With apologies to Weiden + Kennedy, whose Nike spot featuring Colin Kaepernick was no doubt the most talked-about spot in 2018, my choice for marketer of the year reflects a strategy that is older than marketing itself and yet has now reached such a critical mass and level of sophistication that it’s difficult to point to anything else that is as effective. I’m talking about influencers. Influencers, of course, have been around for a long time. Asking your friends and neighbors for a recommendation on…
Read MoreAnyone who has received an email from me may have noticed a rather abstruse quote as part of my email signature. It’s an observation by T.S. Eliot in which he asserts that “Being is intelligible only in terms of becoming.” I like it for two reasons. First, it’s derivative enough to demand that you ponder it a bit, like good poets are wont to do. But perhaps more importantly, I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, which if you were to reduce it to a bumper…
Read MoreThere’s a recurring debate in Fredrik Backman’s endearing book, A Man Called Ove, in which the title character and his best friend lock horns over the supremacy of one Swedish car manufacturer over the other. This Volvo vs. Saab rivalry reminds me of the ongoing debate between PR practitioners who subscribe to our traditional strategies of media relations and the more progressive proponents of content marketing. Of course, if you have a two-car garage, and budget is not an issue, the easy answer is to…
Read MoreWhen last we met, I was huffing and puffing over the PR anathema commonly referred to as “spray and pray” – i.e. the practice of public relations practitioners indiscriminately carpet bombing the media battlefield with news releases and pitches in the hope that one might hit a receptive target. It’s a tactic loathed by reporters and many PR professionals alike, and what makes it all the more confounding is that it rarely works. So, while I’m on the topic of profligate tactics, let’s talk for…
Read MoreTwo of my colleagues recently interviewed journalist and author Roben Farzad on what’s becoming one of my favorite podcasts, appropriately enough called It’s a PR Podcast. Roben hosts Full Disclosure on NPR One, is a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and used to write for Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s smart and curious, engaging and fun, and he’s also pretty generous with his time. The episode is worth a listen. First, for the sake of full disclosure (speaking of which), I’ve had the pleasure of being…
Read MoreA little more than a week after blogging about Facebook’s conspicuously tardy response to the Cambridge Analytica dustup, here I am again making much the same point: Nothing exposes a company’s core values more than a crisis. Facebook’s young CEO may like to think that the company puts a premium on speed, but that priority was exposed as a lie when it took 100 hours to utter his first words about what could fairly be called the social platform’s most consequential crisis. (If you missed…
Read MoreChances are, if you are like many organizations, there’s not a crisis communications plan sitting in your top drawer, one that’s been updated and rehearsed and that lets you sleep soundly at night should some emergency befall you. Undertaking the painstaking process of developing a crisis plan seems to be that task that never quite gets off the back burner, kind of like cleaning out the gutters – there’s always something more pressing or more interesting to do. But then, inevitably, it rains and, well,…
Read MoreFive days. That’s how long it took Facebook to respond to perhaps the greatest crisis in the company’s relatively short life. This is not a commentary piling on the company for its failure to abide by one of the core principles of crisis management – to respond early and honestly. After all, they totally blew the former and the jury is out on the latter. But the delay was more than just a strategic mistake. With recriminations flying all around them, users threatening to abandon…
Read MoreThat dictum from Frederick the Great, the famed Prussian leader known as one of the great military tacticians of all time, has an indisputable ring of truth, even to us civilians. Spread your armies too thinly, and you’ll not have the critical mass to mount a sufficient defense. Makes sense. The same is true of marketing. If you attempt to market to everyone, you really aren’t marketing to anyone. And for the same reason – you’ll have diluted your resources to the point where you…
Read MoreI’ve been mulling over Farhad Manjoo’s recent “State of the Art” column in The New York Times. The paper’s technology writer has gone cold turkey on digitally delivered news, restricting himself to print versions of two national newspapers, his local daily (S.F. Chronicle) and a weekly newsmagazine. What first sounds like heresy for a tech writer, he has now, months later, eased comfortably into the anachronistic rhythms of morning paper deliveries, describing his metamorphosis this way: “Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in…
Read MoreThere was a time when landing a key media relations hit was the be-all end-all of public relations. But today, securing that placement is merely just lighting the flame of its potentially luminous value. It will burn even brighter if you put the right merchandising fire behind it. What do I mean? Media relations works First, let’s acknowledge that there is great power in a media placement. It raises your profile, establishes credibility and provides a third-party, objective endorsement that your company or your products…
Read MoreI want to tell you a story…about storytelling. Over the past 16 years, I can’t recall a client who has walked through our door that did not have an interesting story. How they were founded. How they have conceived unique solutions to confounding problems. How they turned imminent failure into great success. How they have devised a better mousetrap. And the ever popular, how they were the best kept secret around. What’s curious is that, more often than not, those stories were not always readily…
Read More
