When the Headline is You

October 25th, 2010 / 7:00 am

Every day I apply skills that I have acquired from the several mentors with whom I’ve been fortunate to associate during my career. When it comes to the art of media training – one of the core services of PR that I enjoy the most – over the years I have prepared several hundred leaders in North America and Asia for interview encounters with journalists. There’s no doubt that I would have never been able to develop this track record absent my proximity to the great Jeff Ansell, the legendary former news anchor from my home town of Toronto, Canada.

In the early 1990s, Jeff ran the media training practice at our old public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton Canada. During those formative years, I watched in awe as Jeff would mesmerize often petrified executives with his oratory and his on-camera prowess. While sometimes visibly shaken about what Jeff would do to them playing an aggressive journalist in interview simulations (and he sure played rough!), all of them left the room indelibly engraved with the mark of Jeff’s training excellence. As a young 20-something executive, I was fortunate to learn by osmosis from this master of the communications craft.

Fast-forward to 2008, when I was back in Canada re-connecting with friends and family after 14 years overseas. Jeff called to let me know he had written a book about media training, and asked me to read an early copy of When the Headline is You and provide opinions. At first when I flipped through the draft, I was concerned that Jeff – who would never share his training decks electronically lest their precious content fall into ‘the wrong hands’ – was releasing the ’secret sauce’ of media relations. Sort of like KFC disclosing Colonel Sanders’ confidential recipe, or Coca-Cola revealing the ingredients of their proprietary formula. But as I plowed through the pages, I realized what a wonderful service Jeff would be providing a large community of readers by transparently sharing with them the same wisdom and experience from which I had so richly benefited over the years.

Jeff just launched the book, and I recommend it without reservation (especially for PR students and as a refresher for long-time media relations professionals looking for some original perspective). I can’t put it any better than I did on the back cover:

“When the Headline is You is the world’s most sophisticated yet sensible guide to making the most of journalist interactions.”

Congratulations to my old friend on becoming a published author of a great PR book.

Categories: media relations
comments(1) Tags: canada, hill & knowlton, media training, mentoring, training

Thinking about public relations

December 14th, 2009 / 12:05 pm

by Bob Pickard

When I worked at Hill & Knowlton in the early 1990s, I knew that there was a John Hill and a David Knowlton who founded the firm in 1927, but for most of us employees then, the history of the firm didn’t loom very large. In general, I find this to be the case across wide swathes of the PR industry. I don’t think most practitioners know enough about their own company’s past or indeed about their own occupation’s roots.

PR people have been called the ‘world’s most powerful information workers,’ so especially if that mighty moniker is true, then we have a responsibility to take more time to actually think about our profession, to consider where it comes from and where it is going, and to be less ignorant of our own history. All too often, we are just swept along in a quotidian current of disposable information with scant opportunity to survey the whole picture and map our actions against broader contexts.

PR people aren’t just suffering from ‘attention deficit’ or ‘information overload’ or ‘continuous partial attention’ (multitasking is a myth as this NPR report shows). Regardless of how media of all kinds these days are now compressing forests of information into trees and increasingly twigs (with programming edited for flea-length attention spans), we still possess what has been called an ‘executive mind’ that is able to switch between different sources of information. The main problem is that we tend to switch between too many things too quickly. Therefore, to understand concepts more complex than a soundbite, we need to make a deliberate decision to use that mind and force its focused attention for ample periods of time on important issues that should command our interest.

Especially because we are in a position through our work to readily grasp things like the fragmentation of the public mass media commons into atomized private streams, we have a unique perspective to share; we need to illustrate a deeper and more profound view. Perhaps owing to legacy factors such as the PR industry’s past modest scale subservient to advertising, a service solicitous of journalists and gratified by client praise for the resulting publicity, I think we PR people sometimes have a tendency to be too conformist, too intellectually incurious, too timid about asking bigger questions. Then there’s the tendency to parrot (or just ‘Re-Tweet’) trendy-sounding but simple rhetorical explanations about our business from glib boasters or slick sloganeers.

“What’s past is prologue” said Shakespeare, and this is an apt expression for the modern public relations industry because I sense a lack of memory and of thinking (as opposed to just saying ‘yes’ to any passing fad and reflexively ‘doing’). Some trends that are actually old seem new again, but if we don’t recall history and apply its lessons, then it seems to me that we aren’t getting any wiser.

Recently I experienced an epiphany on this. I have been giving a presentation on PR campuses (next up is Humber College on January 20th) on the ‘digitization’ of persuasive storytelling, and emphasizing how the unconscious mind (or the ‘emotional brain’) is key in marketing and how metaphors can be marshaled when content is communicated as a ‘conversation’ to make PR narratives more compelling.

