The Small Ohio Firm That Learned to Move Crowds

The most revealing number in Werth PR's history is not 63, though surviving 63 years in the agency business deserves a small brass band. It is four. Four straight years, Ohio State had lost its annual Blood Battle to Michigan. By 2022, the pandemic had thinned donations while hospitals still needed blood for traumas and bone-marrow transplants. The assignment looked like publicity. The actual problem was behavior: how do you persuade busy people to stop, roll up a sleeve and donate?

Werth brought in local sports figures, then stopped thinking of the campus as a student audience. More than 100,000 people worked or studied there. That was the real constituency. The campaign collected 1,630 units, a 50% jump from 2021 and almost twice the 2020 total. Ohio State won for the first time since 2017.

This is the useful way to understand the Columbus firm founded by Paul Werth in 1963. It sells public relations, public affairs, crisis counsel, research, branding, digital strategy, writing, video and advertising. But the more distinctive product is a way of turning a hazy institutional ambition into a set of people who can be counted.

The first failure is usually a definition

Consider three briefs. Blood donations are falling. An insurance industry cannot recruit enough workers. A tourism day has been canceled twice. The obvious answer to each is “get more attention.” That answer is too small.

Werth starts with what it calls insights gathering: map the stakeholders, learn what motivates them and decide how a result will be measured. Only then come the advertisements, press pitches, websites, videos or events. The sequence matters. A press release cannot repair a workforce pipeline if students think the jobs are dull and colleges do not teach the subject.

That research can change the assignment itself. In 2011, Ohio insurers projected a 17,000-person shortfall by 2020. The first thing that had failed was not a recruitment ad. There was no educational supply: not one Ohio college offered an insurance or risk-management degree. Werth's message testing helped produce Insuring Ohio Futures, a coalition campaign that paired media and email with live events, video testimonials and students talking to other students.

Ten years later, 12 colleges and universities had programs and the industry had added nearly 10,000 employees. No communications firm can plausibly claim every one of those jobs. What Werth can claim is the architecture: a name, a tested message and a coalition sturdy enough to keep working for a decade. PRSA gave the program a Silver Anvil in 2021, Werth's tenth.

A very Ohio form of scale

Werth's first client was Worthington Industries. Over time came Anheuser-Busch, American Electric Power, Nationwide, the U.S. Department of Defense and Ohio State Athletics. Current case studies range from White Castle's national earned media to Advanced Drainage Systems' thought leadership, TourismOhio's comeback and Versiti's blood drives.

The firm sits in a useful middle market. It is smaller than a global network, but broader than a specialist lobbyist, design studio or digital shop. A client can hire one team to study an audience, shape a policy argument, prepare an executive for television, build the site and manage the coalition. Its deepest advantage is geographic: decades of accumulated knowledge about Ohio's business leaders, newsrooms, government and civic institutions. Its LinkedIn footprint and national placements broaden the reach, but the operating system was built in Columbus.

In 2021, that operating system became a product. Werth partnered with Gongwer News Service to launch a recurring opinion poll of Ohio legislators. Public affairs professionals routinely speculate about what lawmakers think; the poll asks them. It is part research tool, part editorial asset and part demonstration of the firm's thesis that influence begins with better information.

“When we lose a client, we put them on the prospects list.”Sandra Harbrecht, second-generation leader

The line is playful, but it describes the business model. Werth is privately held and earns retainers and project fees. Relationships can pause and restart. Public contracts show the possible scale without revealing private pricing: Columbus authorized up to $250,000 for a recycling communication and outreach project and up to $100,000 for a 2025 content-marketing engagement. Those are scopes, not a rate card. A crisis drill, a national campaign and a speech plainly do not cost the same thing.

The family tree became the strategy

Paul Werth started the company in a former candy shop. His daughter Sandra Harbrecht took over as president in 1985 and pushed it beyond the founder's expectations. Julie Granillo, Paul's granddaughter and Sandra's niece, returned to Ohio in 2019 after building a nonprofit pharmaceutical distributor and helping scale a restaurant-technology startup. She became president in early 2023 and CEO after Harbrecht died that summer.

Granillo's résumé matters because it bends the inherited playbook toward operations. At the Dispensary of Hope, she helped a network grow to more than 90 dispensing sites and secure over $10 million in donated medicines annually. At ToGoTechnologies, she helped scale service to more than 1,000 restaurant clients. Her experience is not traditional agency apprenticeship. It is systems building, which fits a firm increasingly asked to organize complicated groups rather than merely announce things.

The culture showed itself under pressure in 2020. Werth went remote, retained every employee and full benefits, continued reduced work for some clients that could not pay, and supported more than a dozen organizations pro bono. The list included public health, legal aid, schools and social-service groups. For an agency, this was not costless generosity; people are the inventory. It was also a bet that institutional goodwill compounds.

Borrow the sequence, not the slogans

There is a practical lesson here for organizations that will never hire an outside agency. Begin with a behavior, not a channel. “Get press” is a channel. “Recruit 1,000 donors” is a behavior. Then find the people who already have credibility with the audience. Let research change your first idea. Finally, choose a number that would still matter if no reporter covered it.

The method has boundaries. It works when the desired action is real, partners have something useful to contribute and leaders can tolerate what the research says. It works poorly when the product is weak, the coalition exists only for a photograph, or management wants trust on a deadline while withholding facts. Earned media can carry substance farther. It cannot manufacture the substance.

That helps explain why the firm's best stories take years. The insurance campaign needed colleges to create programs. Public affairs requires durable relationships. Reputation is a memory held by other people. Werth's longevity is not proof that every campaign works, but it has given the firm many chances to observe the same pattern: attention is temporary; an institution, a habit or a coalition can remain after the headline disappears.

On its 60th anniversary, Werth planted a Red Sunset Maple on the northeast corner of the Ohio Statehouse grounds. It was an almost suspiciously perfect symbol for a third-generation public affairs firm. Yet the tree makes the right point. The visible part arrives last. Most of the work happens underground, among roots that have to reach the right places before anything above them can grow.