Dave Smith and the Art of Reading a Room

Dave Smith has another role in which half the room may disagree with him before he has finished making a decision. He referees high school and small-college basketball. He also chairs the Utah High School Basketball Officials Association. For someone whose working life revolves around communication, a gym offers a useful complication: the audience is paying attention, but attention does not guarantee agreement.

Smith is the partner and CEO of Penna Powers, the Salt Lake City advertising and communications agency he joined as an intern in 1993. His career has unfolded through public relations, client services, strategic consulting and agency leadership. Along the way, he has worked on transportation projects, spoken to business owners about social media and taken on civic responsibilities outside the office.

The basketball whistle belongs in this picture. So do the mountains, rivers and lakes of the Intermountain West, where he enjoys hiking, camping, hunting and fishing with family, friends and colleagues. His work concerns how people use a place, understand a proposal and decide whether to participate. Outside work, he spends time in the landscape that gives those questions their particular Utah dimensions.

A career that stayed in the building

Penna Powers was founded in 1984. Smith arrived nine years later, before completing his bachelor's degree in communications at Weber State University in 1994. The early steps were recognizably practical: a public relations internship, then work as a public relations coordinator, followed by public relations management and direction. The future CEO first learned the business from its working end.

That progression matters because communications agencies contain several businesses under one roof. Research asks questions. Account teams translate a client's needs. Creative teams give a message a form. Media specialists decide where it should appear. Public involvement staff deal with people who can answer back. Smith's responsibilities grew across that territory, rather than beginning with an executive title and an organizational chart.

By September 2019, he was appearing before a U.S. Chamber of Commerce audience as Penna Powers' partner, president and chief financial officer. Today, his title is partner and CEO. The early public relations work belongs in the leadership story: answering a client’s needs, developing a message and learning how an agency delivers it. The internship became a career. The career accumulated responsibilities.

Remaining at an agency can also mean working through a succession of different problems. Penna Powers offers advertising, public relations, digital communication, social media and public involvement. Its clients include businesses, nonprofits and government programs. A new assignment can change the subject, the audience and the kind of result being sought, even when the office address stays the same.

The meeting before the message

A clear example of Smith's work appears in the Cottonwood Canyons. In May 2019, he briefed the Central Wasatch Commission about an April open house concerning the Little Cottonwood Canyon environmental impact statement and the Cottonwood Canyons Transportation Action Plan. His responsibility included making sure people knew about the meeting and opportunities to comment.

The communication involved newspaper notices, a website, social channels, stakeholder materials and a media briefing. The open house ran for more than four hours and drew more than 400 people. More than 1,200 comments had been received across the two studies. Those figures describe participation in a particular process, rather than a score for how many people Smith persuaded.

The distinction is essential. A transportation proposal has to be understood before it can be debated usefully. People need to know where the information lives and how their responses enter the process. The assignment combines the familiar tools of an agency with the less glamorous work of arranging public access. A compelling message still needs a functioning doorway.

Smith's transportation experience also includes Mountain View Corridor, I-15 CORE and the Wasatch Front Central Corridor Study. Together, these projects put his communications work in the path of decisions that extend beyond a purchase. Roads and corridors enter people's daily routines. The audience has a reason to care before anyone has designed a campaign.

First, resist the urge to post

At the 2019 CO- Salt Lake City event, Smith offered business owners a piece of advice that may disappoint anyone hoping for a shortcut. Before entering social media, create a communication plan. Establish where the medium belongs in the larger marketing effort. Being present on a platform is a starting condition; it says little about what the business intends to accomplish there.

“Most companies just jump into social media without any sort of plan because they know they need to be there.”

Dave Smith, CO- Salt Lake City, 2019

He also emphasized an authentic voice, content suited to its platform and decisions informed by data. This is a fairly disciplined brief for a medium that rewards the appearance of spontaneity. The business owner has to think about what to say, how it should sound and where it belongs. The publish button is mercifully smaller than the planning problem.

Put beside the canyon work, the advice becomes easier to understand. Both assignments require a connection between an objective, an audience and a channel. A business wants customers to respond. A public process needs people to find information and participate. Choosing the channel first leaves the purpose trying to catch up with it.

What the people inside hear

Smith has brought the question of communication inside the workplace as well. In a guide to closing the gender wage gap, he urged companies to use the full range of the workforce and examine whether unconscious biases were limiting their capabilities, leadership or future. The point connects staffing choices with the organization's ability to do its work.

That advice asks for more than agreeable language. Who gets considered, who gets heard and who receives responsibility all influence the perspectives available to a business. For a communications agency, those perspectives are part of the work itself. A team trying to understand an audience benefits from examining its own assumptions before presenting them to somebody else.

In May 2025, Smith and agency president Stephanie Miller joined Pat Jones for a conversation about the agency's culture and women's leadership. They reported that women made up 64 percent of staff at that time. The number is a dated snapshot of the team, rather than a claim about the current head count or a promise of any particular commercial result.

Smith recalled the standing ovation when Miller became president that January. She had spent decades at the agency, and her promotion brought an enthusiastic response from colleagues. It is a revealing scene in a career so often described through projects and titles: the room's reaction made the leadership decision visible in a way an announcement alone could not.

He serves on the advisory board of the leadership organization now known as Sego Leadership. His other civic roles include the Salt Lake Chamber's Board of Governors and United Way of Salt Lake's board of directors. These are different settings, but each places an agency executive in conversations about the community around his business.

A bookmark is also communication

At East Midvale Elementary in 2016, Penna Powers participated in United Way's Day of Caring. Volunteers assembled literacy materials and helped with school projects. The agency made flashcards and bookmarks and donated pencils. Smith said he had been involved with United Way for 12 years and, for the previous two, had invited employees to contribute during their working day.

There is something pleasingly concrete about this episode. A bookmark has a modest brief. It needs to hold a place and perhaps encourage a reader to return. Flashcards need to be usable. Pencils require no brand manifesto. The agency's skills and resources could be put into objects a child could carry home.

The scene also gives substance to the word community. A board position establishes a responsibility. A workday spent on a school project establishes a different kind of presence. Smith's public record contains both. The connection between them is participation: time given to an organization, and people brought into its work.

The next audience

Smith's professional biography credits his work with Emmy and PRSA Silver Anvil awards and describes more than 30 years in strategic consulting and communication planning. It also identifies him as a strategic advisor to Utah Rising, the Salt Lake Chamber's economic vision. The subjects include transportation, housing affordability and the workforce: questions with consequences that reach beyond the agency's own business.

In his Speaking on Business appearance, he described Penna Powers' durability through its people, clients and results. The equipment had changed from film reels and drawing boards to digital displays and software. Research, strategic thinking, creative work and meaningful connections remained central to the assignment. His outlook was directed toward the agency's next decades, rather than a victory lap around the last four.

That leaves a fitting picture of Dave Smith: an executive whose career grew through one organization while the subjects, tools and audiences kept changing. On the basketball court, he makes a call. In a public meeting, he helps people take part. In an agency, he asks what the communication should achieve. Each setting gives him another room to read.