As today's advertising has become almost totally ineffective (because, for the most part, marketers are forced to tell lies about products that simply aren’t good), conventional wisdom says, “PR is the new marketing.”
Makes sense: people are more likely to believe a story that’s well written, is not rife with advertising buzz words and appears in a more ‘neutral’ environment (it doesn’t look like an ad).
But not anymore, thanks to companies like BP, Chase, Delta... you know, the big dictatorial firms who think they can spin their way into our hearts. BP’s public response to the Gulf spill was nothing but cynical lies and misdirection: they used PR to blatantly spin the facts, assuming that either we don’t care or are too stupid to see the tricks.
(Consider the PR effort to convince us that the spill was a ‘mere’ 5,000 barrels a day when any fool could look at the live undersea feed and see that BP was telling a porky pie. And what about Tony Hayward’s act in front of a Congressional committee: “I know nothing,” says the new Sgt. Schultz. Still he gets a new job with BP for his 'performance'. He should have gotten fired and prosecuted for being a lying twit!)
Public relations, it used to be called, was an honest way to make a living: a way to help companies ‘relate’ to their clients, deliver important news and company developments, and generally put a human face on a usually cold corporation.
Then came Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propagandist extraordinaire. His theory of telling the ‘big lie’ became Gospel for American PR agencies: whenever a problem arises, lie about it at every turn; tell the same story with the same words and eventually some people will believe.
The once proud American press used to control this foolishness by asking tough questions and doing a bit of ‘journalistic investigation.’ But no more: lack of funds, poor training, reporters that look good but can’t write a lick and Rupert Murdoch have ended adversarial journalism (remember Walter Cronkite?) in favor of the media being in the pocket (they call it, 'embedded') of business and government.
Then add the Internet, where major PR distribution services rarely edit anything (they used to) and online distribution points like Yahoo, Forbes, MarketWatch, etc. publish everything they receive from wire services (it’s an automatic feed), and you can see why it’s easy to spin just about anything with deceptions that are gladly spread by the media.
(Ironically, just as the Net has helped spread PR lies, it has also helped to reveal these lies: companies and PR departments are too stupid to understand that any facts they put out can now be instantly checked. The phony BP spill estimate was countered by a dozen experts within a few minutes of its release, so what good did BP’s lie do for the company?)
Here’s my (long-winded) point: we all know, without doubt, that PR is a manipulative lie and not a creative, informative, honest story. There's not a single grain of truth in any of it, at least as it's practiced by most 'too big to fail' corporations.
So, if consumers know that ads are lies and PR efforts are based on lies… what’s left for intelligent marketers?
May Goebbels continue to rot in hell, along with a few of the geniuses in the PR departments of egotistical multinational companies. Their lies have done some damage!
“Consumers want a new story... authenticity, not spin... participation, not propaganda.”
