Back in August, Method Creative Group of Little Rock announced that it had been hired by "international political consultant and strategist" Noelle Nikpour of Little Rock to develop a Web site and "to manage publicity and marketing strategy for her forthcoming media brand."
"Nikpour’s experience," Method noted, "has helped elect a President, four Governors and countless U. S. Senators and Congressmen."
Online domain registries indicate that NoelleNikpour.com was finally created on Feb. 18, but to say it has launched is generous.
Last week all that was available at that URL was a home page and this message: "Website Coming Soon."
Still, it didn’t look like any political consulting site your Whispers staff had ever seen. Maybe it was her windblown hair or the bandeau top. Or maybe it was the hand yanking down the front of her very short Adidas shorts.
Something about Nikpour’s image just didn’t scream policy wonk.
Within hours after we called to ask Method Creative Group about the tantalizing site, it disappeared from the Web. By Friday it had been replaced with something much tamer. Good thing we thought to save a copy of the original, now available at www.ArkansasBusiness.com/noelle.
Whispers wasn’t able to reach Nikpour; messages left at two phone numbers associated with her weren’t returned.
Marcus Boyce, a partner in Method Creative Group, said NoelleNikpour.com was "basically just a personal site, a marketing site." And while he started to say something about fitness consulting, he let that trail off.
Nikpour’s business, he said, is "just herself."
No matter what her home page looked like, Noelle Michelle Nikpour, 43, definitely is a political consultant of long standing.
In the late 1990s, she was a partner in a Republican fundraising company called Capitol Resource Management Group, which was rolled into Impact Management Group of Little Rock, where Nikpour was a partner until about four years ago.
Most recently she has done business under the name Ricercia & Associates.
And just last year, she was paid almost $75,000 by the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee Inc., according to quarterly reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.