Abenaa gets top PR rating in US

In the PR Week magazine of June 21, 1999, one of the 40 Public Relations Stars under 40 was a Trinidadian Abenaa Hayes. She was just 27 years old, and at the time employed by Rowland Wang Healthcare as an account supervisor: “Not a very big firm”, says Abenaa, “about 25 people only, specialised in pharmaceutical PR.”

The daughter of the late Dr John Hayes, founder of the John Hayes Kidney Foundation, and the late Justice Cynthia Riley-Hayes, attended both Bishop Anstey Junior and High Schools before going to Mc Gill University in Montreal where she graduated with a first degree in English, with a concentration on film and communications. She then obtained a Master’s in broadcast journalism from the Aanenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. Abenaa started off wanting to be a television reporter, but while pursuing her degree realised that the course offered not only print and broadcast journalism but also a degree in public relations which she says is “one of those fields that journalists know they cannot live without PR people, but on the side make fun of them as they are not really considered true news people. But at the end of the day most journalists do acknowledge that if it were not for the people in PR they would not have half the stories they get, especially in the field I work in.”

What is Abenaa’s specialised field of Pharmaceutical Public Relations all about? “It is one in which publicity is given when different clinical trials or a new drug discovery gets published in the medical journals. We co-ordinate the publicity effort for print and broadcast media, which involves interviews with doctors and dissemination of all information.” The Trinidad-born PR practitioner was at the time of her nomination in PR Week, the only practitioner whom Mike Waldholz of the Wall Street Journal had ever complimented on her “helpfulness”. Waldholz, one of the top reporters focuses on health care and bio-technology, but, says Abenaa, “the thing he is most famous for is all the reporting done in the past 20 years on HIV and AIDS. He is one of those people who doesn’t always like PR people and is not always very nice to you on the phone when you call. “The reason I think I got along with him is that I believe you are always as good as your next story and when you deal with people like Mike Waldholz of the Wall Street Journal you have to know when to call them, what to give them and when to be persistent. When I worked with him, he called my client and congratulated them on having me as their PR person because he said if I were not persistent with the story he would never have written it, and he was glad that I was (persistent) because the product actually changed the way they treat HIV patients medically. That was the beginning of my working relationship with him.”

At the start of her career, Abenaa thought she could become a local television reporter in a place like New York or Los Angeles — two big media markets in the United States. “When you make it that is where you want to work. And that is what I wanted to do, but at the time the economy was as it is now in the States, not so good. Jobs were not so easy to come by so I thought how can I use my skills and still be able to carve out a career, and that is how I chose PR.” She considers herself lucky “because when I actually started looking for the job in PR, all the companies at the time were hiring former journalists or people who had journalism degrees because they saw that there was value in having  them on staff. “I had worked for about four months at a television station in Los Angeles and then my grandfather, the late Frank Hercules, a Trinidadian living in New York, called me and said why don’t you come to New York, it is the centre of the universe, we have all the media centres here. So I said I will go and try it for one year.” That year has stretched to almost nine years. Abenaa started off with the same firm with which she now works — Manning Selvage & Lee, a full service Public Relations company in Manhattan. “I was working in their travel PR group but really wanted to do health care, something that would help people since apart from all the direct publicity we also do a lot of patient education, could have been the family history of having a father as a doctor who started the Kidney Foundation in Trinidad and did a lot of grassroots work here. So I do a lot of health care PR, particularly with aids and cancer.”

Abenaa is considered something of a science guru as with no medical training whatever, she is able to read and think scientifically for her job. “It could also be part of having my father as a doctor and listening to all of his friends I was able to pick it up quite quickly.” In her spare time, she is a member of the Junior Committee of HELP USA — a volunteer group which provides shelter and does job training for the homeless. She has chosen “pilates”— a combination of yoga and strength training — a sport. Her one-week visit to Trinidad was to be mother-giver to her younger brother, Dr John Hayes, who married Camille Boodoo last Saturday at Holy Trinity Cathedral.