Category: Media & Marketing Matters

More stupid PR tricks from Mylan

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Don’t the executives at Mylan Inc. ever learn?  The company has filed another lawsuit against The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, related to a series of stories that the Post-Gazette ran a few months back about an FDA investigation into allegations that Mylan employees were overriding automatic safety controls.  As it turns out, Mylan took care of it, the FDA’s investigation cleared Mylan and no one was hurt.

But Mylan hurt itself by the way it managed the story.  Even after the FDA said that it had not yet completed its investigation, Mylan’s chief executive officer, Robert Coury kept insisting that the investigation had indeed been completed; he was of course mistaken.  (I should disclose that Jampole Communications worked on a project for Mr. Coury that did not involve public relations or media relations more than 10 years ago when he was a financial planner.)  Because of Mylan’s insistence on its initial version of the story—that the investigation had ended—instead of coverage on two news days, the story received coverage on five or six news days.

Here are just some of the negative stories Mylan generated about itself:

And Mylan’s latest move, to sue The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also hurts Mylan, especially its standing with consumers who buy generic drugs; remember these folks endure a steady stream of advertising touting the innate superiority of brand-name drugs.  Why remind them that the FDA recently investigated?

Filing and publicizing these lawsuits probably qualifies for any top 10 list of “Stupid PR Tricks of 2009.” 

The lawsuits only keep the story of the two employees overriding a safety system in the news.  The fact that Mylan came out pretty much smelling like a rose in the FDA report is lost in the hubbub over the lawsuit, which will revolve around the Post-Gazette’s right to pursue a story and its accuracy of facts.  In both these areas, the newspaper stands on very solid ground, but even if it didn’t, I would have advised Mylan not to pursue a lawsuit because the publicity could never be 100% positive in favor of Mylan. 

Mylan would have been better off moving away from the incident altogether.  I would have advised the company to do a positive PR campaign based on the safety of its manufacturing process.

How to Work With a Marketing Agency

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Jampole Communications celebrated its 20th anniversary a few months back and it got me thinking about the ways that agencies and clients interact.   Being a “communications guy,” I turned it into a set of tips for organizations on how to work with marketing communications agencies.  Here they are:

1. Judge agencies by their quality of thought.

A marketing campaign is a response to a business problem.  When an agency is showing you its portfolio, make sure you find out why it made the creative decisions it did.  If an agency cannot articulate the thought process that led it to create an ad, you probably don’t want to work with it.

2. Make certain the agency knows your industry and business.

Actual experience is less important than a basic knowledge of your industry and market.  In interviewing agencies, probe to make sure the firm understands how you make your product, to whom you sell, how your industry is doing, what the key industry issues are and who your main competitors are. 

3. Define communications problems in business terms.

Make sure that you and the agency are always tying whatever you do back to the achievement of quantifiable business objectives.

4. Know what you want to spend.

Many creative decisions hinge on budgetary factors.  All marketing communications programs require a critical mass of repetition; if the money isn’t there to achieve the necessary frequency, then less expensive alternatives must be considered.  No agency can begin to develop a plan without knowing how much you are willing to spend.  

5. Don’t have the agency do what you should be doing.

Depending on the size of the company and type of business, there are tasks best done with internal resources and other tasks best done by the agency.  Some examples from our past:  For a large utility company that had a wonderful communications department, we handled special technologies, which tended to come and go, so the staff could focus on the continuing business.  In responding to crises, we have frequently served as the spokesperson for a number of industrial and retail companies, but rarely for health care institutions, which have established and articulate spokespersons in the community; for health care, we would typically work behind the scenes.

6. Expect service from your agency.

A good agency knows how to juggle its assignments for and contact with various clients so that all feel that they are the most important client.  Expect your agency to provide appropriate and timely service, no matter how small your account is.

7. Understand what an agency charges.

Agencies are compensated in two ways:  Professional service fees and commissions on certain outside costs.  In addition, they are reimbursed for out-of-pocket costs, such as printing, photography, website applications software and advertising media placements.  Many agencies (for example, Jampole Communications) will reduce commissions on advertising and drop them altogether for other outside purchases.

