John F. Kouten and the Business of Paying Attention

John F. Kouten had a question for a public relations podcast. He had Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. He understood that these channels existed. Finding the hours to use them was another matter. Sales needed attention. So did operations. So did human resources. In September 2015, the chief executive of JFK Communications put the agency owner's predicament into a comment and asked for advice.

There is something pleasing about a communications professional admitting that he cannot keep up with communicating. The question punctures the polished version of entrepreneurship in which a founder is forever thinking grand thoughts beside an agreeable window. Someone must also run the place. A social account does not become easier to maintain because its owner knows what a content strategy is.

That small admission makes a useful entrance into Kouten's career. He had wanted his own agency since his early working days in Manhattan. By the time he asked the podcast for help, he had spent more than a decade living with the practical consequences of getting his wish.

The bargain before the business

His route into the profession included a bargain with his father. Kouten would pay his own expenses while earning an associate degree at Brookdale Community College. If he completed it, his father would fund the next two years. Kouten then went to Rowan University, where he studied with public relations educator Anthony J. Fulginiti and graduated in 1989.

At Rowan, he worked across the student newspaper, magazine and radio station, and participated in the student public relations society. These were several ways of learning the same demanding habit: finding something worth saying, then getting it into a form another person could use. Print and radio also require different kinds of economy. A sentence that survives one format may need help in another.

“It was a magic time for me.”

John F. Kouten, on his college years

The teachers and practitioners he later named as mentors included Anne Sceia Klein, Frank X. Long and Richard Chamberlain. His account gives the education a human scale. Before the agency had a name, there were people showing him how the profession worked.

Learning from both sides of the desk

Kouten began in Manhattan agencies, then accumulated experience inside Sanofi, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson. Those employers gave him a view of communications from within large organizations. The distinction matters to an independent adviser: a client has colleagues, approvals and business pressures that continue after the agency meeting ends.

His current company biography presents that combination of agency work, corporate experience and business ownership as the basis of his counsel. It describes a career of 35 years and a decade spent inside those three corporations. There is a practical argument underneath the biography. Someone who has occupied the client's chair should understand why a seemingly simple request can take several conversations to resolve.

JFK's present team includes editorial director Peter Steinberg, strategic partners Tony DeFazio, Bob Karczewski and Chris Rosica, and senior adviser Michael W. Young. The collection of roles suggests the kind of business Kouten now wants to operate: experienced people assembled for particular work. A founder can have his initials on the door and still need quite a few other names in the room.

Three clients, then a different sort of address

In May 2004, Kouten started the business without clients. By June, he had three. David Avitabile became his business partner; a later account dates Avitabile's arrival as co-partner to 2005. The speed of the early work surprised Kouten. The independence he had imagined during his agency years had become an operating business with people expecting results.

By February 2013, JFK needed more room than its shared Princeton office provided. It moved into 2,500 square feet in Trenton's EFK building, taking a year-to-year lease. The direction of travel was unusual enough to become a local business story: a firm leaving Princeton for Trenton while other companies were heading the other way.

For Kouten, the explanation was less theatrical than the geography. Shared services had made sense at an earlier size; eventually, the economics changed. The move was a decision about what the company required at that moment. Entrepreneurship often looks like this at close range: an ambition expressed through a lease.

The adviser who asked for advice

Two years after the move, the podcast comment brought the business back down to the level of the working week. Kouten told the hosts of Inside PR that he rarely posted or followed, despite having accounts on several platforms. He was uncertain about Google+, too, a detail that places the question firmly in its period.

The hosts took up his question on episode 422. Here was an agency principal asking peers how to make room for an activity his profession increasingly expected. His list of competing responsibilities is more revealing than a claim to being busy. Sales, operations and HR are different jobs, and each can arrive carrying something urgent.

There is humor in the mismatch between expertise and available time. Knowing the value of a channel does not create an extra afternoon. Kouten's question also shows a willingness to be the person seeking help in public. For someone paid to advise others, that is a useful position to remember.

The exchange supplies a modest correction to the founder photograph. Alongside the confident executive belongs the owner wondering which task can wait until tomorrow.

What happens after someone clicks?

Kouten had already been writing about digital marketing. In an October 2013 essay, he laid out four connected activities: attracting traffic, generating leads, converting those leads and measuring what happened. The sequence makes the visitor's arrival a beginning. A business still has to earn a further conversation.

His examples were concrete: search terms, blog posts, downloadable material, landing pages and follow-up. He asked whether social activity produced useful referral traffic and whether a webinar attracted people who actually attended. Those questions make an apparently broad subject manageable. Each connects a communications choice with an observable response.

The essay's useful tension is between putting material into the world and watching what people do with it. Publishing creates a possibility; attention and response determine its value. For an agency owner with several jobs competing for the day, measurement also offers a way to choose where the next hour should go.

A handsome report still has to earn its keep

In March 2023, Kouten returned to the question of useful measurement in a piece about media monitoring. He began with the daily or weekly reports that arrive while their recipients are rushing between meetings. His concern was what happened after delivery. A report could be elaborate, full of graphs and mentions, and still contribute little to a decision.

He recommended tightening search terms, examining where competitors appeared and asking how a client's spokesperson might become more useful to a publication. He treated coverage as material for planning. Counting an appearance is straightforward; deciding what it tells you takes more attention.

This is a recognizably editorial instinct. A pile of information needs someone to select, interpret and act. The attractive dashboard can make the pile easier to inspect, but its colors cannot do the thinking. Kouten's questions return the responsibility to the person reading it.

Read beside his earlier marketing essay, the piece shows continuity in his published advice. Set a purpose, look at the response and revise the work. The tools change more quickly than those obligations.

From the student chapter to the president's chair

In 2018, Kouten became president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. By then he had been a PRSA member for more than 25 years, with involvement in New York and New Jersey as well as Philadelphia. His responsibilities included chapter operations, committees and connections with the national and district organizations.

His stated priority was helping area practitioners make use of professional development resources. It is a fitting ambition for someone whose own account of college gives teachers and mentors such a prominent place. The profession appears in his story as a network of instruction as well as a market for services.

The chapter's presidential history supplies another connection. Fulginiti, Klein and Long, all figures Kouten named in his education, had each held the same office. Their years were 1984, 1979 and 1970, respectively. By taking the chair, Kouten joined an institutional history that already contained people who had helped him enter the field.

The owner remains in the conversation

JFK's current operating model allows the firm to lead an assignment, extend a client's internal team or provide particular expertise. It describes teams that can change as the work changes, with senior counsel remaining close to the assignment. This is the later chapter of the company that once needed a larger office: its public argument now centers on the fit between people and work.

The contact page makes a small, specific promise. Kouten reads every message himself, and a reply is promised within two business days. The claim belongs to the company, but the responsibility is placed on a named person. After all the talk of strategy, that is a very ordinary way to describe service.

It also brings the story back to the podcast question. Running an agency means deciding where attention belongs, over and over. Kouten has written about the problem, asked peers about it and built a business model around experienced attention. Somewhere between the student radio station and the chief executive's inbox, he made a career of deciding what deserves a response.