Rose’s Week in Review: 10-07-07

In the 80’s, 90’s and the earlier part of this century Burson-Marsteller had a stellar reputation. It was the gold standard, the McKinsey of PR. Burson execs were built of special stock, seemingly smarter, richer, working on cool, high-level stuff with big budgets. Burson was the perennial top-dog in billings, its prestige, even when attacked, unquestioned. If you had deep pockets and you wanted the best and the brightest, you hired Burson. What happened?

In the 9-30-07 Week in Review I commented on Burson’s flagrant Astroturfing for Microsoft. Not disclosing the client you are working for or its agenda or intentions is obviously unethical. Refusing to acknowledge, discuss or correct your misdeeds is bad, reputation-damaging PR and indicative of the sort of defensive arrogance that big PR agencies suffer from today. Sadly, Burson fits neatly in that category.

Harold Burson told the following to The Australian in 1998: "I'm totally opposed to front organizations that do not disclose where their funding comes from and to my knowledge - we're a big company - we have never started or organized a group where the funding sponsorship was unknown."

Harold Burson has a blog that supposedly “discusses issues related to communications and reputation.” So, I left a comment on Mr. Burson’s blog last week politely asking if he could offer perspective on the news about Microsoft and Burson. I guess he has no perspective since my comment never appeared. So much for the new “transparency” or the conversation we are supposed to be having through blogs.

The bad news keeps piling up for Burson. In a story for Salon called "Countrywide puts lipstick on the pig," Andrew Leonard takes issue with Burson’s “crisis management” work for the giant, troubled mortgage lender. It seems that the CEO of Countrywide pocketed $138 million last year while 12,000 Countrywide workers were about to be fired. Burson’s response to this is an exhortation for Countrywide employees to fight back and stand strong in the face adversity. The talking points for the “Protect Our House” crusade that Burson concocted are so bizarre that it would make for interesting fiction if it were not true.

Now, Blackwater has hired Burson to put a positive gloss on gun-toting, outside-the-law vigilantes who siphon off hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to wage a private war in Iraq. I am sure that Burson has a ready-made defense for accepting this client – everybody deserves representation, and all that – but the reality is that Burson is part of WPP Group plc and the parent company demands constant escalation of the revenue stream. And you can bet that Blackwater has very deep pockets, thanks to our tax money. The equation has a perverse elegance when you think about it: We pay Blackwater over $800 million to shoot first and ask questions later, and they pay Burson a few million to tell us what we should really think about it. Isn’t PR beautiful?

Burson’s refusal to take responsibility for its actions or engage the public threatens to overshadow some of its good work. Erin Byrne, Chief Digital Strategist for Burson, is a regular contributor to the Digital Perspective blog. In a recent post, she noted the firms’ work on behalf of the new $5 bill. The website and flash demo expertly demonstrates how the web can be used to convey messages and images where words alone, and traditional media relations outreach, might fail. Burson should win an award for this work and the rest of us, if we’re smart, can learn a few things from the intelligent, web-based presentation of this news.

Can’t somebody in the Burson digital group impress upon the rest of the firm that we are living in the digital age, the age of involvement and dialogue, the age of transparency? Or haven’t they heard?

Mark Rose is editor of PRBlogNews - a web publication focusing on public relations practices in the digital age.

You say you want a revolution

The uprising in Burma-Myanmar reached a fevered pitch this week and reminded us of how important blogging can be. Citizen journalists on the ground reported on skirmishes and posted graphic pictures of death and bloodshed as photographers were cut down by gunfire and monks were killed, beaten, corralled and confined. We may choose not to react, or we may find ourselves impotent against a far off military regime, but we cannot claim ignorance. When the junta cut Internet access I really felt their pain. I am tethered to the Internet at least six hours a day and life without it seems inconceivable. When Myanmar blogs went black it was a cruel reminder that there are still places in the world that can enslave its people and prevent the rest of humanity from peering in.

As of today the people of Myanmar are finding a way to break through the digital iron curtain. Reports and images are coming through an adept London-based blogger, Ko Htike, who is feeding news to CNN and other mainstream media for wider distribution. Burmamyanmargenocide is a good central site that is aggregating news from inside the country. Bloggers inside Burna-Myanmar are risking their jobs, businesses, families, even their lives to get the word out. We have an obligation to pass the news to the widest possible audience.

