May 2006

PAUL V HEATHER: THE PR VERDICT

Paul v Heather: the PR verdict

Celebrities who benefit from the best PR know the secret lies in being represented by someone who's as close to Fleet Street as to their clients.
It's been a big PR fortnight.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/marketingandpr/comment/0,,1781951,00.html

While it may be hard to pick an outright winner between Madonna, McCartney, Prince Charles and the heavy metal merchants from Finland who won Eurovision, it's a lot easier to identify the loser. Step forward Lady McCartney. Or, if you prefer, Heather Mills.
Public crises are when good PR is needed most and Heather could learn a lot from the queen of pop and the Prince of Wales, not to mention her own husband.

Sir Paul has cleverly maintained his image as a national treasure for more than 40 years, thanks to a loyal serf called Geoff Baker - a former tabloid hack who knew exactly how to play the game from both sides - and it was a big risk to let him go a year ago.

However, thanks to the stewardship of the Outside Organisation, whose Stuart Bell has been living out of Macca's suitcase on two gruelling world tours, the former Beatle has still come out of this calamity smelling of roses.

Ever adept at playing a part, Sir Paul now inhabits the very role the press assigned to him when Heather first arrived on the scene - the vulnerable widower snared by a cunning little gold-digging vixen. Heather, on the other hand, suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, becoming the butt of another new joke in my email inbox every day.

Meanwhile, Madonna got back on the front pages for a tired old stage routine involving a crucifix (didn't she do that stunt in the 80s with Like a Prayer?), her queenly image polished to a fresh lustre by the seasoned hand of Barbara Charone.

The undisputed queen of the music PR scene, BC (as she calls herself) has personal relationships with everyone in Fleet Street for the simple reason that everyone in Fleet Street needs to know what Madge is up to next. Just as Outside boss Alan Edwards has been the man every hack needs to know since he launched the Spice Girls and merged them with the Beckham brand to such spectacular effect.

Then there's Prince Charles and sons' new best friends of Ant and Dec (and Leonard Cohen) which can be attributed to Charles's press supremo of the last two years, Paddy Haverson, who also handled effortlessly the heir to the throne's union with Camilla - no mean feat. A former FT hack, Haverson moved out of Fleet Street to manage publicity at Manchester United before getting the royal summons.

Heather, on the other hand, is looked after by Anya Noakes, a former film and TV publicist (and one-time personal publicist to Sir Ben Kingsley) and a woman to whom most journalists of my acquaintance have never spoken (or heard of) until now.

Perhaps Ms Noakes has spent too long in the world of film publicity, where journalists are often regarded as the enemy (apart from the tame junket crowd). The simple art of plain speaking and open dealing is preferable to the tight-lipped, Stepford approach that our American cousins consider the norm.

The big names in PR in the UK - if not in the US - are as close to their Fleet Street contacts as to their clients. It's all about trust and nobody trusts someone they don't know. So if her publicist can't do it for her, then it's time for Lady M to build bridges and start communicating. Her future depends on common sense taking a firm hold.

WEAVING A TANGLED WEB

Weaving a tangled web

The sheer quantity of spin can silence the noise of a damaging story
As a keen public relations-watcher I constantly marvel at how the dark craft continually changes. With each new publicity disaster - and I'm not thinking just of the Labour party ... but it's hard not to - the vast canvas used by the PR practitioner to win hearts and minds expands.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/marketingandpr/story/0,,1771158,00.html

In the 21st century, damage limitation has become the ability to overwhelm the gathering pace of a story, defusing it with a huge quantity of information, misinformation and disinformation. It means the truth is harder to find than ever.

The fast-growing constellation of blogs and new media outlets, such as handheld devices and mobile phones, has given spinmeisters a galaxy of new media for their tall tales.

Let's consider how we are currently being bombarded with the soundbites of a public figure under siege. Battered and befuddled John Prescott demonstrated a good old reputation management exercise when he provided the grateful Independent with an exclusive off-line media interview.

The Bennite class-warrior and old-school bruiser manfully planted the hypothesis that he is a tireless and misunderstood backroom power broker. Like Scotty from Star Trek he has heroically been keeping the New Labour project on course to boldly go where no party has gone before. Before the outing of his tryst (the first one) Prescott was on the point of announcing a shake-up of his office: this was spoilt by his romantic misjudgment.

We were then subjected to the at-first-glance incredible argument that he is the caring therapist calmly sitting between Tony and Gordon, managing their differences over cottage pie. Oh please, a cottage pie! Still, I suppose it's less dangerous that lasagne. The ploy is both shameless and brilliant.

