Ampush announced the recent hiring of Andrew Hersam as director of sales. Ampush, founded in 2009, is a social technology company that helps brands and agencies advertise on Facebook. The company expects Andrew to play a key contributing role in continuing to drive Ampush forward during a period of expansion and investment. Hersam is an accomplished media executive with more than 20 years of experience managing print, digital, TV, and event brands. Hersam was most recently global marketing solutions, client partner at Facebook with Facebook’s financial services business. Prior to Facebook, Hersam served as EVP, media for the Competitor Group, Inc. (CGI). (Release)

Hearst Newspapers announced that Mike DeLuca, 45, has been named senior vice president, digital for Hearst Newspapers. Hearst Newspapers’ digital footprint includes 30 websites, 11 mobile sites and 33 apps that together reach more than 50 million unique readers each month. DeLuca last served as chief revenue officer at Savored, which was acquired by Groupon in 2012. At Groupon, he most recently served as VP of sales and before that, was senior vice president, sales and operations for AOL Local. DeLuca is also on the advisory board of Yodle, where he was senior vice president of sales and marketing from 2008 to 2010. He was vice president of sales and account management at Yahoo! from 2003 to 2008, and prior to that, held various sales and management roles in the storage technology sector. (Release)

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Now we’ve learned of another big-name departure–and the arrival of some new blood.

Shannon Eis, who led internal and executive communications at Condé , left last week for a new role as senior vice president of corporate communications at top PR firm MMW. Eis previously worked as senior vice president at Kaplow Communications (and yes, she will continue making regular appearances on The Late Show With David Letterman as a parenting expert).

This week brings news that Patricia Röckenwagner has been named Condé Nast’s senior vice president of communications. Industry vet Röckenwagner previously served as senior VP of marketing and communications for McGraw-Hill Companies and corporate comms director at Paramount Pictures.

It would appear that Condé Nast is reshaping its communications team as part of a larger strategic shift. Expect more announcements to foll0w.

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Women’s Wear Daily goes so far as to call her “Condé Nast’s most powerful gatekeeper”; she spent more than two decades at the company performing PR duties for such names as David Remnick and Tina Brown and mentoring much of the industry’s younger talent. Before joining Condé Nast she worked at ABC News alongside Barbara Walters and others.

Brown says “She’s more than a publicist. She’s a consiglieri. No one can see all the angles like her”. Tough to find greater words of praise for anyone in the business.

Earlier this week an internal email revealed that Perl would be leaving as a result of Condé Nast’s decision to hire the Rubenstein agency for all media relations concerns. This move comes about because the company looks to further establish itself in “the scripted TV and feature films arenas”. Robert Green, executive producer of Huffington Post Live, will be the company’s new senior vice president.

No word on next steps for Perl, who has “no intention of retiring.”

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Film critics from Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and Criticwire opened up about the impact of digital, their approach to film selection and the challenges they face. Here are our key takeaways:

In the current film review landscape, everyone’s a critic. Owen Gleiberman, film critic at Entertainment Weekly, expressed mixed feelings about the web’s impact. Overall, he said the internet has been a positive. “The practice of film criticism is energized by the outpouring of opinions on the web.” Still, he mentioned a big downside: “The web has led to a multiplicity of voices, but that breeds consensus thinking and it’s harder for any one voice to come through. There can be a pack mentality among critics.”

Digital shortens the review process. The increased prevalence of online movie reviews has added pressure to review films quickly. Critic Matt Singer of Criticwire said, “I attended a press screening last night but it’s tough to turn a review around overnight. It’s not like The New York Times restaurant review policy that requires four restaurant visits.” Gleiberman agreed, saying “There’s less time to mull movies over, and I want to nail my feelings about a film.”

Video on Demand/VOD expands movie distribution to wider audiences. “VOD is very important since it allows people from all over access to movies, including indie, foreign films and film festival movies,” emphasized Richard Brody, critic at The New Yorker.” VOD made niche films–previously released only in urban centers–easily accessible to viewers worldwide.

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Luckily, John Seabrook of The New Yorker just published a fascinating article about the carefully choreographed process that fuels the fast-growing world of Korean pop music—and its top PR teams’ plans to win Western fans with their dizzying mix of contemporary production, eclectic stage shows and a shocking amount of plastic surgery.

South Korea’s top three entertainment PR firms have essentially come to run the K-Pop industry by adopting the British/American boy band business model…on steroids. And they’ve completely dominated the Asian music market by beating predecessor J-Pop at its own game and winning the Chinese public over with their bizarre videos and promo events.

Now music publisher and promoter SM Entertainment—whose Twitter profile reads “Follow us for 10 years, we’ll make you pretty and famous”—plans to take over the United States, one flashy tour at a time. Founder and former entertainer Lee Soo-man is often described as the creator and mastermind behind the K-Pop phenomenon who made good on his plans to recreate American pop for the Asian market, and he inspires conflicting emotions among fans.

The industry is hardly limited to music; K-Pop idols frequently star in ad campaigns, soap operas and feature films. There’s even a term, “hallyu”, for the incredible influx of South Korean culture that has blanketed the continent over the past decade, and the country’s government has aggressively promoted its distribution as a form of “soft power.”

