PeppercomBlog

When News Becomes Voyeurism, and Vice Versa

Posted by Matt Purdue

Call them Ponytailgate and Joggergate. 

Two bubbling controversies present important lessons for PR folks: Whatever your clients do or say in public can come back to haunt them.

First, Ponytailgate. University of New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert was caught on video apparently roughing up some BYU opponents in a recent match. The real trouble involves a clip of Lambert yanking an opponent down by her ponytail. Somehow, someway the video spread around the interwebs like wildfire, giving Lambert an anti-Warholian taste of what it’s like to be infamous for 15 minutes.

Lambert had no business going rogue on her opponent (despite that fact that video evidence shows Lambert getting elbowed in the stomach at one point). But does our culture really have any business blowing this completely out of proportion? This was a women’s college soccer match, not the Super Bowl. 

Hand of a Frog

Posted by Milos Sugovic

Soccer (or football) is by nature a dirty sport; but that doesn’t mean cheating is acceptable. Unless, of course, you make the rules. 

It took the setting up of an easy play-off draw, two tough matches against soccer giants Ireland, an undetected offside, and a handball by captain and top scorer Thierry Henry for the French to barely qualify to the World Cup 2010. Great news for French fans but a shameful embarrassment for FIFA - Fédération Internationale de Football Association - a French acronym for the international football governing body.

In the aftermath of a match-fixing crackdown on 40 European games, last night’s referee blunder comes as a bitter pill for football fans to swallow. After Thierry Henry’s handball followed an obvious offside and a furious reaction by half-dozen Irish players, it’s curious how Swedish referee and chief culprit Martin Hansson and his assistants missed the blatant cheating. Or did they?

Rooting for Baseball, Inc.

Posted by Matt Purdue

Huge company takes gigantic risks in an infamously volatile market. Huge company gets enormous help from the government in the form of tax breaks and other favors. In the face of all this, huge company is now making piles upon piles of cash.

Are you rooting for this company, which has obviously figured out how to work the capitalist system to full advantage, to succeed or fail?

It’s not Citi or Goldman Sachs. It’s Yankees Global Enterprises, or YGE. This holding company owns both the New York Yankees and the YES cable television network. And when the World Series ended last night, with millions of people screaming until purple in the face, did they know or care that everything in the lead paragraph is true about their beloved conglomerate?

Leveraging My Cutting-edge Digital Platform

By Matt Purdue

They’re called clichés: words and phrases that have been overused to the point that they have become almost meaningless. Businessspeak is rife with them, and it’s time to end them. Look, I’m sure at some point a phrase like “leverage best practices” was new, may even clever. But now it—and its clichéd cousins—is just nauseating. 

I propose that we immediately retire:

Platform—Unless you work on an oil rig, you don’t have to worry about platforms. It’s not a communications platform; it’s a plan or, if you want to get fancy, a strategy.

Dig deep—Stop trying to pretend you work a blue-collar job. Besides, this should go without saying because clients pay us to conduct in-depth research. When is the last time a client asked you for a bit of shallow, perfunctory research.

Drill down—See above. What is it with the PR sector and references to oil, gas and mining industries?

Leverage—When did this become a verb? Leverage “use” instead.