Harte-Hanks

Harte-Hanks (NYSE: HHS) is a direct and digital marketing company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. Direct marketing services include: agency, strategy and creative services; mobile and social marketing; data analytics and modeling; database development and data management; e-mail delivery; inbound and outbound contact center; fulfillment services; and mail delivery, tracking and optimization. In addition to the direct marketing side of the business Harte-Hanks is also North America's largest owner, operator and distributor of shoppers, with 13 million circulation weekly in 1100 separate editions of the PennySaver and Flyer each week in California and Florida, respectively.^[1] Harte-Hanks also manages PennySaverUSA.com, a nationwide network of local advertising content online for consumers and businesses.

History

Founded by Houston Harte and Bernard Hanks in 1923 as Harte-Hanks Newspapers (and later Harte-Hanks Communications), the company spent its first 50 years operating newspapers in Texas. It made its first IPO on March 8, 1972, later diversifying into television and radio properties. In 1984, the company's managers took it private, later going public again in 1993. In the mid-1990s, the company withdrew from the newspaper and broadcasting business and focused solely on direct marketing and shopper publications.^[2]

Texas newspapers

Harte-Hanks' first newspapers were Hanks' Abilene Reporter-News and Harte's San Angelo Standard-Times. Early acquisitions, in the 1920s and 1930s, included the Harlingen Star, Corpus Christi Times, Big Spring Herald and Paris News, as well as two competing newspapers in Greenville, Texas, which Harte-Hanks consolidated into the Herald-Banner.^[3]

In 1962, the company, still a Texas-only affair, took full ownership of San Antonio Express-News, its largest circulation newspaper. The Express-News was one of the first properties Harte-Hanks sold off, however, as it began to narrow its focus to smaller newspapers and eventually to direct marketing. Rupert Murdoch paid $19 million for the Express-News in 1973.^[3]

The Abilene, Corpus Christi and San Angelo papers were among the last Harte-Hanks properties divested, sold to E.W. Scripps Company in May 1997.^[4]

Television and radio

The company made its first foray into other media as early as 1962, when Harte-Hanks bought KENS-AM-TV, San Antonio's CBS radio and television affiliates, as part of its acquisition of the Express-News. Harte-Hanks turned KENS from a perennial ratings also-ran to the market leader by 1968. In the 1970s, the newspaper-dominated company further diversified its holdings by purchasing a television and radio station in Anderson, South Carolina, as well as television stations in Jacksonville, Florida; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Springfield, Missouri. In 1978, Harte-Hanks bought radio stations formerly owned by Southern Broadcasting. Harte-Hanks in 1980 owned four television stations, 11 radio stations and four cable television systems, in addition to its newspapers. It sold off most of these assets in the mid-1980s, to pay down debt incurred in the leveraged buyout that took the company private. Harte-Hanks continued to hold KENS until 1997, when it and the company's remaining newspaper properties were sold to Scripps.^[3]

Television stations owned

Other newspapers

At the time of the first IPO in 1972, the firm owned properties in 19 markets, spread around six states.^[6]

By 1980, the company owned 29 daily and 68 weekly newspapers, but its fastest growing division was Consumer Distribution Marketing, which included shoppers, market research firms and direct-mail distributors -- the future core of today's Harte-Hanks.^[3]

In 1995, Harte-Hanks sold to Community Newspaper Company its interest in the Middlesex News, two other dailies, and associated weeklies in the western suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts.^[7] It had owned the News since 1972 and bought the News-Tribune and Daily Transcript in 1986.^[8]

Other Businesses

Harte-Hanks also owns the Aberdeen Group a provider of business-related research services, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 2006 Harte-Hanks acquired Global Address, a software company based in the UK that developed International Address Validation technology. Global Address was founded by Martin Turvey and Matthew Furneaux. Furneaux left Harte Hanks in 2007 to pursue other interests while Turvey remains. In 2008 Global Address was merged into Trillium Software.

Harte-Hanks owns Harte-Hanks Trillium software. Also, Harte-Hanks provides customer service/technical support for selected products of major companies such as Microsoft, FedEx, Samsung and Apple Inc.

In 2008 Harte-Hanks acquired Mason Zimbler. Mason Zimbler is the agency within Harte-Hanks that focuses specifically on marketing business and consumer technology, in the U.S. and around the world.

Footnotes

1. ^ About Our Company: Harte-Hanks, Inc., accessed July 1, 2010.
2. ^ Our History: Harte-Hanks, Inc., accessed January 22, 2007.
3. ^ ^{a b c d} Answers.com: Harte-Hanks Communications, Inc., accessed January 26, 2007.
4. ^ Sale of ARN to Scripps Complete, accessed January 25, 2007.
5. ^ Acquired with the purchase of Southern Broadcasting, but had to be sold off to Gulf Broadcasting in order to comply with FCC duopoly rules of the time.
6. ^ Abilene Reporter News: About Us, accessed January 25, 2007.
7. ^ "Middlesex News Changing Owners." Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, Mass.), November 23, 1994.
8. ^ Adams, Jane Meredith. "Harte-Hanks Acquires Transcript Group." The Boston Globe, March 14, 1986; "Four Leaving Jobs at Middlesex News." The Boston Globe, April 9, 1982.

External links

• Harte-Hanks website
• Harte-Hanks Trillium Software website

Categories: Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange | Newspaper companies of the United States | Companies based in San Antonio, Texas