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We would normally agree–but this week The New Republic published a fascinating story that caught our eye: It would appear that The Church and The Nation of Islam—which may well be our country’s two least favorite native religious groups—have decided to join hands in the interest of faith and public relations. It’s quite bizarre.

Some might say that Scientology is going through a bit of PR crisis right now. After Paul Haggis’s big 2011 New Yorker takedown, the church’s famous PR team seems to have slowed down a bit—they haven’t even truly responded to PT Anderson’s thinly-veiled L. Ron Hubbard film “The Master” or the inflammatory headlines that have appeared on gossip rags in the wake of the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes split.

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His central premise is this: until the late 90’s, political PR men had only one very blunt weapon–mass media communications. Flyers/mailers, TV attack ads and scripted phone calls were the only way to go. Now, however, technology has turned micro-targeting into an art. Campaign representatives use data drawn from “shopping habits, leisure activities, voting histories, charity donations, and so on” to identify and target two very specific groups of voters: Those who truly haven’t made up their minds and those who may need an extra push to make sure they get to the polls.  It is a never-ending process that is constantly being reviewed and refined.

Surowiecki’s most important point (and one we’ve noted before) is that TV ads are growing less and less effective—and that fact puts an even higher premium on micro-targeting and the simple act of knocking on doors and engaging potential voters in real-world conversations. Repeated surveys have found that the most personal messages are also the most effective. For example, “Just thanking people for having voted in the past significantly increases the chance that they’ll vote again.”

In this way, the evolution of campaigning mirrors changes in general PR practices.

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His current claim to fame? An extremely profitable partnership with the world’s favorite pre-pubescent crooner, Justin Bieber.

In case you haven’t heard, Braun is a former Atlanta-based party promoter who worked with various area hip-hop stars and discovered Bieber while browsing YouTube for clips to help promote his biggest client at the time, singer Ne-Yo. After a bit of pleading with Bieber’s mother, he managed to persuade the two to relocate to the ATL and join forces with R&B veteran Usher. This move gave Bieber the credibility he needed to pass muster as a lily-white soul singer capable of reducing tween girls across the globe to incoherent screeches while simultaneously looking innocent enough to win parents’ approval.

Despite appearances, Bieber was not quite an overnight sensation, and the route he took to superstardom was anything but traditional.

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Another clever promo from those eggheads at The New Yorker: This meta-comedic short film directed by Lena Dunham (HBO‘s “Girls“) features the writer/actress/producer introducing the concepts of an iPhone, an app, and the magazine itself to charmingly oblivious talk show host Jon Hamm (“Mad Men“). The interview — like so many on late night talk shows — centers on Hamm showing a clip of Dunham’s “new film”, in which she portrays an exasperated New Yorker editor trying to explain the importance of the new app to a flustered assistant (played by fellow “Girls” regular Alex Karpovsky).

This isn’t the first time the magazine has used big-name actors and directors to get the word out about their digital ventures — for their 2010 iPad app launch, they released another comedic short film starring Jason Schwartzman and directed by Roman Coppola.

Source: Ad Age

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“…If it were up to me, I wouldn’t show movies to anybody before they were released. I wouldn’t give clips to talk shows. I would do one trailer and three television spots and let the chips fall where they may,” the story says (italics, theirs). “Ultimately, movies live or die by word of mouth anyway. All that other stuff doesn’t matter.”

An article on Slate kind of bolsters this argument.

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Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig in David Fincher's 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' Photo: Merrick Morton

Gasp! The New Yorker has broken an embargo on its review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the much-anticipated David Fincher version of the crazy-popular book by Stieg Larsson.

IndieWire has the email chain between New Yorker reviewer David Denby and the film’s producer Scott Rudin, which you can read here. Rudin also contacted other reviewers urging them to stick with the December 13th run date.

In a nutshell, the end of the year is crunch time for reporters on the movie beat because so many films come out at once in order to be considered for awards season. In an effort to fit everyone’s schedule, Dragon Tattoo was specially screened by the NY Film Critics Circle (Denby is a member) earlier this month with a December 13 embargo date. The New Yorker has decided to run its review today.

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USA Today‘s editor John Hillkirk has stepped down to be senior editor of the paper’s investigative projects. And Rudd Davis, who joined the company last year as VP of business development, has been named president of the paper’s travel media division. [via Businessweek]

Muck Rack, which covers news from Twitter, has relaunched with the addition of Muck Rack Pro. Free for reporters and available by subscription for publicists, the service helps to organize and manage media lists, complete with social media info from networks like Google+ and Facebook.

The revamp of CBS’ The Early Show continues (sort of) with the announcement of a new name. Starting January 9, the program will be called CBS This Morning, which is what the show was called from 1987 to 1999. Were the ratings better with that name?

Crazy Don Imus took to his microphone to talk smack about the Fox News PR team. They took it in stride. [via TVNewser]

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But we’ll still keep an eye peeled for the next social media step from The New Yorker. This is definitely a win in the short run. Now that they’ve got all this attention, the question is: Can they keep it?

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If you “like” The New Yorker, for a limited time, you can read a 12,000-word story by Jonathan Franzen (author of The Corrections and Freedom) titled “Farther Away” on Facebook. Content from The New Yorker is usually behind a paywall.

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