PeppercomBlog

The Bankers Still Don’t Get It

Posted by Matt Purdue

You know the whining must be loud when you can hear it all the way from Switzerland. The world’s banking titans are once again assembled in Davos for their annual confab. Amid all the confusion about how the global banking system may look in the future, one thing is painfully clear: the big banks still don’t get it when it comes to PR.

Financial giants are complaining that government leaders are threatening to place tighter restrictions on the way they do business. However, at least in the U.S., only a small portion of citizens surveyed in a recent Rasmussem poll opposes such measures. For example, only 29% of respondents are against limits on the type of investments banks can make.

But the bankers quoted in this Financial Times article just don’t understand the power of public opinion. Politicians read polls religiously, and they are feeding off the disgust Main Street currently has for Wall Street, the City, etc.

Get With the Times

By Matt Purdue

The dictionary describes hubris as overbearing pride or presumption. The word should be inscribed on the New York Times’ 1.5-million-square-foot, 52-floor tower in New York.

It seems the New York Times is, once again, ready to make readers pay for content. New York Magazine recently ran an excellent article on the company’s plans. While we’re waiting for details, it appears the Times will move to some sort of metered system in 2011, under which readers will be able to view a set number of articles for free, then be forced to pay for anything extra.

What world are New York Times’ executives living in where they actually believe the average reader will pay for their content? Journalism pundits have suggested the NY  Times’ model will work because the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have gotten away with it. But they’re missing the big picture: Most of the business world must read the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. It’s simply the cost of doing business.

Tiger Had Us By the Tail

Posted by Matt Purdue

When I first read my colleague Ed Moed’s take on Tiger Woods, I admit I was a bit miffed. At the time he wrote it, Woods had been in a one-car motor vehicle accident…and that’s pretty much all we knew for sure. Rumors were swirling about his alleged affairs.

My thinking at the time was simple: Leave the man alone for a while. He crashed into a fire hydrant and a tree, and was knocked unconscious. Doesn’t any human being deserve a time to heal up after an auto accident before every so-called journalist and blogger goes crawling through his personal life?

But now, it seems, the worm has turned. Tiger is all but blatantly admitting infidelity, confessing to “transgressions” and being “far short of perfect.” But at the same time, Tiger continues to plead for us to ignore him, declaring that he has a human right to a “measure of privacy.” Funny, but I don’t remember the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights including the freedom to cheat on your wife without getting busted.

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. 

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.

Balloon Boy: Not the First, Not the Last

Posted by Matt Purdue 

 A strange craft is seen floating over the skies of the United States. Immediately, the authorities and the news media mobilize. An entire nation is riveted by live reports of the ship soaring through the lower atmosphere. Millions of people are caught up in the excitement. 

The craft lands in a quiet field, and the police and media descend, falling over each other to uncover if what’s inside is a nightmare. 

But, in the end, we’re all fooled. This real-life drama has very little to do with reality. It’s all a fraud. 

Don't Rub It In.

Posted by Matt Purdue

In today’s L.A. Times, James Rainey’s column is a must-read for PR professionals. Rainey pithily summarizes the latest chapter of the Alessandra Staney saga at the New York Times (sorry, I refuse to capitalize the self-aggrandizing “the” in the paper’s title). A bit of background: Stanley, the NYT’s leading TV critic, has been chastised almost without mercy for the shoddy job she did on Walter Cronkite’s obituary in the July 17 edition. It’s become widely known that the obit included at least eight factual errors.

Everyone from Gawker to Katie Couric have ripped Stanley (and, to a lesser extent, her editors) for, once again, playing fast and loose with veracity. In one of the most scathing rebukes I’ve ever seen a journalist fire at a colleague, the NYT’s public editor placed blame with a reporter “with a history of errors [who] wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.”

Blame to Go Around

Posted by Matt Purdue 

Bernie Madoff made off with millions of dollars in advisor fees generated by his Mother of All Ponzi Schemes. But now he’s been nailed, jailed and will spend the rest of his life enjoying three hots and a cot. I feel for his victims, I really do. But some of them are hardly blameless. 

In California, real estate developer Robert Schapiro, himself a victim of the scheme, has become a leading advocate for his fellow investors who have been Madoffed. He recently told the press that the average Madoff investor "is not a super-wealthy person. These are people who worked their whole lives, had maybe $200,000 — $400,000 invested. Their sole source of income was Madoff, and many are elderly. That’s why they’re so desperate." 

Within that plea lies the problem: “Their sole source of income was Madoff.” Again, I sympathize with Schapiro and his cohorts. But there’s something fundamentally wrong with entrusting your entire nest egg (in technical terms, your portfolio) to one investment advisor. The number-one rule of investing is diversification: spread your capital around to avoid taking on too much risk in one area.

Missing, Inaction

Posted by Matt Purdue

Where, oh where, has my little chief executive gone? Where, oh where, can he be? Two high-profile men have been playing cat-and-mouse with the media lately, providing communications professionals with very clear lessons in what not to do. 

First, Apple leader Steve Jobs has reportedly returned to work at the company in Silicon Valley following a liver transplant. Jobs’ health (or lack thereof) has spurred nagging questions for five years now, since he announced in 2004 that he was having surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his pancreas. During this crisis, Jobs was open with employees, investors and the media, informing them that his cancer was a rare, less-aggressive form of pancreatic cancer than the grave condition most of us have come to expect from this disease. 

The media’s been abuzz over Jobs ever since, commenting ad nauseum on his appearance and his disappearances from industry events. In September 2008, Jobs implied that he was fine, and announced that he would no longer answer questions about his health. But this year, Jobs revealed both that he’s suffering from a hormone imbalance, and also that he had a liver transplant. The media—print, digital and social—continue to follow his every move with baited breath.