Simultaneously, blogs have been full of speculation surrounding the story; old material has been rejuvenated, and old interviews have re-surfaced, repackaged for new locations.

Google "Prescott" and you will find the residue of previous spin. "I have close emotional identification with Billy Elliot" - he has seen the film six times - he told one interviewer.

"This lad Billy rose up against the prejudices of his community and against the very structure of that community and said, 'This is what I am. This is how I want to live my life.' He had to fight with all the love he had for his family and his community to be true to himself. And yes, that moved me. It made me cry," said Prescott. Me too.

In the new information war the successful are the ones with the dissemination resources as well as teams that can hone and tweak the messages and constantly feed huge chunks of copy to submerge the news and digital agenda.

Size is all that matters in modern impropaganda - the sheer quantity of the output can silence the noise of damaging copy. Quality research is a budget issue and beleaguered editors - under pressure to keep the newsroom full and to cut down on expensive foreign trips and "entertaining" contacts over long lunches - see staffers turning to search engines for help.

What hope is there when the public has a goldfish-like attention span and the sheer scale and ubiquity of spin compounds and clouds reason? The PR businesses that seem to be growing are those consultancies offering software-rich resources to populate the web not with information, but with disinformation and misinformation.

We should we all question more intently the invisible marionette-maker stringing us all along. If it's not too late.

THAT'S SHOE BUSINESS

That's shoe business

Speculation about a possible link between Wayne Rooney's injury and his choice of footwear could mean Nike keeping its head down at the World Cup.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/marketingandpr/story/0,,1765949,00.html

Scramble the damage limitation specialists for the crisis! While Wayne's world for the next six weeks will be a special oxygen tent to speed his recovery, the men and women in suits are already hard at work to work to starve the rumour mill of air.

As England football fans hold their collective breath following Rooney's broken foot at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, the internet has been alive with conspiracy theories. Their subject: not just Rooney's fourth metatarsal but a whole series of injuries connected to the launch of new football boots on the eve of major tournaments.

This is potentially very bad news for Nike, whose new 'Air Zoom Total 90 Supremacy' boot made its Premiership debut on Wayne's foot at Stamford Bridge on Saturday. Far from kick-starting a multimillion-pound sales boom from kids across the globe, the new soccer slipper - a feathery 10.5 ounces in weight - designed specifically to cushion and protect the foot, now stands in the dock, under a bright spotlight, its studs curled in shame, accused of wrecking England's best chance of winning the World Cup since 1966.

As the suits at Nike woke up the next morning, sick as the proverbial parrot, the downside crystallised. Their talisman and prized acquisition, shod in the boot, would now most likely not be able to pirouette around the defences of Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago and Sweden.

Rooney would be unable to plunder priceless goals, with wide-eyed kids dreamily gazing in wonder at his footwear, in the belief that £120 would buy them the chance to emulate their sporting deity in all his lightweight-booted glory.

The negative PR threatens to overwhelm Nike. But it's not just Nike, who have been quick to exonerate themselves and their boot of blame, with the Manchester United medical staff backing them up. After all, three other England stars who have suffered metatarsal injuries - David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and Ashley Cole - were all wearing Adidas footwear.

Nonetheless, a myriad of soccer blogs speculate that the new breed of super-lightweight boots are the major reason behind the spate of recent metatarsal injuries.

The history of boot manufacturers jostling for position has been interesting to watch: take the original rivalry between Adidas and Puma - two German companies run by brothers whose sibling rivalry fuelled a multimillion-pound war - which existed long before Nike came along.

One of the first examples of brand endorsement was in 1954, when the German team won the football World Cup for the first time, wearing Adidas shoes with then-revolutionary screw-in studs. While Adidas took the glory, Puma angrily claimed they had invented the screw in stud - and from that moment the battle lines were drawn.

Fifty years later the stakes are higher, and the catastrophe of Wayne's injury could not only condemn England's World Cup dream to failure, but also eclipse Nike's marketing push around the tournament. If England fail to lift the cup, or at the very least reach the semi-finals (no doubt to be defeated on penalties by those pesky Germans), the rising tide of blame-seeking could seriously undo the Nike cool.

For now, the web rumour mill is the battleground Nike must neutralise, in the same way that MacDonald's is successfully holding its own against the growing healthy food lobby. As candles are lit and prayers are said in hope that the wonder kid makes a remarkable recovery to help the England team emulate the heroes of '66, Nike will be gnawing a few fingernails in the hope that those prayers might be answered.

But history is surely against us, for as all theology students know, when it comes to football, God is a Brazilian.