‘You haven’t got a PR problem, you’ve got a reality problem.’

Enjoyed this presentation by AlistairCampbell. He neatly puts his finger on the disconnect between the unrealistic hopes of company execs and the real world outcomes of PR.

‘I get calls from people out of the blue… But when a government or company or a big brand comes on, I always assume two things – 1, they have a problem; and 2, they think it is about the communications. They think they need a spin doctor.
So I go and see them and the first thing I do is say: “who are your key people?” and I ask to see them too, at the same time. And I get out some plain white postcards. And on each one is written the words: "The main objective of our organization is …"
‘And I ask them to end that sentence. Then I ask them to turn over the postcard, and it says:"The strategy to meet our objective is …"
‘And I ask them to fill that out too. Then I gather them in. And nine times out of ten, I gather in a stack of different objectives, strategies which are tactics, or strategies which are objectives, and I say to them… you don’t have a spin problem, you have a reality problem. 'If you are not aligned on strategy, you, the key people running the show, why should the public be expected to know and hear what you are trying to say or sell to them? And why should the media not take every chance it can to make your life more difficult, pore over your errors, ignore your successes?”

Of course he’s right. It’s probably the most frustrating thing that PRs have to deal with, the immanent failure of executives to integrate PR into all their work, instead to see it as a post-facto magic wand.

But how many other lowly PRs would embarrass a potential client at first pitch like this? How many would actually succeed in such a way by highlighting said client’s board-level dissonance?

I’m sure it works for Alistair Campbell but, by dint of his reputation, I think AC has most other PRs at a disadvantage here.  

Chewing the cud with journalists

When I was a journalist and short of a story I would spend hours on the phone talking to contacts for ‘golden quotes’. It’s a basic news trawling exercise that relies upon the art of making conversation, rocket science it aint.

I would just talk, have a chat, chew the cud, engage about anything and everything and wait for the contact to say something interesting and… newsworthy, why else would I have been calling?

The approach could be refined in proportion to the expertise of said contact. For example, if I was working on a provincial daily newspaper and wanted to know what’s going on in town, I'd speak to the pub landlord, the post office master, or newsagent. Just a bit of idle chit-chat for a few minutes, and I'd turn up a story.

A refined version of the ‘golden quotes’ tactic served equally well with contacts who had more specialist expertise than the bloke down the pub. The only difference was that the chit-chat took place at a more rarefied level of discourse. The outcome, however, would usually be the same. After a few minutes on the blower, I’d have a lead for a story.

Any decent reporter worth their salt continues to employ this tactic, they pick up the phone, they chat, they listen (they take notes).

Now sometimes it’s obvious why a journalist is calling, you know their angle and this can limit the chit chat a little. Other times a journalist calls up and they genuinely have no angle, they’re just after a story, anything really. 

I make this point to clients all the time nothing else matters to journalists, apart from stories. It's their medium of exchange, lifeblood.

It’s great when you can give them something, it doesn’t have be about your organization or client (journalists don’t particularly care about your client, they care about stories). Perhaps they’d be interested in a story you’ve read somewhere else (though usually not from a rival publication).

At other times you don’t have have a story at all. It’s at times like this that I like to turn the ‘golden quotes’ tactic into reverse, especially if the journalist is not near a deadline. I like to engage them in a conversation, find out what’s going on in their world, what’s happening in the newsroom? What’s today’s splash? How many staff photographers are on the books these days? Are they doing any freelance work? How many leads have they had this week? Best ever scoop? How did they stack it up? Talk news with journalists, talk their language. 

I think it helps. 

Leveson journo who lifted lid on dodgy press starts news channel exposing... er dodgy press.

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This is good. A new Youtube site ‘The Spike’ set up Richard Peppiatt, a former Express journalist who blew the lid on dodgy newsroom ethics at the Richard Desmond vanity title.

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Le charm discret de la bourgeoisie Vs Come dine with me.

I watched Luis Bunuels’ Discreet Charm for the first time recently on the back of comparisons between it and Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.

Discreet Charm is a better film –notwithstanding the aesthetic beauty of Von Trier - and is in some ways similar to Bunuel’s earlier Exterminating Angel. In both films Bunuel uses the dinner party as a means to satirize and poke a particular kind of surreal fun at the bourgeoisie.

Both revolve around the genteel rituals of the dinner party, in particular the polite discretion each middle class attendee affords the other.  Etiquette demands that certain conversations be off the menu.  

In ‘Discreet Charm’ Bunuel is having none of this polite dinner stuff. Instead he interrupts each of his middle class protagonists’ attempts at breaking bread with an excursus into social relations that underpin the surface of this polite society: adultery, drug running, assassinations, militarism, addictions, all are rudely played out to the annoyance of the dinner set, continuously interrupting their attempts to eat. The film is surreal and funny whilst ripping away the mask of polite society, thrusting the reality of domination into the audience and the actors faces.

