It's gotten to the point where PR strategy can be its own news hook, as demonstrated by Beth Kowitt's Fortune article on how ADP uses its business data to drive press coverage.
Few companies get as easy and guaranteed a PR hit as Automatic Data Processing (ADP). Each month its eponymous payroll report comes out two days before the government's own and gets reported, dissected, and beamed out to anxious market watchers the world over. "You couldn't buy the coverage," says CEO Gary Butler.
Because it processes paychecks for one in every six employees in the U.S., no company is better positioned to serve as a gauge of the nation's jobs situation than ADP (ADP, Fortune 500).
One hopes that no coverage is bought but rather earned, saving buying for advertising but that's a semantic quibble.
Like my former friends at Adecco Staffing, the nation's third largest employer, ADP is so big in its field that it can score coverage just by packaging its work product. Kowitt's article is part of a package on America's Best Companies, so the positive press is built into this one by format and Kowitt does a good job of explaining why the mundane task of processing paychecks generates such devotion from its clients.
She also gets the CEO to speculate on a turnaround in the job market.
So when will employers start hiring again? That's one data point ADP doesn't put out, but Butler is hopeful based on his own indicators: "Our salespeople are selling again," he says. "For a year people were doing nothing."
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