Tyson Foods hires Fleishman-Hillard (updated)

Ad Age Magazine is reporting Tyson Foods Inc. recently struck a deal with St. Louis-based Fleishman-Hillard to handle the meat giant's growing public relations business.

Although Ad Age claimed the work dealt primarily with crisis management, Tyson spokesman Worth Sparkman wrote the following statement on the magazine's website: "Fleishman Hillard is a PR firm that provides an array of services, among them crisis-PR. It is incorrect to characterize the nature of the service they have been hired to provide Tyson as "crisis-PR" because it is in fact a wide array of services. The headline suggests we have only retained them to do crisis PR, which is wrong."

Sparkman noted in an e-mail to The City Wire: "Our company is growing and we need more PR resources, so we conducted a search and chose Fleishman-Hillard. We expect them to help us in many areas, including issues management, social and digital media strategies, corporate image and the like."