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Toni Alexander specializes in ‘branding dirt,’



Former Singer Has Touted Some of OC’s Top Communities, Shopping Centers

In 1974, Toni Alexander faced her first major crossroads. She was a 26-year-old account executive for public relations firm Burson-Marsteller in Los Angeles, and a singer on the side. She’d just finished recording an album.

But she decided she had to make a choice,either pursue an entertainment career, or focus on advertising. She opted for advertising. Influencing her decision was a romance she had struck up with a co-worker at Burson-Marstellar, Bill Strateman, who would soon become her mate.

“My husband and advertising became the anchor for me,” Alexander said. “The music business didn’t hold that sense of promise I felt the business world could.”

It was a pivotal decision that today finds Alexander as creative director and president of Newport-Beach based InterCommunications Inc., the largest OC ad agency owned and operated by a woman.

In the past 16 years, Alexander’s firm, which counts 40 employees and $40 million in capitalized annual billings, has carved out a niche marketing residential, commercial and resort developments throughout the world. She’s done work for The Irvine Company, marketing masterplanned communities like the Irvine Cove Crest Community and Tustin Ranch, and retail projects like The Tustin Market Place, Irvine Spectrum Center and Fashion Island.

InterCom has also has marketed high-end resort developments like Ventana Canyon in Tucson, Ariz., featuring a Loew’s Hotel and 18-hole golf course, as well as local communities like Dove Canyon and Coto de Caza.

The agency, with 60% of its business devoted to resort communities and 40% to master-planned communities and retail complexes, is currently working on what’s known as the Treasure Island project in Laguna Beach, being developed by The Athens Group, a high-end resort developer based in Phoenix.

After making the fateful decision to leave singing behind, Alexander soon left Burson-Marstellar. She said she hoped to one day be the “captain of my own ship,” and in the late 1970s and early 1980s it was unlikely that a woman would do so at a large ad agency.

A few stints with small ad agencies and magazines followed. Then, in 1980, she joined InterCom.

The company’s former owner, Norval La Vene, was looking to retire and wanted to sell the agency, which was then at eight employees in a 2,000-square-foot office in Newport Beach with about $1 million in capitalized annual billings. At the time, Alexander said there was a major inflation-induced slowdown in the real estate world, which comprised most of the agency’s business.

Alexander said that La Vene offered the company to LA-based Abert Newhoff & Burr but was turned down. He had two more prospects, one of them Alexander, who says she won the company by default.

If nobody else wanted the agency, Alexander believed it was a “good strategic move,” since she says it would have been harder to start a company from scratch.

“I was purchasing an established business. There’s value to a brand,” Alexander explained.

She did a buyout for an undisclosed amount in the six-figure range. She and La Vene struck a deal in which she agreed to give him payments every month for five years, without a big down payment.

So in 1984, Alexander,then 34 years old,became InterCom’s president. She had two sons under the age of 3 at home, and her husband commuted to Los Angeles every day to work at Young & Rubicam’s office there. Eventually he came to work for InterCom as a consultant and remains in that capacity with the agency.

“It was a big move, especially since I had some experience with accounting, but I wasn’t real sharp on it,” Alexander said.

The beginning was a little rough.

“Real estate, like many industries, has tended to be a much more male-dominated profession,” Alexander said. “It was one thing to be behind a male shadow, but when I finally emerged as the owner it was like, ‘Oh, wasn’t she somebody’s assistant?’ Credibility is sometimes difficult to establish whether you’re a man or a woman. Twenty-five years ago it was more difficult as a woman.”

The Lusk Co.,then a big, steady client,disappeared from the portfolio. Another client having financial trouble refused to pay its bill, banking on Alexander being inexperienced in business and law. But Alexander says “thankfully I had a good lawyer.” The Irvine Co., which used InterCom as a consultant in the early 1908s, tapered off a little bit too.

Gaining credibility meant becoming more visible and getting more experience. Alexander began to network. In 1984, she joined the then-mostly male Recreational Council of the Urban Land Institute (she’s now a Chair) to cultivate relationships and gain research knowledge on the consumer and trends in development. She persisted with the Irvine Co., landing some new work, including the marketing for Tustin Market Place. (The ad agency has worked with the Irvine Co. on various projects for the last 15 years.)

Eventually, those early projects with the Irvine Co. created word-of-mouth advertising for InterCom and led to more work, Alexander said.

The agency got its first big break in late 1984: Tucson’s Ventana Canyon.

Alexander said the project’s developer, The Estes Co., which had worked with InterCom on an earlier project, had heard InterCom’s name mentioned in industry circles and contacted Alexander.

InterCom’s challenge was to make visitors view this 1,100-acre high-end resort as environmentally friendly, a theme incorporated throughout the project. InterCom pushed the connection with nature in its marketing campaign. The company used naturalists’ artwork and focused on the “Who’s Who” in Tucson,highlighting animals indigenous to the area instead of people.

“A lot of people pointed to it as the first real project that was environmentally sensitive and in the high end,” said Kim Richards, who had worked with Alexander on the resort. Richards now is president of the Athens Group. “That was the keystone for what we did, not only for that project but others as well.”

Buzz about that project eventually led InterCom to win other local projects, such as Coto de Caza and Dove Canyon.

Richards also came back into the picture, calling on InterCom in the early 1990s to market a high-end resort known as the Four Seasons Resort in Hualalai in Hawaii.

“The more projects we worked on outside California, the more credibility we gained. Suddenly you have a national posture and before it was seen as a local ad firm,” Alexander said.

A few years passed, and Richards again looked to InterCom to help position the former Treasure Island project, which calls for a 275-room hotel (under the Ritz Carlton umbrella), 14 condos and 14 single-family ocean front lots.

Though that project, expected to open mid 2002, at first was embroiled in controversy, Alexander said InterCom hasn’t let that influence its marketing plans.

“Part of becoming an addition to the community is helping Laguna Beach tell its story of why artists came here,” Alexander said.

InterCom plans to push Laguna Beach’s artistic heritage in its campaign, and educate people about the colony of artists that inhabited the area in the early days.

Alexander says one of the keys to her business has been the ability to be flexible and adaptable.

In 1993, that meant cutting her then 35-person staff to 20 during the recession.

Now, it means the agency must continue to research to understand the consumer and tap into behavioral trends, Alexander said. It also means the agency must keep providing clients with a full-range of services, including signage, interactive Web sites and compact discs, to meet their changing needs.

Plus, Alexander has a personal goal: “Continuing to educate young people in the field will also be an important goal for me. I’m not saying this is going to turn into a school, but I want to provide a place where creative people want to be.” n

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