JetBlue Wants You to Feel Good About What You Eat, But Should You?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

On my JetBlue flight to New York yesterday, I was served a small bottle of water and a little pouch of chocolate chip cookies.  Both “food products” tried to create additional value beyond the food/drink by latching on to a cause:

  • The packaging of Chocobilly’s Chocolate Chunk Cookies has the slogan, “Cookies with a cause” and claims that the company, Immaculate Baking, donates a part of the proceeds for art supplies and folk art workshops.  The text spends more time patting the company on the back than it does talking about its “good works.”There is also an uplifting biography of Jimmy Lee Sudduth, who evidently was a storyteller specializing in “colorful stories” about growing up in rural Alabama.   
  • The water, from Aquarius Springs, has a legend across the label that reads, “Hydrate, Donate, Participate.”  Aquarius Springs, which comes in a nonbiodegradable plastic bottle, provides a water-saving tip under the headline, “What else can you do?”  We can only assume that the “what else” means “what else besides drinking our water,” since there is no other reference to actions other than the three-word legend. The tip: to shut the water while soaping up in the shower.

Let’s disregard the fact that Aquarius Springs distorts the values of environmentalism by trying to turn an environmentally unsound act—drinking water from a disposable plastic bottle—into an environmentally correct activity. 

Let’s instead focus on the similarity in the marketing approach of both products.  Both companies think they can add value by making the consumer feel good about the social implications of using the product.  But it’s a cheap, unsatisfying kind of value, at best, akin to eating sawdust and calling it nutritious. 

In both cases, there seems to something fishy about the cause: For Aquarius it’s the deception by silence about the plastic bottles. For Chocobilly, it’s the self-serving nature of the text that left me a bit suspicious. 

What I find most interesting, though, is that JetBlue served both.  Does JetBlue think that people will feel better about flying in its planes if they believe that when they consume the food products available on flight that they are actually doing a good deed and helping society or others?  But of course, nobody believes that.  It’s just more hype that most won’t even read (and why should they, since most people expect hype from product packaging). 

Six ways to get the media to throw out your news release

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Every day, reporters and editors endure an overwhelming tide of news releases and story ideas—in their email inboxes, in the mail, by fax.  From this ocean of information they hope to fish out a few stories that are truly newsworthy to their audience.  Some stories cry out for coverage, and I don’t just mean acts of violence or the snafus of politicians.  For example, it’s newsworthy when two large companies merge or if an international rock star gives a benefit concert. 

But what if the story is smaller? Why do some get selected and some don’t?

Although I have been a public relations professional or news reporter for more than 25 years, I still can’t tell you how to guarantee media coverage of a smaller news story or one that may be part news and part feature. 

But I can share a number of mistakes that will typically guarantee that the news release ends up in the trash bin.  When I was a television news reporter years ago, not a day went by in which I did not see at least one news release with one of these mistakes.  And, judging from the complaints I hear from reporters and the news releases that I see on company websites today, these mistakes are still quite widespread. 

Here are six of the most common errors that organizations and marketing agencies make when approaching the news media:

1.  Send the news release to a reporter or to a media outlet that would never consider covering the story because it’s not in their editorial scope.

2.  Send it to a reporter in a way that he/she doesn’t like and perhaps doesn’t use.  While most reporters like email, some still prefer facsimile transmissions or even regular mail.  It’s best to find out ahead of time what each reporter prefers.

3.  Write the news release from the point of view of your organization or its customers and not from the point of view of the audience for the media outlet. 

4.  Use too much jargon or make the news release too technical.

5.  Make syntactical errors that virtually all reporters know are wrong.  For a full list of some of the more common of these glaring writing mistakes, see the Associated Press Style Book or any edition of Strunk & White.  Here are two examples:

  • Misuse of “comprise:” saying that “animals comprise the zoo” when in fact “the zoo comprises animals”
  • Referring to a company as an animate object or a plural object in the use of pronouns, “the company who…” and “the company and their employees…” are both wrong.  It should be “the company that…” and “the company and its employees.”  Don’t trust the word check function in Word on this point: it is just plain wrong to say “the company who” and “the person that.” 

6.  Use some overworked words that signal that there is more hype than news.  Our research shows that many reporters and editors automatically delete email that contains words they hate to see; the words that will most commonly turn off reporters include “solutions,”  “scalable,” “state-of-the-art” and that enduring classic of hyped language, “unique.”  By the way, a recent study showed that the media receive a news release containing the word “solution” every eight minutes.

The common theme in these mistakes is lack of knowledge of or respect for journalists and the news gathering process.  It is a lack of knowledge that causes organizations to misuse words or send a news release to the wrong reporter.  It is a lack of respect for the process that is at the heart of focusing the message of a news release on something that is important to the organization, but not to anyone else.

