This month marks Hope Beckham Espinosa’s 30th anniversary. Much has changed in the last three decades – both in business and in the world. Our founder Bob Hope reflects on our evolution as an agency, and how we have thrived through it all.
Half the world’s population was yet to be born 30 years ago.
Lion King and Forrest Gump were the top movies and remain popular today. Cell phones flipped. The IBM Simon was introduced as the first smart phone. There was no World Series in baseball for the first time since 1904 because of a player strike. O.J. Simpson led police on a bizarre chase in a Ford Bronco. SONY introduced the Play Station. The QR Code was introduced. The inventor of high brightness blue LED won the Nobel Prize.
Two notable businesses started in 1994. Hope-Beckham Public Relations, which is now Hope Beckham Espinosa, was formed by friends Bob Hope and Paul Beckham. The other was a young guy named Jeff Bezos who started selling books online and called his new company Amazon. Both have done well, and I am proud to have been around for three decades and enjoy a wonderful ride with a terrific company.
We started with a handful of projects, the largest being the creation of a women’s professional baseball team for Coors Light, the Colorado Silver Bullets. That team is now on display in six different places in the Baseball Hall of Fame….pretty good for something that started as a beer promotion. We’ve worked for some of the top companies in the world and have traveled the world, doing business in places like Taiwan, Bahrain, Israel, England, Central America and Canada. We’ve worked on the Olympics, the Super Bowl, World Series, soccer, and an assortment of golf tournaments. We’ve worked with top celebrities like Michael Jordan, Hank Aaron, Elton John and most recently Dominique Dawes. We’ve designed a theme park for Coca-Cola for the Olympics and even the world’s largest peanut for the National Peanut Board.
When I worked for Ted Turner, he’d talk about the “magic touch,” the ability to take the ordinary and turn it into the extraordinary. Our people have done that time and time again. Our attitude has been to say yes and then ask what the question is. We’ve worked along companies in their worst times like Enron and Arthur Andersen, and also in their best like with Coca-Cola during the 100th anniversary of the Olympics in Atlanta or more recently the 150th anniversary of Wellroot Family Services, formerly known as the Methodist Children’s Home. Or perhaps working to host events honoring a baseball legend attended by the President and other legends. We’ve helped figure the best way to encourage 3,000 factory workers to get vaccinated by creating huge vaccination rallies almost overnight. We’ve helped organizations do good, creating major events for many worthwhile charities to tell their stories and raise money to build their capacity to do even more good.
My original partner, Paul Beckham, died four years ago, suddenly and unexpectedly, leading to a new chapter in our history. Hope-Beckham became Hope Beckham Espinosa when Paul’s partnership interest was replaced by Gina Espinosa, the leading public relations expert on the growing Hispanic market in Atlanta and the Southeast. New horizons are opening for us. We continue to do what we’ve always done but are reaching out to a new population with new expertise. Three decades can be a lifetime or simply time to grow up and mature in preparation of taking on new and greater challenges. We know more than we’ve ever known before and are excited to work with both old and new clients doing work that will flourish with our “magic touch.” It sounds a lot more hopeful than selling books online.