Girl Power
Okay, Cashman & Associates plays at being a serious full-scale events and PR firm, but a recent communiqué that misspelled the name of a client gives the game away. No matter; the company truly excels at throwing parties: “Events are a really important marketing tool for our clients,” says Cashman. “It’s a chance to make personal contact directly with the customer.” For a party at the Manayunk bar Bourbon Blue, for example, Cashman sifted through her enormous database — names collected over the years and sorted by area — and blasted out an e-mail to hundreds of 20- and 30-somethings. “VIPs” like local sports figures and the company’s favorite media friends round out the crowds — all of which gives a warming ego boost to the venue, which feels like it’s playing host to a couple hundred of its own closest friends, even if it’s only for the night.
“Nicole is head and shoulders above everyone else in Philadelphia,” says Wayne Shulick, the owner of Denim and pricey jeans emporium Smith Bros. “She has the ability to reach that core group that’s conducive to Denim’s customer base,” which he defines as “20 to 35. A young, hip, affluent group.”
If you are a restaurateur, it could cost you $5,000 and up to have Cashman & Associates throw you a party, where they’ll ostensibly introduce hundreds of customers to your product. Five grand can buy you an ad in a magazine or newspaper, but that doesn’t guarantee that the media and local celebrities and the sorts of girls who buy $150 jeans at Smith Bros. — the people Cashman and her Associates make it their business to be friends with — will take any notice. An ad won’t get you a schmoozy mention in Dan Gross’s column in the Daily News or Michael Klein’s Inqlings in the Inquirer, but an affiliation with a publicist — an established brand — will.
And lest you think all of this cleavage-dotage is the product of a dirty mind, let’s just say that Cashman and her ilk are not above flaunting their own assets. The invite to the firm’s Christmas party, a remake of a Sex and the City promotional shot, featured Cashman and her glossy-lipped Associates vamping in low-cut evening dresses. “It was soooo cheesy,” groans Steven Grasse, the bald creator of Gyro Worldwide advertising and mastermind auteur behind the Bikini Bandits movies. He nonetheless admits: “I hire Nicole because she has big boobs.”
“It’s all about hot girls,” says promoter/publicist Rachel Furman, who recently employed a girl in a tight English maid’s petticoat to serve shots at the opening of the Walnut Room, a Rittenhouse Square lounge. “Wouldn’t you rather take something from a hot girl?”
Kelly Boyd is also a hot girl, but in a small-breasted, demure way that befits her more aristocratic and discreet clients.
“We’re a strategic consulting group,” she says when I meet her in the bar of the Sofitel Philadelphia, a client of her company, KB Consultants. “We’re image-makers.” A slight brunette with a penchant for the tweedy Chanel suits usually worn by much older women, Boyd, 38, is literally the face of KB Consultants. Her heart-shaped visage, arranged in a serene half-smile, is printed on the company’s promotional packet.
Boyd’s patrician image is an essential part of KB Consultants. The firm, located on Rittenhouse Square, handles or has handled a number of what the industry terms “high-end lifestyle accounts”: Center City restaurants Twenty Manning, Bliss, and McCormick & Schmick; furrier Jacques Ferber; salon Pierre & Carlo at the Park Hyatt Bellevue. In addition to securing media placements and planning events for these clients, Boyd serves as a walking promotional tool. She wears fur coats she bought from Jacques Ferber, and two sizable diamond rings (one on each hand) she purchased from another client, jeweler Craig Drake. She gets her hair styled regularly at Pierre & Carlo. And at McCormick & Schmick, she holds power lunches dedicated to “cultivating” corporate clients like Bank of America, which she says now make up most of her business.
