Virginia Brooks, APR
As founder and principal of Brooks & Associates Public Relations, Inc., Virginia Brooks brings targeted counsel and strategic results that translate into bottom-line gains for companies and organizations that understand and embrace the power of effective communications.
In business for more than 13 years, Virginia has been instrumental in leading Brooks & Associates to prominence in the high tech and energy industries with blue chip clients including Microsoft, Paradigm, Sabre Holdings, SMU Cox School of Business, Siemens PLM and more.
Prior to 2000, she helped manage corporate media relations for EDS, an $18.5 billion information technology service provider headquartered in Plano, Texas, and now part of tech giant HP. In that role, she concentrated on developing effective global media relations programs that helped raise the company’s visibility among all its target audiences worldwide. These activities included:
- Bringing national attention to the EDS Super Bowl XXXIV marketing campaign built around the highly successful “Herding Cats” commercial
- Communicating the launch of EDS’ Web Computing suite of services, a sweeping marketing and public relations initiative that staked out EDS’ leadership in the emerging world of Internet-based computing
- Providing communications consulting and implementing the announcement of the EDS/MCI WorldCom agreement, a $17 billion outsourcing agreement and acquisition that stands today as among the largest such contracts in the global telecommunications industry
- Promoting EDS and its clients in all its targeted industries, including transportation and hospitality, financial services, manufacturing, oil and gas, chemicals, utilities and telecommunications
Virginia gained experience in directing large-scale media events during her almost five years as communications manager for the Greater Houston Partnership — the Chamber of Commerce, Economic Development and World Trade organization for the country’s fourth largest city. During her tenure there, she led media relations activities targeted to the more than 35,000 international journalists who attended the 1990 Economic Summit of Nations and the 1992 Republican National Convention, both held in Houston. She was involved in the Partnership’s heavy lobbying efforts on the local and state level that facilitated the passage of NAFTA. She won several regional and national awards for the level and quality of coverage garnered to Houston as a result of those efforts.
She brings more than a decade of experience in crafting public relations and marketing programs targeted to the oil and gas, chemical and utilities industries. Employed with NL Industries, a then Fortune 200 chemical and oilfield services firm, Virginia’s public relations and marketing communications efforts saw that company successfully through the dramatic industry upheavals of the 1970s and ‘80s, a succession of acquisitions and divestitures, stock split-offs and ultimate reinvention of the company.
An accredited member of the Public Relations Society of America, Virginia has served in local, district and national leadership roles for the organization. She is a sought-after speaker to public relations organizations and has led seminars and training programs for other professional associations, including extensive and in-depth media training for public figures and organization spokespeople. Virginia did undergraduate work in pre-medicine and English at Oklahoma State University and graduate work in Public Relations at The University of Houston.