Murphy's Law

Off Topic (a little): The Tech Bust (Again!)
I am sure that you, like me, had your fill of the doom and gloom of the current downturn and in particular the dotcom crash. However the Washington Post have an excellent four part feature on the aftermath of the tech burn-out in the vicinity of Washington DC. “Sixteen of the 40 technology companies in the Washington area that first sold stock to the public in the past five years are sold, in bankruptcy or out of business.”

PR and the art of talking straight
MediaMap‘s Expert PR has a nice straightforward and common sense article on the benefits of being up front. It’s writen by the folks at RML PR (who don’t use Flash 🙂 Refreshing.

Some reading for the new week…
Business 2.0’s David Futrelle has an interesting piece criticizing firms who are embroiled in financial ‘difficulties’ who keep ‘spinning’.

Brenda Clevenger has published the second part of her article on online PR over at CornerBar PR.

No, we want you to invest in PR…we just don’t think it’s effective…

Thanks to Phil Gomes who picked this one up. Edelman, the well known (“world’s largest privately-held PR agency”) has decided to celebrate its 50th anniversary by getting suppliers to pony up cash for an advetorial in Ad Age.

Now I’m not a big fan of advetorial, I admit that, but this seems absolutely ridiculous. A PR firm with thousands of PR professionals, celebrating its 50th anniversary by paying for an ad in the advertising bible.

Anyone spot the irony? Can Edelman now tell clients, “oh you’re much better off getting editorial coverage than advetorial..what’s that? oh yes well we prefer advetorial ourselves but…”

This is all the more surprising given a fantastic piece of PR that Edelman executed a couple of year’s back when they held their global meeting in Canada and got the participants to come up with marketing ideas for the brand ‘Canada’. A fantastic story ran in the Canadian Financial Post.

Looks like Edelman thinks PR’s not worth the hassle. I’m sure their clients will be impressed.

Supplemental: On the front page of the Edelman website they have a link to a webcast on “Marketing in the Post-Advertising Era” – oh the irony of it!

ChannelEdge..Top marks for creativity…but where’s the meat?

I’m sure if you’ve been scanning the marketing press during the week you’ve probably come across the announcement of “ChannelEdge” the new joint venture between Ketchum and IDC.

ChannelEdge’s raison d’etre is:
” a strategic alliance formed in July 2002 between Ketchum and IDC to help technology companies define and deliver winning channel strategies and communications.”

From the outset this defintely gets kudos in terms of creativity, but the more I read about it the more questions it raised with me.

Question #1
What experience do the PR guys have in creating ‘channel strategy’? Looking at the biographies there is no question but that these PR folks are very successful, experienced and capable PR people, but back to the question, if I am paying for consultancy I am paying for expertise and experience. Not one of these PR people (according to their bios) have worked in a channel role or inside a firm with responsibility for the channel…..eh, so is this a channel PR program? Now in fairness the IDC analysts do have channel experience…but

Question #2
If Ketchum are offering channel communications (given they have no actual channel experience themselves) programs. Isn’t this a standard PR service? Why do they need to create a joint venture?

Question #3
What’s the relationship between Ketchum and IDC? Does it stretch beyond ChannelEdge? What are the lines of demarcation that allow IDC to be an ‘honest broker’ for non-Ketchum (or ChannelEdge) clients?

Maybe I am being cynical and even unreasonable, but look at ChannelEdge’s “proven three phase approach”:
1. Assess
2. Plan
3. Execute

It’s not really pushing back the barriers of channel marketing is it?

My initial take is that this is a clever marketing ploy to sell some channel-related PR services – and in that I say best to luck to them. If they are serious about offering strategic channel counsel however I would recommend they head-hunt an experienced channel executive (or marketer). Talking about co-op funds etc. is fine in practice but in reality it’s about more than a press release.

This is a high-profile example of the PR industry’s continued attempt to become more than PR. Can they carry it off?

Did we get any coverage? Search me…
There’s nothing like a stuttering economy to encourage chat about bringing PR in-house. Though as an aside I’m intrigued that people immediately believe it’s cheaper, sorry more cost-effective to build in-house teams, even though quite often it’s not cheaper.

