REDWOOD SHORES, CA: FitzGerald Communications has closed its Bay Area office, opting to focus on what it considers growing markets - Boston, New York, and Washington, DC.
"There's no business there," said CEO Maura FitzGerald of the Bay Area. "The market is dead from what I can see.
"We are going to focus on the regions where we are seeing growth," FitzGerald explained. There's no point in maintaining a presence in a market that is not showing any growth at all."
She added that accounts coming up for review in the Bay Area had very small budgets.
FitzGerald still has clients based in the Bay Area, including Credence, Mellanox Technologies, and NextPage, and the agency will continue to work with those clients.
In May, SVP Steve Astle, who ran the Bay Area office, left to join Text 100 as an SVP in that agency's San Francisco headquarters.
Astle had joined in April 2003 to replace John Berard, who left FitzGerald to join PR21 (now known as Zeno Group) as MD of its San Francisco office. Berard joined FitzGerald in mid-1999.