The best way to approach reporters is to treat them like you treat a customer: know what makes them tick, understand how your product—the news story—helps them out, communicate in the language they like to use, and make it as convenient as possible for them to work with your organization. 

The Big Lie or Check Your Facts, Part 2

Posted on by Marc Jampole

If you read yesterday’s blog entry, you know that I’ve been investigating the facts behind the many reports of large numbers of people at the Taxpayer March of September 12 with the help of my assistant.

Virtually all the news media that chose to count got a total of 75,000 or less at the event, except for the British newspaper, Daily Mall, which reported that as many as 1.0 million may have been there.  Instead of reporting these numbers, many reports took advantage of the fact that other reports cited numbers that did not exist to state that a number of nameless media estimated the crowd at more than a million and some as high as 2.0 million.

What has never gotten out in the main stream news media, however, was the fact that an entirely separate event, the annual Black Family Reunion, filled two-thirds of Washington’s Mall that day.  The prevalence of this other group at the Mall was reported only by The Atlantic and then noted in an Associated Press story that got very little play.  In other words, the low numbers cited by most of the media that actually cared to chime in on the issue may have in fact been on the high side. 

Now if people knew about this other group, they would realize that the one and two million person counts thrown around on right-wing radio and hinted about in much of the mainstream media in fact boil down to one big lie.  But like all big lies, it’s one that many people want to believe.

Check Your Facts

Posted on by Marc Jampole

If I’m a little late in commenting on the vast differences in the reported head count at the so-called Taxpayer March on September 12 in Washington, it’s because I took the time to do some homework (with the help of my assistant Colette).

I first noticed that reporters were including a wide range of numbers in their stories about the march in an article analyzing the significance of the march on the front page in the September 15 edition of the Pittsburgh/Greensburg Tribune.  Here’s the paragraph in question:

“Estimates of the crowd size ranged from a low of 75,000 to a high of 2 million. A number of news organizations reported that more than 1.2 million people attended. “

Now my ethical sixth sense as a former journalist tells me that the discrepancy in numbers from 75,000 to 2 million is so great that the reporter should have cited the names of those news organizations that were reporting these figures. 

As some readers will know, the political bent of most articles and opinion pieces in the Trib-Review is decidedly right-wing.  I therefore immediately thought that the higher figures were probably spurious numbers.  

To check my hypothesis, first I had Colette look online for news media accounts of the march that mentioned that a number of news organizations reported that more than 1.2 million people attended, but without citing the organizations. Colette found dozens upon dozens of these stories, including from The Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, Hawaii Free Press, Care2.com and The Huntsville Times.

The next step was to find which news media had actually reported these large numbers of marchers, and in doing so I uncovered what may be labeled a conspiracy of incompetence.  As we will see, the main stream media allowed the larger numbers to get into the mainstream public discussion by citing the broad range of numbers in a typical “he said, she said” approach to story-writing, instead of going to the original sources and finding out who really said what. 

We found very few citations in the news media or online of reporters naming the parties actually providing head counts, but here’s what we did find:

  • In his September 14 show, Glen Beck said that The London Telegraph reported that more than a million people attended the Taxpayer March. In fact, what the London Telegraph actually said was “There was no official count.”
  • In one of its stories on the march,  Hawaii Free Press says on September 14 that the Daily Mall, another British paper, stated that “up to two million marched on the U.S. Capital.”  The Daily Mall did say “up to one million,” which is the only number reported by the news media that turns out to actually have been proposed by a cited reporter/media outlet. How the one turned into a two is anyone’s guess.
  • The American Thinker reported that the National Park Service called the march the largest event ever held in Washington.  That was a lie.  What the Park Service said, as reported for example in Washington Post, was that the Inauguration of President Barack Obama had the largest crowd of any event ever held in our nation’s capital.
  • As The Nation points out, during the rally part of the march, one of the organizers announced onstage that ABC News estimated the crowd at from 1.0 million to 1.5 million.  Of course, ABC News issued a quick denial.
  • An ultra-conservative friend said he heard that by analyzing a photograph, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin concluded that there were 2 million people at the Taxpayer March.  We checked this claim out too.  In reality, it was Glen Beck who cited a university study but could not remember the name of the university.  That was it for this weird rumor.

By contrast, a number of news organizations directly cited estimates of from 10,000 to 75,000 and pit their names behind the estimate, including Huffington Post, Baltimore Sun, New York Times, Associated Press and Fox News.com.

