The inaugural staff of The Agency stood in professional attire surrounded by flags and balloons during its dedication ceremony Tuesday.
Students, faculty, staff, alumni and donors filled the Weimer Hall Atrium at 11 a.m. for the grand opening of The Agency, UF’s student-staffed integrated public relations and advertising firm.
UF College of Journalism and Communications Dean Diane McFarlin took center stage as she introduced some of the donors and visionaries that made the 57-member firm possible.
“The Agency is not one person’s vision, but a collective vision,” she said.
The firm, part of the UF College of Journalism and Communications, will be run by a team of industry professionals as well as current UF students, most of them public relations and advertising majors.
The Agency’s office, located on the first floor of Weimer Hall, has been under construction since August and opened for business Tuesday.
Andy Hopson, the executive director of The Agency, has worked with reputable public relations firms such as Burson-Marsteller and Ogilvy & Mather and said he has high hopes for the growth of the firm.
“We are not building an agency,” he said. “We’re building ‘the’ agency.”
Ryan Baum, Hopson’s assistant and a UF public relations junior, said journalism and telecommunication students have the Innovation News Center, but there was a lack of opportunity for public relations and advertising students to gain hands-on experience.
So The Agency was born.
“The college has always made it a priority to bridge the industry and the classroom,” Baum, 21, said, “but for the first time, with The Agency, they’re taking the classroom and putting it out in the industry.”
Its current clients include Experiencias Xcaret, a Mexican theme park, and The Florida Department of Citrus. Within UF, The Agency represents the International Center, the Health Science Center and the Department of Mechanical Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
The Agency’s target audience is millennials, Baum said. Within six months, it plans to launch Millennial Research Core, an online community populated with thousands of millennials to provide insights on the group’s habits and social media usage.
“Because we have such a niche focus with millennial marketing, we can work with other agencies on major national clients because we can come in just for the millennial marketing segment,” he said.
Hopson said he thinks the firm’s power lies in the students behind it.
“Old guys like me try to figure out how to talk to people like you, and they often miss the mark because I’m not you,” he said. “But when you actually have millennials talking to millennials, that’s the secret sauce.”
[A version of this story ran on page 1 - 4 on 2/25/2015 under the headline “The Agency PR firm has its grand opening”]
Members of the inaugural Agency team write messages and sign their names on a strip of paper in the new facility on Tuesday afternoon. The signatures will be placed in a time capsule.
A worker walks through the construction site of The Agency, located on the first floor of Weimer Hall, on Thursday afternoon.
