Marian Salzman Named PRWeek's PR Professional of the Year

NEW YORK, March 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Euro RSCG Worldwide PR President Marian Salzman was named PR Professional of the Year in the annual PRWeek Awards competition last night in New York City.

Among Salzman's many accomplishments during the year and a half since she has headed the three-office agency, she created The Sisterhood, an agency-within-an-agency and social media lab that was launched after groundbreaking research about the communications and consuming habits of teenage girls. The Sisterhood was a 2011 finalist for PRWeek's Innovation of the Year. Salzman has also:

• Served as Wyclef Jean's lead media consultant during his run for the presidency of Haiti and helped re-create the public image of Yele Haiti, the NGO that Jean founded and for which ERWW PR served as agency of record for most of 2010.
• Led teams that have expanded existing accounts and won a number of major new business accounts—including Warner Chilcott, the respiratory portfolio of a major pharmaceutical company and software to enhance reading comprehension for the visually impaired—and projects such as Campaign Money Watch and Chiquita.
• Led teams that have won key industry awards—Bulldog Reporter and SABRE among them—for clients.
• Spearheaded other research and white papers, on social life and social media, the future of home, the mind and mood of Americans, millennials and social media, the state of American males, and love and sex in the age of social media.
• Launched four blogs: one for the Sisterhood (forsistersbysisters.com), two for ERWW PR (eurorscgpr.com and eurorscgpr.com/eurorscgfashion) and a Euro RSCG companywide blog whose focus is social media (eurorscgsocial.com). (Salzman manages global social media programs for the company.)
• Managed or launched initiatives such as the Center for Account Management Excellence, SoMe Central, Newsengine (media relations) and Newsengine U. (a paid internship program), and Editorial and Strategic Planning departments.
• Helped the agency expand its CSR innovation and offerings to clients and embrace its own social responsibility.
• Expanded her annual trends forecast and created offshoots such as social media trends, teen trends and two "Hot/Not" lists.
• Regularly wrote columns for the Huffington Post, CNBC.com, PRWeek and PR News on subjects ranging from social media to the power of young people to politics.

In the same time period, Salzman was also named a finalist for PR Agency Team Leader in the PR News PR People Awards and a finalist for both Lifetime Achievement Award and Service Executive of the Year in the Stevie Awards for Women in Business. The Sisterhood and various agency staff have also received a variety of industry awards and finalist honors during Salzman's time as ERWW PR head.

"Fantastic news, because there is no harder worker than Marian, whose creative energy rarely sleeps," said David Jones, CEO of Havas and global CEO of Euro RSCG Worldwide. "Marian's understanding of the ever-changing media landscape, especially a command of where social media is taking us, her ability to spot trends and apply them across industries, and her laser focus on creating unique, successful campaigns for her clients, among so many other attributes, all help underscore the fact that I think PRWeek made a great call in naming Marian its PR Professional of the Year."

Said Salzman: "Although I am singled out, this is a team sport. It's been fun, and we're just rounding the first threshold in a marathon. I also want to acknowledge all the victims of tragedies—Haiti's earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—that have led to incredible CSR projects we've had the opportunity to take on and been able to differentiate ourselves with. And for me, it's the strangest thing to realize that four years ago I was struggling with a brain tumor diagnosis, three years ago reinventing myself in a PR agency and today carrying home the trophy of a lifetime."

Salzman sits on the Agency Management Committee of the Council of Public Relations Firms and the board of directors of the World Future Society, and she recently joined the board of directors of the Fairfield County Public Relations Association. She is an adviser to the Berlin School of Creative Leadership's M.B.A. program and serves as a member of the mentoring board of Brown University's Women in Business. Salzman graduated from Brown University with top honors and studied sociology at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is the author or co-author of 15 books on topics ranging from current affairs to the commercial workplace, including the bestseller Next Now: Trends for the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and is currently working on a book based on her four-part Huffington Post blog series about brain injuries, recovery and creativity.

Among her many recent public appearances, Salzman has given speeches to a German media group, the National Association of Realtors and TheStoneClub in London, on subjects ranging from trends for the near future to the gender reboot to how social media is redefining business.

For more information, please go to eurorscgpr.com.

About Euro RSCG Worldwide PR

Euro RSCG Worldwide PR is the public relations arm of Euro RSCG Worldwide, a leading integrated marketing communications agency with 233 offices in 75 countries. Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America, is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Chicago and Pittsburgh. It is part of Adweek's first-ever Healthcare Agency of the Year (2010) and Medical Marketing & Media's 2010 All-Star Network of the Year. The agency provides communications services, social brand momentum and thought leadership, among other services, in core areas ranging from CSR and health care to content creation and social media. Clients include Bayer Corp., Purina, sanofi-aventis, Toyota Motorsports, Transitions Optical and Yele Haiti. Euro RSCG Worldwide is the largest unit of Havas, a world leader in communications (Euronext: HAV.PA) (Paris: HAV.PA).

SOURCE Euro RSCG Worldwide PR