The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, zipped through my neighborhood on the upper west side of Manhattan last week, with a quick stop at Columbia. What seemed like a tailor made PR opportunity for the nuke-loving, genocide-denying, great-Satan-hating dictator turned into a humiliating turn as the President of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, excoriated his “petty tyrant” guest. Bollinger was playing to an American audience, but Ahmadinejad was playing to his constituency. The Arab world was sympathetic to the Iranian’s slight by the Great Satan and the Iranian government was emboldened enough to label the CIA and the U.S. military “terrorist organizations.” The rationale is the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and secret jails in other countries. So, there, after the ‘dialogue’ in the U.S. we are more polarized than ever. So when do we stop talking and start shooting?

Burson blows it big time

While Strumpette was lashing Ogilvy to the whipping post for pimping online gambling, and once again belittling Ronn Torossian for flacking Girls Gone Wild, Burson-Marsteller, supposedly a blue chip PR firm, was really mucking in the sleaze. Burson has been fronting a bogus organization on behalf of Microsoft to try to stop Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick. The organization was PRing for a “more transparent and competitive Internet,” but failed to tell reporters and organizations that Burson was on this mission at the behest of Microsoft. Burson was busted by The Guardian and then The Wall Street Journal followed with an in-depth piece. The organization, Initiative for Competitive Online Marketplaces (ICOMP) now says right up front on its website that this is a Burson-Microsoft scheme. The pathetic list of “signatories” to this initiative underscores its utter failure.

It seems that PR firms will always push the ethical envelope but it is up to individual account people to take responsibility for their actions. I have a simple rule in contacting the media. Within 15 seconds of the call the reporter will know: a) who I am b) who I represent c) why I am calling. No bull, no schemes, no lies. Simple. Burson’s actions here are reprehensible. I would think they know better but obviously they don’t. Let’s see if Harold Burson addresses this sad episode on his blog.

One two three four we don’t want your stinkin’ war

“Don’t Tase Me Bro!” became the rallying cry of disenfranchised college students this week as one slightly unglued academic took the zap heard round the world at a John Kerry speaking event. YouTube videos of the tasing became the subject of news segments, T-shirts went on sale the next day, designer tasers were hot items on eBay. That was but one sign of the return of radicalism in America. Other signals included arrests and riot police at a boisterous anti-war rally in Washington D.C. and a march on Jena, Louisiana that was reminiscent of Selma a generation ago. It harkens back to a time when all you needed to get out your message and attract the media was adept sloganeering and a willingness to confront authority. Only now we have the power and simplicity of the Internet to amplify and sustain dramatic local news. The video Jena Six, a photo story, has been viewed 260,000 times in the past two months.

Of course, for every effective protagonist there is an equally forceful antagonist. You have Rudy Giuliani more than willing and able to step into that role. Rudy jumped all over the New York Times MoveOn.org ad attacking General Petraeus as ‘betray us’ with his own attack ad in the Times the next day as he commandeered the headlines with a sneering rebuke of the pantheon of elitist, liberal east coast media. General Bush, sensing that the story had legs and feeling frisky by the Republican slapdown of Democrats attempt to legislate an end to the Iraq war, waited a week before deeming the ad “disgusting” and insinuating that Democrats were cowards who did not respect the military.

I said it before and it’s worth repeating, Bush is the most masterful PR President we have seen. Like Rudy, he’s a fearless gut player unencumbered by intellectual self-reflection or any sense of compassion for his political enemies. In a perverse way, you have to admire Bush’s media savvy, and the fact that Rudy, a brutal media in-fighter himself, refused to be interviewed for a series of stories on him in the Times last week.

Naked and missing

Strumpette lived up to its tag as the “Naked Journal of the PR Business” last week with a bronzed nude that was definitely not Steve Rubel, the ubiquitous blogging gadgeteer. We imagine that this post elicited a rash of masturbatory activity behind walled off cubicles at PR firms and consequently lead to increased production in media pitching. There is no truth to the rumor that Playboy is planning a spread on the “Girls of Strumpette” or that Britney Spears is staging a dance routine on the episode as the cornerstone of her latest comeback. Also, we have found no proof to substantiate the rumor that it is a Photoshopped picture of Aedhmar Hynes, the MIA CEO of Text 100, who has not posted to her blog since last May.

Here now the news

Dan Rather, 75 years old, refuses to go gently into that good night. You won’t see him smiling, sailing off the Cape and reminiscing about the good old days like his predecessor Walter Cronkite. No. Dan, who apparently suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder so extreme that age cannot temper it, must embark on what may be the biggest story of his career: how CBS screwed him. When I read that Rather has hired investigators and lawyers and is suing CBS for $70 million it seemed like a petty vendetta from an overwrought has-been news Anchor.