I include several contemporary sources in this speech, but also cite Dale Carnegie, whose 1936 book How to win friends and influence people remains a relevant classic. I don’t include any material from Edward Bernays’ seminal 1928 book: Propaganda. Most PR people who know of it are repelled by the book’s equating of public relations with propaganda, but I think it is largely unknown to most modern practitioners. It includes a chapter called “The Psychology of Public Relations” that contains some chilling parallels — written 80 years ago — with what some depict as modern communications practice.

Recently I came across The Century of the Self, a BBC documentary that looks at the roots of 20th century mass marketing (especially things like the unconscious mind and the psychology of persuasion), and was reminded that breathless digital jargon aside, many of the concepts that are being trumpeted as ‘new’ today go at least as far back as the First World War.

I certainly don’t agree with everything this TV series says, but I do think that getting alternative viewpoints helps us gain perspective on our profession. In that regard, The Corporation and Manufacturing Consent are two classic documentaries of the genre. These videos cast PR in a pretty sinister light, in an exaggerated, misleading way relative to what I know is current practice.

Even though it makes some of us feel uncomfortable to admit it, it is pretty clear that PR shares a common history with propaganda. However, I feel that there has been a clear divergence between these concepts. I’ve repeatedly chimed in with this point of view before, in The Japan Times newspaper and in BusinessWeek some years earlier.

When it comes to PR industry credibility, it does the profession no favors to pretend that all we do is “share perspectives” or “create relationships” or “listen to stakeholders” or “engage in dialogue.” It’s true that PR people do all of these things, but we’re not doing them for academic purposes or just for the heck of it. We’re in a persuasion business, trying to get people to do or think what we are hoping they will do or think.

In that sense, very little has changed in PR since its birth. What has changed is we’re transparently letting people know what we’re doing, and while deliberately misleading and manipulating people for nefarious purposes is now seen as the province of propaganda, PR has earned its distinction as a practice of ethically sharing information openly so that people can reach their own conclusions.

Categories: article
comments(0) Tags: bernays, hill & knowlton, persuasion, PR, propaganda, psychology

Billionaire client work

November 15th, 2009 / 5:00 pm

It’s been my honor to provide PR services for very senior leaders, including in Canada for Bill Gates and Donald Trump and in Korea for George Soros. Over the years, I’ve been asked many times by fellow PR practitioners what it is like to work with such influential people.

I’ve consistently answered that the most important thing to remember is that even though they are world famous, these folks are human beings just like the rest of us and they seem to enjoy working with PR professionals who realize that as well. There’s nothing billionaires seem to dislike more than nervous handlers who act in awe of their celebrity. They want to proceed from one planned scenario to the next with ease and confidence. They want to follow a PR leader, not feel as if they themselves need to guide a follower (especially in unfamiliar territory surrounded by media frenzy, which most places are for such people).

Here’s some b-roll footage of me (age 29) arriving at an event with Bill Gates. I was feeling pretty pumped-up trying hard not to show it, but we somehow got the job done.

There are a lot of clients out there – especially middle-management – who ‘Lord it over’ the PR people and seem to think that they know everything. Some might assume that billionaires might act that way, writ large. But the reverse is true. You learn very quickly that such people probably became so successful in the first place because they maintained open minds. They also ‘get’ the fact that they wouldn’t be shelling out oodles of money for professional services unless they felt that some value is being added.

For much of their careers, PR professionals work hard to earn engagement with stakeholders such as media in order to generate positive media coverage. Pitching and placing coverage is often an uphill struggle, with calls to journalists that often go unreturned and rejection a constant fact of life. Just getting the coverage – any coverage – is often the objective, with concern for the content a secondary priority amid the general relief that the story appeared somewhere.

All of this changes when the PR pro becomes the designated media contact for a famous person. Then the underlying fear isn’t that coverage won’t appear, it’s that the wrong kind will. With saturation media play already a given, then then strategy and messaging become key. For example, when Bill Gates was in Toronto during 1993, Canada was just coming out of a tough recession and with the advent of new PC technologies, people started to worry that technology would put them out of a job. Thus was born the slogan “Putting technology to work for Canadians,” to communicate Microsoft’s vision that new new technology would enable, not unemploy.

There are more media requests than there is billionaire time in town to accommodate them, and so it is the media who then need to deal with rejection as outlets and opportunities are carefully selected. On one level, it felt strangely exhilarating to decide who would get to interview Donald Trump in Toronto or George Soros in Seoul, but rather than mete out to others the rudeness I had endured from a small minority of journos in past, I took great pains when I was in such a position of unexpected authority to return all calls and express sincere appreciation for the media interest.

This video shows the publicity results of the Trump experience:

I once heard that any good PR person should always keep out of the picture, but with so many media around, and being the handler, that is basically impossible.

Categories: work
comments(0) Tags: bill gates, billionaires, donald trump, edelman, george soros, hill & knowlton, media relations, PR