Vol. 5 No. 3, March 2008
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At the Top of Her Game
PR maven Beth Marshall stumped for Trump, then moved to the home of the Braves
Atlantic City has launched countless premier executives, many of whom remain in gaming.
Beth Marshall chose an alternate path. The Haverford, Pennsylvania, native, a former Trump Plaza PR specialist, took her public relations savvy into the sports arena. Marshall began as a Philadelphia 76ers intern, worked for the Professional Bowlers Association and just started her fifth season as media director for the Atlanta Braves. It’s a lofty achievement.
There are only 30 major league teams. Thousands of people want to work with them. To succeed at this level, a person must know it all: hard sell, soft sell, when to push, when to be subtle.
Marshall walks a difficult media-client gauntlet. She deals with editors, who view those in her profession with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for salesmen. She deals with clients, who want ink and TV exposure. Serving both ends means dispatching credentials, helping reporters on deadline, pitching stories for clients and keeping a sharp eye on everyone’s best interests. Marshall earned her stripes working for Donald Trump, who brought Mike Tyson to Atlantic City.
“The hours I worked in Trump were ridiculous,” she says, laughing, “but I loved every second of it. The boxing matches were amazing. It was an electric time, the glory days of my generation. Boxing is so cyclical, and at that point—in the late ’80s and early ’90s—it was running high.
“That was only one part of it, though. We also had the casino, the theater, the hotel, the restaurants. No day was ever the same. One day it was something really exciting and sexy, the next moment it’s down-to-earth regular PR. If you work with the right people, you learn to love it even more. You learn how to approach things in a pro-active, rather than a reactive way.”
Marshall found a band of mentors who later gained acclaim. Mitchell Etess became CEO of Mohegan Sun. Gary “Seles the Prez” Selesner is president of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Dave Coskey became a force for the Sixers, the NBA and the House of Blues before becoming Borgata’s marketing czar. Maureen Siman became an ACCVA executive. During Marshall’s realm, they were all blossoming.
Coskey brought Marshall here from the Sixers. He noticed her ability to stay ahead of the job’s demand curve.
“When it comes to PR, there are some people who just ‘get it’,” Coskey says. “Beth has always been one of those people. She’s always been a person who works hard, but more importantly, cares a great deal about what she does.
“Most people don’t know that when we worked with the 76ers back in the ’80s, before the memorabilia craze came around, there were people in every front office of most teams who sometimes ‘helped’ with requests for autographs. That’s obviously changed these days. But back then, Beth did a mean Julius Erving signature. Only one person could tell the difference, and that was me. To this day I still see an autographed piece from those days and I can spot an authentic Beth Marshall autograph.”
To succeed, PR specialists must keep track of hundreds of media contacts, and understand what each one wants. As in sports, anticipation is critical.
“You have to pitch the story to the right people,” Marshall says. “You need to know who the sports editors and sports directors are, who the gossip columnist is, and pitch a story that really makes sense to each person.
“If you send out a press release three or four times a year saying Paul Anka’s coming to town, you could get a listing in the newspaper. But you could also send out a press release saying he grew up around women his whole life, and pitch that to a lifestyles editor. Don’t wait for the story to happen, go forth with your idea.”
One of her favorite PR coups involved a ribbon-cutting for a Trump store tenant. The store’s executives showed up, and the media yawned.
Marshall was asked to get them to come again, for the same thing. That’s nearly impossible, but she pulled it off by bringing Governor Christie Whitman, Donald Trump and Marla Maples, his then-girlfriend. That’s public relations at its best.
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