Flack's Revenge

While most of the rest of the world is focused on the Winter Olympics, the NY Times covered another high stakes event earlier this week: the Westminster Dog Show.  More specifically, the article was about PR (or so it seemed).  The headline "Best PR in Show" did its job and reeled me in (note: as often happens, online NY Times articles get different headlines than their print versions for some reason).

Apparently, some spend big bucks on lavish multi-year campaigns to try to draw attention and influence the judges.  As the article says:

Among breeders, owners and handlers, it’s understood: you can’t just
turn up with the paradigm of the breed, if such an animal exists, and
expect a best-in-show ribbon. To seriously vie for victory, a dog needs
what is known as a campaign: an exhausting, time-consuming and very
expensive gantlet of dog show wins, buttressed by ads in publications
like Dog News and The Canine Chronicle.

The cost of a campaign can add up fast… Altogether, a top-notch campaign can easily cost more than $300,000 a year.

However as above implies, most of the focus is on ads.  Despite the headline, I could not find mention anywhere in the article about PR.  This is another example of how the field is portrayed inaccurately in the news.

One would think that at least some of the campaign investment and effort would go towards true PR programs.  Don't people read Dog News for the articles?  Doesn't Canine Chronicle have any actual chroniclers? Apparently not, it is all about ads:

Most magazines are struggling with a downturn in ads. Not Dog News.
It’s about 75 percent ads and runs as long as 600 pages in issues
coinciding with big shows. Prices vary from $250 for a full-page
black-and-white ad to $4,000 for the cover…

Judges are the main target — they are sent the magazine gratis — and
they star along with the dogs in most of the ads. There’s a tradition
at shows of taking a photograph of winning dogs along with the judges
who selected them, and most of the ads are little more than that photo
and a cutesy tag line.

In the NY Times Shortcuts column on Saturday, Alina Tugend wrote an excellent article: An Attempt to Revive the Lost art of the Apology.

According to the piece, there are four important components to an apology:

These include an acknowledgment of the fault or offense, regret for it
and responsibility for it — and, if possible, a way to fix the problem,
said Holly Weeks, a communications consultant and author of “Failure to
Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right
Them” (Harvard Business Press, 2008).

The article includes examples of inadequate apologies (classics include “I want to apologize” or “I am sorry that I have offended you”).  On Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David was famous for his poor apologies (one of my favorites was when he was taken to task for apologizing via telephone while loudly chewing pistachio nuts.  The other characters argued with him about whether his apology was valid).

It seems so simple, yet why do so many people stumble when it comes to apologizing (especially when it involves a public figure and some kind of crisis)?  We are all familiar with the carefully parsed apology that sounds like it was written by a lawyer and does not adhere to the above apology “specs.”  In fact, fear of legal liability – and the involvement of lawyers – is a major cause of ill-conceived apologies.

Here, I disagree with the article, or at least one of sources quoted. Holly Weeks is quoted in the article as saying: “So many apologies are constructed by legal or P.R. people” as a defensive mechanism, not as a sincere expression of remorse.

This implies that legal and PR are generally agree, and of course that is not always the case.  The last thing we (PR people) want our clients to do is sabotage apologies by making them legalistic and incomplete.

Another interesting thing I learned from the article is that a number of states have enacted “apology laws” that protect people from penalties they would otherwise be subject to simply because they apologized.

In an article that was generally pessimistic (Suppliers Say Spending Still Tight), the Wall Street Journal identified pockets of growth in tech today.

The fine print in the earnings season wrap was that IT buyers are still putting the squeeze on tech vendors, and that the spending is limited to areas with the most pressing needs, like security and data storage (we have a number of clients in these areas and were encouraged by the report overall).  According to the article:

Any available money seems to be flowing to tech products that address pressing needs, like gear to cope with the flood of data generated by most businesses… Another healthy sector is data security, as companies face an array of new threats to their computer systems.

But technology buyers remain selective, exploiting fierce price competition among vendors, and gravitating towards products that promise a speedy payoff..