PeppercomBlog

When 1 = 20,000

Posted by Milos Sugovic

Here’s a brilliant idea: I’ll put up a sign for one day near the Empire State Building. The sign will say “Check Out Peppercom’s Blog!” Since on any given day about 13,000 people visit the building, and each person has an upper bound of about 150 people in their social circle who they’ll talk to about my sign, that means I can expect 1.95 million impressions in one day! Astounding, isn’t it? Especially if you’re one of those that looks at a glass half empty and says it’s a river dam, then the math definitely makes sense.

The PR industry’s struggle for credible measures has paradoxically reduced its credibility. And it’s because of measures like impressions that are comprised of circulation numbers and a mysterious multiplier. It’s not so much that circulation numbers are misleading, it’s the multiplier - a number used to inflate audience exposure by a factor ranging from as low as 2.5 to 8.0 – that grossly exaggerates and distorts already questionable figures. 

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.

Who are you calling ‘average’?

Posted by Milos Sugovic

How many companies actually serve the average consumer? Unless you’re selling a commodity like corn or wheat  (but even there you have some market segmentation and differentiation), there’s a need to target messages to target audiences.  We do it all the time in everyday conversation. Your boss gets a “Good morning,” your bud a “Wasssuuuppp!” So why is it so hard in marketing and communications?

Being all things to all people may seem like the dominant strategy, but it really isn’t. Yes, by maintaining centrality you appeal to the masses, but so what? Are you really trying to appeal to every possible buyer of your product or service? 

It always puzzles me when market research, originally intended to tailor a marketing/communications strategy, is conducted to uncover none other than the wants, needs and preferences of the average consumer. Granted, there is something to be said about the central tendency of your sample population, but deviations away from the norm are as important, if not more so.

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.

What do ice-cream sundaes and correlation have in common?

Posted by Milos Sugovic

Nothing really, unless you’re in PR. 

Take a look for yourself: slide six of a VMS presentation titled “Measuring the Power of News on Advertising and Business Outcomes.” Is that really correlation? Last time I checked, correlation is a statistical relationship between two (or more) variables. So why would VMS, the leader in providing news and ad monitoring solutions, dumb down a statistical concept so much that they themselves look dumb?

Well, there are three explanations I can think of: First, and least likely, they don’t know better. Judging from the rest of the presentation and the credentials of the researchers, they know what they’re talking about. So let’s scrap that one. Second, and more likely, they talk to it when presenting. Fair enough, but why a graphic with one variable? Unless they’re talking about autocorrelation (self-correlation over time), which I highly doubt, it’s not a good illustration, period.

Which brings me to the third and most likely explanation: the obsession with “dumbing it down.” Statistics has traditionally struggled with making inroads into the public relations profession, and understandably so. On one end you have practitioners that rely on right-brain functions (nothing wrong with that), while on the other there’s a whole myriad of challenges one faces when dealing with qualitative data. But that doesn’t mean we should reduce powerful statistical techniques to the cravings in the hypothalamus!

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.

Path of Least Resistance

By Milos Sugovic 

Competitive differentiation is about survival. Your success depends on how your business is positioned vis-à-vis its competition, and rests on your ability to answer one simple question: “Why are you better?” Most companies struggle with communicating their niche and opt for the easy way out by taking their competitors head on.  

But why do businesses readily forget about the easiest route of all - or as it’s know in physics - the path of least resistance? What’s interesting about the path of least resistance is that it describes why an object or entity takes a given path, usually a motion forward through a system, as a result of resistance levels in its environment. As a metaphor for personal effort, it implies least confrontation - a person taking the path of least resistance avoids conflict in order to survive.