At the end of the day, if news media outlets wanted to cite low and high range numbers (instead of accepting the low range consensus), they should have said that the Daily Mall estimated that as many as 1.0 million people were in attendance.  Why didn’t they? Occam’s razor, that principle that the simplest explanation is probably the best, might say that they didn’t think the Daily Mall’s one claim of a million stood up real well against multiple claims of under 100,000.

Citing numbers that no one is actually using is a variation on the Matt Drudge phenomenon that has already weakened the ethical standards of journalists and other writers.  The Matt Drudge phenomenon occurred when reporters started reporting what Matt Drudge said about the facts of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  Drudge was not always right, but that did not matter to mainstream reporters who instead of investigating allegations themselves instead told us what Matt had reported.  While Drudge got some things right, he got far from everything right, and the longer the scandal went on, the less right he turned out to be. 

But quoting Drudge allowed the news media to present an anti-Clinton (and at heart an anti-progressive) bias as facts without having to defend the facts. It’s the very same approach used by the news media who reported numbers without citing which organization provided the numbers.  The effect in the later case was to give the false impression that the views of the Taxpayers March represent a large majority of the country, and not just one corner of the increasingly marginalized right wing.

Notes from the Overground

Posted on by Marc Jampole

From a September 17 story in the New York Times exploring why gourmet teas are thriving even as the global economy sags, Mark Daley, chief executive officer of Dean  & Deluca says, “Demand for quality products has remained strong.” 

Now I ask Mr. Daley and the public relations staff that wrote this response if the word “product” conjures up a comfy image of steaming tea, the soothing heat as one cups the glass, the blossoming fragrance, the sense of relaxation.  If this were an article about gourmet retailing in general, perhaps “product” could be an appropriate (if weak) word choice, but in an article solely about tea, why not say “tea” and help to sell your product!

Over the past week, I have seen marketing people use the word product to describe software, cereal, healthcare insurance and special equipment. In each case, referring to the actual name of the product would have brought life and warmth to sentences that sounded stiff and, even in the TV ads, vaguely corporate.

From a September 18 World Brief column of the New York Times , a story about an 18-year-old German kid who ,”…armed with an axe, knives and Molotov cocktails wounded eight fellow students and a teacher at his high school…”

Notice, no one dead, only wounded.  This story, although not really important as news, is nonetheless one of the most poignant if macabre rationales for greater control of all fire arms.  Lots of violence, but no one died! And before they make it, here is my refutation to the knee-jerk sloganish argument that if we outlaw guns only criminals will have them: the backgrounds of the men who have committed mass killings over the past five years; lots of outsiders, some extremists and some prone to rowdy behavior, but no career or even occasional criminals.

From a September 14 article in the New York Times business section on why Business Week is in trouble, there is a paragraph explaining why advertisers discount the number of visits to Business Week’s website pages.  The reason:  because they figured out that 45% of unique visitors go there to see the slide shows, which can be endless (but represent only one real visit and one unique visitor). 

I have been wondering for about three years, why Forbes¸ Business Week other mags insist on presenting the website version of their lists of top 5, 7, 10, 20 and 40 cities, companies, states, resorts, schools and etceteras as slide shows in which the fastest turn to the next screen lasts approximately three times the length it takes to read it.  In designing this approach, they were not thinking either of their readers (or is viewers more apt for Internet reading?).  They were thinking primarily of pumping up their advertising rates.

Good Taste is Not Selling Out

Posted on by Marc Jampole

“Good taste is knowing how to eat right,” is the headline for a Diet Coke ad I found near the back of the GQ through which I recently flipped.  The ad depicts Tom Colicchio, supposedly an award-winning chef, seated in a plush restaurant booth, before him a luscious and healthy salmon dish that we are to assume he created, with a side of what looks like gorgeous red peppers.  In his hand is a glass filled with ice and a brownish substance, which we are to assume is Diet Coke.  Also on the beautiful redwood table is a glass bottle of Diet Coke.  The ad copy recommends that if we want some stylish and delicious healthy cuisine, we should visit the Diet Coke Kitchen at dietcoke.com

Once a chef suggests any sweet carbonated drink as the perfect liquid to accompany anything other than barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers, he or she loses all credibility to me, and to most educated people (I think… I hope).

How much money did Chef Tom get to endorse Diet Coke, or to pretend that it’s just right for a nice piece of salmon?  On the off chance that he really believes in the culinary virtues of Diet Coke, though, I recommend that my dear readers avoid his restaurants in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Las Vegas.

