pitched idea from a PR firm. They executed this so smoothly across all their departments that it came across as organic to the public. Lauren told us to question everything on our feed, because most of it is from a PR agency and not those organic viral stories.

They explained to us how much of a collaborative company they are from working within different departments such as digital, production and brand, and the different offices such as Paris, Atlanta, and Toronto. Edelman explained that they focus on an end goal for each project for each client. Instead of just making a promotional video for a client, they ask where the video will live, who is going to see it and what is the message of the video to go above and beyond and deliver the top content possible.

Today was a great start to this trip, and I can’t wait to see what day two brings!