I wonder what Bunuel would make of ‘Come DineWith Me’? A show that revels in encouraging its working class participants to heights of indiscretion, bitchiness and freakery.  A kind of ‘Discreet Charm’ turned on its head?

Field Recording 0001: Call to Prayer Turkey jul 2012

Walking around on a recent trip to Turkey I happened to be passing a mosque when the Adhan or call to prayer began.
I'd been wanting to capture this sound as a field recording and I managed to get a decent clip. It was outside a mosque in the tourist town of Marmaris.
My ideal would be to get a field recording in a larger urban environment when the sound of hundreds of mosques calling out at the same time gives rise to an almost unreal layering of sound that is unique to Muslim countries.

Forty second film review

They Live - Jon Carpenter

I'm a JC fan, but this film is not one of his best. Not sure if the disengaged acting, ropy characterization and lazy plot line are intentional, I suppose they could be, given the film's vision of an anomic consumer society enslaved 'behind its own back' by aliens.
And that's the problem with this film: the aliens. Why blame extraterrestrials for inequality, injustice, over consumption, police repression and the like? We do a pretty good job of that by ourselves thank you very much.
The film's premise reminds me of  this research paper which, among other things, argues that an advanced alien civilization might have the solution for many earthly problems.... you know, world poverty, inequality, sustainability, global warming... stuff like that.
Far be it for humans to be able to solve these problems ourselves.
Of course, the film could just be an ironic joke, in which case... you certainly got me there.

'Fuzzy Filches Fuzz's Funder'

I was going to write a blog about how companies like News International adopt the PR tactic of ‘stealing thunder’ to limit bad news and sell more things.

But before I could finish, as if to ram home the point, former news international CEO Rebekah Brooks gave a quite brilliant show of how [not] to do it.

Rather than wait for the Crown Prosecution Service to announce that it was bringing charges against her and five others relating to perverting the course of justice, she announced the bad news herself:

In a statement, Brooks and her husband castigated the CPS:

"We deplore this weak and unjust decision after the further unprecedented posturing of the CPS..." 

Later in the day (just in time for the prime time evening news slots) she and her husband followed-up with a statement to for TV News cameras:

For a journalist, like Brooks, it probably seems common sense to go for the ‘stealing thunder’ approach, to get the bad news out there on your own terms, before your enemies.

The immediate response on Twitter was interesting. The Mail’s Political Editor, James Chapman, with a hint of irony, hailed it as ‘classy’.

Rebekah Brooks steals thunder of CPS by announcing her own arrest before they do. One more scoop. Got to say, classy
— James Chapman (Mail) (@jameschappers) May 15, 2012

BBC correspondent Daniel Sandford called it ‘cheap’ (which I think means basically the same thing).

@jameschappers No not classy. Cheap.
— Daniel Sandford (@BBCDanielS) May 15, 2012

I don’t know what Brooks’ lawyer thought. Nor have I seen any PR heads giving their view.

For what it’s worth, I think Brooks’ act could only be considered ‘tactically’ sound, if staying on top of the 24-7 media agenda was important to some other aim within the context of the impending criminal trial. By pre-empting the CPS and announcing that she had been charged she won a couple of decent headlines and signalled an important message to her supporters in the media and elsewhere.The problem is, this isn’t the end of it and it’s difficult to see how she will be able to keep ahead of the discourse for long. Surely her lawyers will be trying to get her to keep schtum. Or will they?

An organisation has several options when releasing information about a crisis. Perhaps the most common, intuitive position is to say nothing, or deny everything. In the early days of the phone hacking scandal that’s what News International seemed to do. They stuck to the ‘one rogue reporter’ line until a mounting set of allegations, culminating in the details surrounding the court case concerning Milly Dowler, left them with no credibility left. At some point during the summer of 2011 News International must have realised that it needed to start fessing up about a few things. That’s when rumours started about ‘draining the swamp’ in and around Wapping. It was met with a backlash by senior News International journalists.

I understand that the tactic of ‘stealing thunder’ originates in the arena of courtroom rhetoric (happy to be told I'm wrong on this). Lawyers in jury trials have, apparently for a long time, adopted the tactic, particularly when defending dubious clients. So much the better to tell the jury early doors that there’s a stain on your client’s character, rather than leave it to the prosecution, juries don’t like that.

Outisde the courtroom, if you’ve got bad news, the tactic implies it’s better to adopt a journalistic mindset, and look to scoop the hacks. In PR parlance this is known politely as ‘initiating a crisis communication scenario.’ And there’s actually some evidence the tactic works by enhancing the credibility of the person/organisation who fesses up. A study byArpan and Roskos-Ewoldsen concluded that organisations that ‘steal thunder’ are perceived as more credible than those that do not.

According to PR theory the more credible an organisation is perceived to be, the more palatable its messages become, the more palatable its messages the higher the likelihood that customers will continue to buy its product.

By way of illustration (not I stress correlation or causation) latest circulation figures show that 2.4 million people per week buy the Sun on Sunday, just 200,000 less than bought the News of the World before it was closed last year.