A short article from the Pharmaceutical Business Review on the PR challenges facing AstraZeneca and its drug Crestor which reduces high cholesterol:
“Analysis of Crestor prescription trends in the US shows that each Public Citizen statement causes a slight drop in the number of weekly prescriptions. However, once the publicity recedes, prescription growth continues. It seems unlikely that Public Citizen will stop its attacks, but AstraZeneca’s PR machine seems to be overcoming these difficulties as growth of Crestor continues.”
AstraZeneca have released a public rebuttal of Public Citizen’s claims.
Interesting story from New York Lawyer on the growing demands on legal firms to provide PR advice:
“Every once in a while, when a client doesn’t have any PR staff or when they are unavailable, I’ve thrown something up on the PR newswire for them, or when they were in a pinch, I’d give them some starting advice on crisis management. My first advice is to get a good PR firm,” says Petri Darby, public relations and marketing manager for Dallas-based Jenkens & Gilchrist.”
Time for PR firms to start offering legal services perhaps?
Nothing illustrates the diversity of this “profession” better than the inside track on how some practitioners work in high profile fields such as sport or entertainment.
In the UK at the moment there’s a feeding frenzy around the sexual high jinks in the headquarters of the governing body of English football – the Football Association (FA). It turns out the national coach and the head of the FA were having an affair with the same employee. The FA’s PR man offered one of the tabloids the dirt on the coach if they held back on the story about the FA’s CEO. Unfortunately for the PR guy, the journalist taped the conversation and ran with both stories…
“The transcript of what the News of theWorld called the “tape of shame” detailed Gibson’s attempt to trade information about the England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson’s relationship with an FA secretary, Faria Alam, in return for the paper’s silence about her affair with Mark Palios, the association’s chief executive…. Still, it is no revelation that PRs try to stop stories appearing by offering others – or the prospect of others – instead. Such horsetrading may not be the norm in mainstream public relations but killing a story is a key service offered by the small number of “independent media brokers” (as one of them calls their trade) who try to massage press coverage of the various celebrities they represent.”
Murphy's Law 