Note to Tom: Good Taste is Not Selling Out.

GQ: The Bible of the Other Directed

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Someone in my household bought the latest GQ to read the feature on Vladimir Putin, so naturally I took a look-see at this slick rag. 

The ads in GQ were just as I remembered them from the last time I perused a copy, probably some 25 years ago: very sharp photographs of highly-chiseled models in stylish clothing against nondescript backgrounds or in plush environments, all body imperfections whisked away electronically. 

What shocked me was the contrast in the sophisticated classic designs of the ads and the almost sloppy, thrown together look of most of the design of the editorial—except for a few features, most were bulletin-board arrangements of paragraphs, pull-out quotes, mini cartoons, clip art and factoids, in primitively primary colors and tiny type size, all presented with a kind of studied camp irony, as if the bulletin-board design were making fun of itself.  Bite-sized and well-sugared pieces of knowledge.

To use David Riesman’s terminology from his seminal work of sociology, The Lonely Crowd, GQ readers are upscale versions of the “other directed,” always seeking to follow the crowd and changing their opinion with the crowd changes.  Most of the magazine is dedicated to selling fashion and high-end consumer goods.  The underlying premise is that the purchase of consumer goods will attract the opposite sex.   Funny, GQ’s politics tend to be left of center and supportive of our left-of-center president, but the subtext, even of the politics, is inherently sexist.  Women in GQ become another possession. 

I was trying to figure out how GQ gets away with putting dozens of pages of advertising near the front of the magazine, page after page after page.  In a way, GQ forces you to flip every page (and thereby see all the ads) because editorial content is so sparse until the back of the book.  I suppose if the primary motivation is to understand what to buy and how to act to be cool, then you don’t mind looking at ads.

Harvesting the Sunday Newspapers

Posted on by Marc Jampole

As usual, there were a lot of disturbing trends to note in last Sunday’s newspapers.  Let’s skip the small stuff, such as the increasingly common misuse of “but,” “though” and “nevertheless” by reporters and public relations writers, and instead look first at a weird bit of “celebriosis,” and then at a long-term trend that has put serious literature on life support.

Celebriosis is the disease that makes editors want to connect a celebrity to every trend or cause, and Parade Magazine has had an advanced case of it for decades.  The issue dated September 4, 2009 is dedicated to helping people find a job, including articles on how to ace an interview and features on five people who were “winners” in the job market. 

The expert on job-seeking whom Parade put on the cover and who reminisced at length about his own job search was neither an economist nor a human resource professional, but Jay Leno.  Jay tells a few anecdotes, from which jobseekers and our nation’s youth can learn two lessons:

  • Work for free (which Jay did to get a job at a car dealership)
  • Work two jobs and save all your money from one of them. (Hidden message –you need to work two jobs to save).

Jay, and I call him Jay because after he bared his job-seeking soul I now feel as if I know him like a brother (sic), had the space in his 500-word pep talk for the unemployed to shill at great length for his new TV show.

Now to a trend in serious literature and poetry, which I believe is one of leading causes behind the growing disinterest in the literary arts.  The center spread—the absolute middle of the magazine—of the New York Times book review contained two reviews of recent fiction:

  • The Anthology by Nicholson Baker, about a man writing an introduction to a book of poetry.
  • Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez about an editor.

The trend of course is to make writers, writing, teachers and editors the central subject of a novel or a poem.  If you peruse any literary journal, at least 10% of the poems are about poetry and poets, and in another 10-20%, the poet reminds the reader that the narrator is a real person who is a poet.  Writing about the writer infected the novel decades ago.

My objections:

  1. Anyone can write about him or herself.  It’s so much more challenging to write about other people.
  2. I’m a little tired of the inherent navel-gazing that writing about writers and writing involves.
  3. Since it’s been done to death, it’s akin to replowing farmland of which the soil has been depleted decades ago.  That usually yields a scrawny and inedible harvest, which pretty much describes most poetry and fiction these days.
  4. It turns off readers, although when I mention that notion to my friends who write poetry, they say that only writers are reading literature nowadays.  How depressing, but even if it were true, why not try to write beyond your audience? Why not try pushing your audience, as Joyce or Stevens and virtually all writers who are remembered and read after their death have always done?

The reviewer of the Baker book said the reason he liked it was because instead of making the novel about some first-paragraph straw man—hokey stories about poets—, this one is “actually about poetry.”  I would prefer if instead it were about some aspect of the human condition.