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Rawle Murdy Associates serving clients for 30 years, sees brainpower driving marketing, advertising
By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer
David Rawle happily embraces technology. While reflecting on Rawle Murdy Associates’ 30th anniversary, which the Charleston advertising, marketing and public relations firm celebrated in late October, Rawle marveled at how the technological innovations of the past three decades, particularly the advent of the personal computer, the fax and the Internet, changed the industry.
“The technology allows people to use their brains more than their hands,” said Rawle, who started the firm from his home.
Principal Bruce Murdy came aboard in the late 1980s, and Rawle Murdy now has about 40 employees and, for the past 20 years, has been operating from a building on Beaufain Street.
When Rawle entered the industry, busy hands cranked out advertising copy on typewriters and slapped down layouts on drawing boards. Ad professionals spent almost as much time typing, drawing and pasting as they did strategizing, Rawle recalled.
By reducing all that manual labor, technology transformed the business into a brain game—and for the better, Rawle said.
Brains are his firm’s strong suit, he said, adding that competing in today’s marketing, advertising and public relations world requires firms to “out-smart rather than out-spend” the competition.
“Information and communications systems have become more sophisticated,” Rawle pointed out. “There is a multiplicity of ways to reach people.”
Finding the most efficient way to reach a particular audience is where a shop’s brainpower comes in, Rawle said.
“The product isn’t as relevant as the way it’s communicated,” he noted.
Decades of delivering
The Spoleto Festival, the South Carolina Aquarium, Daniel Island, Piggly Wiggly Carolina Co., the Charleston Area Regional Transportation Authority, MTV Networks and the South Carolina Department of Commerce are some of the clients Rawle Murdy has served over the years.
North Charleston’s upscale condominium community Reverie on the Ashley and forestry biotech firm ArborGen are among the firm’s newer clients.
In a world in which publicly-owned communications agencies are growing larger through mergers and acquisitions, private firms like Rawle Murdy continue to hold their own, observed Ed Wax, former chairman of the international advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, at Rawle Murdy’s 30th anniversary celebration.
“Doomsayers have been predicting the eventual demise of smaller agencies, but this will not happen for very good reasons,” said Wax. “Small agencies are privately owned and serve one master—the client.
“Smaller agencies can move quickly and can focus their energy and talent on a specific issue.”
Some Lowcountry issues on which Rawle Murdy has focused its talent and energy include the growing importance of a mass transit system to accommodate the region’s growing population—hence the firm’s promotional work for CARTA and the half-cent sales tax funding the transit authority—and the need to support environmental initiatives such as Seabrook Island’s beach renourishment program.
It is through addressing public issues and supporting philanthropic organizations like the Community Foundation that Rawle Murdy instills social responsibility among its employees, Rawle said.
Collaborative culture
Rawle Murdy’s office space is free of cubicles and has few walls.
It is an open environment, encouraging all employees to participate in what the firm does—creative problem solving, Murdy explained.
“There are no boundaries between disciplines,” Murdy said. “There’s a lot of freedom here to share ideas.”
The firm’s “real culture of collaboration” has attracted into its ranks advertising, marketing and public relations professionals from large, big-city agencies, added Murdy, who himself came from a large agency in Chicago.
Such collaboration inspires the free flow of ideas, and, for that reason, Murdy looks forward to the firm’s future in which technology will present even more choices for communicating the clients’ needs.
“The choices are going to be more complex,” he said. “That’s why we have to keep getting smarter.”
Dennis Quick is senior staff writer at the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.
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