Then I read Peter Himler’s assessment of this in The Flack and I realized how juicy this could be. If you want to know how to rob a bank, you get Willie Sutton. Who better to unveil the ugliness and political intrigue of network news than Dan Rather? What does Rather hope to prove? "I think we're going to find out just how much interference at the corporate level there is in national news stories," he told the Washington Post. In this case, did CBS sacrifice Rather to appease the global terror-hungry Cheney-ites running roughshod at the time?

When the legal dust settles, or as it unfolds, Rather should produce his own series on his findings. Rather spent 44 years at CBS. He is a bona fide investigative journalist. He’s been to war. Why is he being treated like the Bobby Bonds of TV journalism? He could distribute his expose through the web. He doesn’t need CBS to bless his legitimacy. He earned it.

Puking

That’s what I felt like doing after reading the comment of Peter C. Waldheim of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) to the Strumpette post: Should the FCC investigate word-of-mouth marketing. We haven’t heard such drivel since … hmm, last week, when J. Jarvis curlicued his way up the stairway to oblivious obfuscations. I never got WOMMA. They charge absurd fees, they are stocked with committees and groups and whatnot by big corporations that dictate according to their own self-interest. I sat in on a WOMMA conference call once and you get the standard big software company, online provider, content distributor mid level bloated ego drone talking theoretical nonsense - people who have too many non-billable hours and asses to kiss (more of a Steve Rubel audience). That’s not half bad for a trade group with a bureaucracy to support, but do we have to endure Waldheim slinging puke-inducing bull? Does anybody do PR for this guy? Some advice: a) don’t let him post such idiocy, especially here b) find out what he’s talking about c) try speaking the native language, English.

Mark Rose is editor of PRBlogNews - a web publication focusing on public relations practices in the digital age.

Lamest duck

It was an intense high chatter PR week that began with Osama bin Looney lobbing verbal and visual bombs from a cave in Pakistan, and ending with George Bush, the Great Bumbler, desperately seeking understanding and legitimacy in a world disinclined to bestow either. Bush’s spin of “building on success” comes three years after “Mission Accomplished.” What does it mean? He intends to pull back a fraction of the 30,000 more troops that he recently sent in to finish the job that he says was already completed. Stripped bare of Rove, standing alone even among Republicans, Bush is looking and sounding more and more like Alfred E. Neumann: “What me worry?” There are lame duck Presidents and then there are lamer ducks and then there is the lamest. Where does Bush’s legacy lie?

Jaffe gags on juice

Speaking of lame spin, Joe Jaffe took a much deserved thumping on Strumpette last week – Joe Jaffe’s Fall From Grace - for transparent, grandiose, comical obfuscations that strike a stake deeper into the writhing sub life form formerly called social media. Jaffe and gang at crayon launched a much ballyhooed stinko “social media” program for Coke called Virtual Thirst, described by Jaffe like this:

“Virtual Thirst is about interpreting anything along the continuum of ‘the metaphorical quenching of thirst’ to expressing the essence of the Coke brand and what it means to you.”

Since nobody could figure out what that meant it seems that few people entered the contest and the campaign did not generate enthusiasm among the virtual/video head cases that should be obsessively swigging Coke as they are glued to their computers and flying avatars around Second Life.

Jaffe and the crayon crew rode the social media boom for six months of its total life span. Then they reportedly lost clients and trimmed staff. As Rumsfeld used to say: “stuff happens.” But they lost credibility with Jaffe’s psychedelic rationalizations and tripped out avataristic delusions that would be rejected in any PR 101 class. You notice that whenever the word of mouth/ social media gang can’t justify a campaign with a result they call it an exercise in “branding”? Is that how MWW will spin its blogola program for Nikon? You have to wonder how valuable an endorsement a Jaffe blog post is to Nikon and MWW. Priceless or useless?

Richard lasts

I am going to commit blasphemy here on Strumpette and offer congratulations to Richard Edelman. This month marks the three year anniversary of his blog, 6 A.M.. Richard takes his lumps here and elsewhere but he blogs consistently and thoughtfully on a professional level. Yes, many posts start with a drink or lunch he is having with an important journalist or “thought leader” and end with mention of an Edelman client or research paper but what is a CEO to do? Look around to his peers at the other top PR firms and you see stale or abandoned blogs, cursory self-serving posts, a real fear of committing thoughts to scrutiny and posterity. Lately, Richard writes a lot less about the “revolution” in media and PR and a lot more about the traditions of the business and his family. His audience is more internal (employees, clients) than external (the PR business and the public) and he knows it. He jumped out into “new media” early, established the lead, and he still holds it. Others are either playing catch-up or have given up altogether.

Mark Rose is editor of PRBlogNews - a web publication focusing on public relations practices in the digital age.