There is a tidy way to explain Falls & Co.: it is a Cleveland agency that does public relations, advertising, brand strategy, digital marketing, research and video. Tidy explanations are useful. They are also excellent at hiding the interesting part. Falls did not begin with that list. It began in 1989 as the Cleveland outpost of a partnership between a Detroit public relations firm and a Cleveland advertising agency. Robert Falls was asked to run it while still splitting his time with Detroit. A few years later, he bought the operation from its parent and put his own name on the door.
That origin matters because the modern company can be read as a sequence of corrections. A PR shop learns that reputation is connected to the website. A digital shop learns that a click arrives with an opinion already attached. An advertising team learns that reach without trust is rented attention. Falls & Co. kept encountering boundaries between disciplines and, one by one, removed them.
The jelly slogan was not the real prize
The pivotal move came in 2019, when Falls acquired Wyse Advertising. Cleveland knew Wyse. Marc and Lois Wyse had founded it in 1951, and the agency later produced a line for a small Ohio jelly company that became advertising folklore: “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.” Wyse also worked on enduring campaigns for Sherwin-Williams, Applebee’s and Marathon Petroleum.
It is tempting to treat the acquisition as a charming transfer of local advertising history. But Falls was buying practical machinery: creative development, strategic branding and media buying. It already had media relations, crisis work, corporate communications, public affairs and a digital business. Wyse filled the conspicuous hole between making people trust a company and making them want something from it.
The acquisition supplied more than a famous past. It supplied the part of the present that turns attention into demand.What changed after Wyse
The firms did not instantly become one organism. The communications and digital companies were first merged under the shorter name Falls in 2019. The combined business appeared as Falls & Co. in 2021. That slow assembly is instructive. Capabilities may fit together on a pitch deck long before teams, incentives and measurements fit together in practice.
The proof is hiding in the tape aisle
Consider Shurtape Technologies, maker of Duck, FrogTape and T-Rex tapes. Tape is wonderfully physical and comically difficult to romanticize. Falls built publicity around product launches, trend-based pitching, sampling, demonstrations and media events. It also used the annual Stuck at Prom scholarship contest, in which students make formalwear from Duck Tape, to attach a utilitarian product to a life event nobody forgets.
Falls reports 1,100 Shurtape media placements and 8.1 billion impressions, with the brands beating 3M and Gorilla in clips and impressions in important tape categories. The prom contest alone generated 2.3 billion impressions in one cycle. Those are enormous attention numbers. The sharper point is the mechanism: a product demonstration proves usefulness, a contest creates emotion, and targeted media relations distributes both.
Energy Harbor shows the other half of the model. Consumers in a competitive energy market did not always understand that they could choose a provider. Falls developed the “Live with Power” idea, then carried it through digital ads, paid search, social media, video and web content. The agency says sales targets were exceeded by 128% while cost-per-acquisition goals were beaten. Here the communications problem was not obscurity. It was confusion. The creative work succeeded when it made the choice legible.
A third case, for lighting maker Tivoli, began with diminishing sales. Falls moved the story toward architectural entertainment and used projects at Las Vegas resorts, a Times Square hotel and notable restaurants as proof. The campaign combined trade storytelling, advertising and social media. Reported Instagram impressions rose 233%, engagements rose 265%, and LinkedIn reactions climbed 176%. The useful idea is not “post more.” It is to move a product into a market where its existing work suddenly becomes evidence.
An agency for awkward middle problems
Falls & Co. fits between the narrow specialist and the global holding company. Its public work runs from manufacturers and energy companies to universities, healthcare organizations, restaurants, residential communities and Cleveland nonprofits. For a global manufacturer facing a cyberattack, the agency describes coordinating executives, legal counsel and forensic experts while handling stakeholder messages, monitoring and town-hall scripts. For The Menopause Society, it handled a new name, positioning, identity and website. One assignment protects enterprise value in a crisis; another makes a medical organization easier to understand.
The business model is conventional professional services: clients pay for people, judgment, production, media and ongoing programs. The price of the Wyse acquisition and client fees remain private. The more revealing cost is organizational. An integrated shop must carry researchers, strategists, writers, designers, media buyers, digital operators and crisis advisers - and make them behave like one team instead of adjacent vendors. Breadth is only an advantage when the handoffs disappear.
That is also what separates Falls from hiring several specialist firms. The alternative may provide deeper skill in one narrow channel. Falls argues for coordinated research and execution across paid, earned, shared and owned media. For work outside the United States, it uses PROI Worldwide. Falls says the network includes 88 independent agencies in 65 countries with more than 7,000 staff. The structure offers local knowledge without turning the Cleveland office into a multinational holding company.
What another firm can steal
Expand when a repeated client problem sits between existing services. Falls built digital, then acquired creative and media depth.
Move from output counts to business signals: sales targets, acquisition cost, reach, reactions and share of voice.
Duct tape became prom night. Energy choice became control. A technical product needs a human reason to care.
A trusted partner network can provide local execution without pretending one headquarters knows every market.
There are conditions. Integration does not rescue a weak proposition, and attention metrics do not automatically equal profit. A client must share access, agree on a measurable outcome and let disciplines work from one strategy. The model is a poor fit for a company that wants the cheapest isolated deliverable, cannot supply timely decisions or treats every channel as a separate procurement exercise. In those cases, the machinery is present, but the gears never touch.
Falls & Co. publishes five values: be curious, speak up, serve others, celebrate diversity and enjoy balance. There is a pleasing bit of specificity behind the last one. The firm says it marks every fifth anniversary with substantial, personalized gifts, including trips to employees’ family homelands. This is not proof that agency life has solved burnout. It is evidence that the company understands memory. The best campaigns in its portfolio work the same way. They find the fact, ritual or choice people can carry with them.
After 36 years, Falls & Co. reports more than 600 awards. Seventeen arrived at the 2024 PRSA Cleveland Rocks ceremony alone, including a Judge’s Choice prize for refreshing Swensons around its running curb servers and the line “We Bring It.” Awards are nice. The more persuasive achievement is that the company’s evolution remains easy to follow. Public relations exposed the need for digital. Digital exposed the need for creative and paid media. Acquisition closed the gap. The agency kept buying the missing piece until the pieces could tell one story.