David Politis

David PolitisThe eldest of five children born to Luc and Diane Politis, David spent his formative youth growing up “poor” in East Palo Alto, California (for many years, the murder capital of Calif.).

This is instructive only from the standpoint that when David wanted a 3-speed stingray bike for Christmas as a 10-year-old, his family was too poor to afford one for him. Upon facing this dilemma, David took matters into his own hand by reaching out to a greeting card company that was promoting fund-raising opportunities in Boy’s Life magazine.

Within a few weeks, David was selling boxes of Christmas cards door-to-door with a goal of selling 35 boxes to earn a bike. Thirty-six sales later, David soon had a Schwinn three-speed, lemon yellow, stingray bike, with a yellow metallic banana seat and a wheelie bar in the back.

“I realized many years later that I’ve always been involved in sales,” David explained. “Whether it was selling Christmas cards door-to-door, men’s suits at a department store to work my way through college, or pitching a story idea to an editor, it’s all selling. I now understand that much of what I do as a strategic communications consultant is learning about a client’s problems/challenges, understanding the benefits of its products/services, uncovering the needs of my client’s customers, and then translating those benefits into concrete, simple, yet powerful messages those customers will understand and act upon. And all of this fits neatly within the marketing mix.”

But David did not understand this as a 10-year-old in Northern California or even when he went off to Provo, Utah to attend Brigham Young University as an entering freshman in 1974. In fact, it wasn’t until after he completed his two-year stint as a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the “Mormon” Church) in Washington, D.C. and returned in late 1977 to BYU that he realized that he wanted to go into public relations.

At the time, David did not know that BYU’s undergraduate PR program was one of the top five programs in the country. But he was privileged to have both Dr. Rulon Bradley and Dr. Ray Beckham as advisors, as well as being guided by journalism professor Gaylen Jackson and adjunct professor Mark Stoddard.

As he neared the end of his educational career at BYU in late 1983 (and with the encouragement of his young wife, Allisha), David prepared a targeted direct mail program designed to land him job interviews back home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Using principles learned in his major, he prepared a two-page introductory letter written over the “signature” of Kristopher Kringle that offered an interview with soon-to-graduate David L. Politis as possibly one of the best Christmas gifts the recipient might ever receive.

Letters and resumes were sent to 39 of the top Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing professionals throughout the Bay Area, executives working at companies like PG&E, Kaiser Permanente, Ogilvy & Mather and others. Each letter was personally addressed and signed, and enclosed in each envelope was a pre-addressed and pre-stamped business reply card.

By the end of the campaign, David

  • Was contacted by 30 of the 39 execs (most by the enclosed postcard),
  • Landed five job interviews, and
  • Got two job offers.

His first professional job started in January 1984 in Palo Alto, California (a neighboring city that was in a different world from his childhood home in E.P.A.). His employer, Tycer-Fultz-Bellack, was the largest Ad/PR agency west of the Mississippi River focused on technology clients. With 80 total employees, 25 in the PR department, TFB made a slot for David by hiring him as a Junior PR Manager, in essence, hiring him as the agency’s publicist. Within six months, he began working on paying client accounts as well, and the first full year on the job, David tripled the media coverage for TFB.

However, 1985 was a tough year for the information technology industries, which meant it was a tough year for TFB, as the agency suffered two layoffs by April. Then in May, TFB instituted a 20 percent across-the-board pay cut, which meant David was now making $4,000 less per year than when he was hired, and he and his wife now had two kids to support.

In July 1985, TFB conducted its third and final layoff of the year, one that caught David in its wake. However, following the formal dismissal interview, David was offered a new position (with a promotion and a raise included) at TFB/Davis, a seven-person ad agency in Seattle that TFB had acquired in March of that year.

Several weeks later, David and his family were transplanted to the Northwest, where they soon bought their first home).

At work in Seattle, David found another interior office with no windows, and he had no clients and no billings. But within two months, David had assisted TFB/Davis management in landing the $1 million Ad/PR account of Applied Microsystems, which made David fully billable. And within two years, TFB/Davis had expanded to 14 employees, and David had grown the PR department to three employees, transforming it into the 2nd largest high-tech PR shop in the state of Washington.