As budgets tighten, all over the web conversations spring up about how to do PR and PR research on the cheap. The most popular ‘tip’ I’ve seen recently on e-mail lists and web sites is:
“Hey dump those monitoring firms and subscription services, Google’s news search engine is all you need.”

Pardon? Have any of these folks used it? It’s a 1 out of 100 for accuracy, reach and depth. Try it out. Unless your client/employer is regularly on the news pages of the AP, Wall Street Journal and USA Today this search engine is not for you (yeah sure your client is top of the news every day…sure 🙂

In fact, people who can’t afford clipping services are typically small and private. If you rely on the Google news search engine you may get depressed.

So what’s a solution? Well it’s not perfect, it’s not guaranteed to track every hit, but waaaay better than Google News Search are free consolidated search products like Copernic (or shell out $40 for the more detailed version) and manually tracking your key targets. Though in my opinion paying for a clipping service (online or offline) may be a better, more productive use of your time….

There is some money for online content…
According to the Online Publishers Association more than 12.4 million people have stumped up hard earned cash for online content, a rise of 56% over Q1 2001.

The leading revenue generator is Real Networks followed by the Wall Street Journal Online. On the downside the top 100 websites account for 97% of all revenue. You can read the full report here (Adobe Acrobat required).

No negative vibes man…..
Interesting post from Phil Gomes on a story by Douglas Rushkoff in the Guardian about how his editors at the New York Times refused to publish his negative analysis on the AOL-Time Warner merger at the time because he clearly didn’t know what he was talking about! He who laughs last…

Now I am going to kick you one more time…Apple Redux
Further to the post on how Apple is alienating its own (should that be eating?) by coming down hard on rumor sites etc., their copyright attorney’s have been busy again this time in France.

Sony: Money can’t buy you …. good staff
There are times when you read something and your brain informs you that your eyes are misleading you. So you read it again and still your brain rejects it.

These incidents are usually provoked by moments of such stupidity that it’s really hard to fathom what is going on and what the perpetrators were thinking.

What am I talking about? Two words: Sony Electronics.

The New York Times as you may have read has refused to accept ads from Sony that attempt to blue the line between advertising and editorial content.

Effectively Sony has put together the age-old Advetorial rubbish and tried to place them in editorial pages with little or no identification that they are in fact ads.

OK let’s take a little breather here. Does this strike anyone as innovative? breaking new ground? opening up the frontiers of marketing?

No, I didn’t think so. This is a cheap marketing activity that has happily filled the un-read pages of newspapers and magazines around the world since mass circulation started. It’s space filling and magazine ad reps have happily took people’s money from it for years. From an advertisers perspective it’s admitting that ‘editorial’ coverage has value.

None of what I have written is rocket science to any of you. I would never recommend advetorial for a client or employer because it’s only a space filler and to be honest I don’t personally believe it has much value.

But, let us hear what Sony’s Consumer ‘Marketing’ Officer, T. Scott Edwards, has to say:
“We’re breaking paradigms here. We consider ourselves a content provider — we are buying the space.”

What? Excuse me. What is this guy on? Buying ‘Advetorials’ and ‘Commercial Features’ is (ahem) “breaking paradigms”? Who talks like that? Oh I know marketing management at large companies who have lost their tenuous grasp on reality.

Is ‘T’ really trying to tell us that paying for advetorial and trying to sneak it into editorial content is the brave new frontier?

Of course it doesn’t stop with ‘T’, oh no, his ad agency is right behind him.

Let’s listen to what they, Universal McCann, have to say for a moment:
“We’re trying to blur the line between the adveritising and editorial boundary.”

Oh my lord (I am trying to reduce my use of expletives).

Well I’d would like to publicly praise the New York Times for their standards, and show these Sony ‘marketing’ people that they need to stop drinking the ‘Kool Aid’.

To end, not everyone of course agrees with the NYT’s stand, there are, as there always are, people only too happy to get their hands on some filthy lucre to help make their quarter, and hang the consequences.

Jack Haire, sales muppet executive extrordinaire is quoted as rallying his executives at Time and AOL for a plan to distribute Sony’s content. Well done Jack, never let standards get in the way of a dollar.
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