When Extreme Makeover: Home Edition comes to town to build a house for a deserving family, there's a lot more than elbow grease that goes into those walls.

Last November, the ABC show descended upon Sandpoint, ID, and asked local builder Sullivan Homes to construct a house for an as-yet-unnamed family. Sullivan readily accepted, and two weeks before the construction started, it asked Desautel Hege Communications (DHC) to help manage the media flurry that would accompany the project.

Having to ...