During his tenure at TFB/Davis, David continued his role as agency publicist. He also had his first experience working on investor relations and advertising campaigns, as well as his first efforts working life science clients.

But Seattle was not to be David’s lifelong home as Utah soon came calling.

Through a fellow BYU graduate, David had already learned of an up-and-coming high-tech ad agency in Salt Lake City called Dahlin Smith White. By some interesting “coincidences,” David contacted Darrell Smith by phone in August 1997 to introduce himself. And on Halloween day 1987 David found himself employed in Utah as the Director of Public Relations at a newly formed agency called DSW Public Relations.

Once again, David found himself at an agency in an interior office, with no windows, no PR clients and no PR billings. And that first day on the job, half of the employees showed up to work in costume, leaving David to wonder what he had gotten himself into.

But the TFB team was excellent to work with and the agency had great clients. Within two months, DSW client Barb Patterson at GTE Supply had hired DSW PR, so it was off to the races once again.

Two years later DSW PR had grown to five full-time employees, generating more than $340,000 in fee income per year, making it the 2nd largest PR agency in all of Utah. Additionally, in the fall of 1989, DSW PR won 20 Golden Spike Awards during the inaugural competition sponsored by the local chapters of the Public Relations Society of America and the International Association of Business Communicators.

But change was coming once again into David’s life.

For the last several months of 1989, DSW had been actively participating in an agency review for the Intel advertising account. Previously, Intel had spent between $6 million and $8 million annually, primarily advertising in engineering-focused magazines, such as EE Times and EDN.

In mid-January of 1990, however, DSW learned it had won the Intel account. For the next six weeks, DSW teams met with their counterparts in Santa Clara, California, Scottsdale, Arizona, Beaverton and Hillsboro, Oregon, and any other city where Intel marketing and/or advertising teams were based. Naturally, the focus of these visits was to flush out the coming advertising/marketing strategy for Intel’s DSW-led campaigns.

What no one could have fully appreciated at that time, however, was that Intel was about to embark on a consumer-focused branding campaign centered around the “Intel Inside” theme.

What had been a conservative ad budget at Intel grew to approximately $25 million in 1990, $45 million in 1991, $65 million the next year and within 10 years had ballooned to more than $250 million in annual advertising spending worldwide.

The DSW execs had no idea this was coming. Neither did David.

So when he was called in to meet with DSW partner, John Dahlin, on March 15, 1990 — do you remember what Shakespeare wrote about this day? (”Beware the Ides of March.”) — David was unprepared for what was coming.

Simply put, the majority owners of DSW PR had decided to close its doors so they could focus on the advertising side of their business at DSW. Three weeks later on David’s birthday, April 6, was the last day of business for DSW PR.

That next Monday, April 9, Politis & Associates, Inc. formally opened its doors in a spare bedroom in the Politis home in Sandy, Utah with five accounts

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A quick aside.

“For the record, the DSW execs were quite fair to me throughout this entire experience, and I tell people that as corporate divorces go, this one went quite smoothly. Had I known then what I know now, I probably would have offered to buy the assets of DSW PR. But I didn’t, so I didn’t. Must have been I was supposed to start my own agency.”

David Politis

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Today, David is still sole owner of Politis Communications (a dba of Politis & Associates, Inc.), an agency with a core group of communications professionals focused on meeting the strategic marketing communications needs of clients in the technology and life science industries.

David has also formed a holding company known as POLITIS LLC, which is owned by him and his family.

Two other companies fill out the POLITIS LLC universe today:

  • SOAR Communications (the first agency in Utah focused exclusively on clients in the Sports, Outdoor, Athletics and Recreation industries), and
  • Mad Jolt Media (an agency providing expertise in interactive media to any and all organizations).

Along the way, David self-syndicated a weekly column on technology issues for almost 10 years (between 1995 and 2004) called Utah Tech Watch. During his career, he has also been privileged to serve with other business and community leaders in a variety of non-profit endeavors, such as

In addition, David has served as

He and Allisha now have five wonderful children, three of which are in college (one in Electronic Journalism, one in Graphic Design and one Undeclared).

And . . . life is good.

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