You Can't Have It Both Ways, It Seems - from Media Post

I'm going beyond the press release and into advertising territory in this column, after a recent article in The New York Times' "On Advertising" column grabbed my attention. It discussed the trials and tribulations of a new female "enhancement" product that is having a hard time getting airplay. Pun very much intended.

Most readers of that article would surmise that its purpose was to highlight the disparity between what is acceptable in advertising -- or not -- when it comes to "our" sexuality, as well as the double standards that exist within the advertising world today. To me, the article also raises another red flag: the very aggressive and divisive political atmosphere that has engulfed our country when it comes to women's choices and the freedom and control that we have over our bodies. And let's not forget the media cohorts, either. However, as this is not the appropriate place to discuss political issues, I won't. So let's go back to advertising.

Advertise like it's 1959

When it comes to today's media market (or did I mean to say meat market), one could argue that society has progressed a great deal since the early days of television and print advertising, à la "Mad Men." More and more, we have been exposed to TV shows, commercials and ads that feature interracial families, homosexual couples (albeit male, predominately), and an altogether a more laid-back attitude when it comes to discussing and displaying things of a sexual nature. This, however, is not the case when it comes to female sexuality -- which seems to be as taboo as ever if we take the boycott of this female product as an indicator.

Zestra Essential Arousal Oils, a product designed to enhance the female sexual experience, is struggling to find networks or publications that will run its ads.

I have to say that Zestra's commercial is really rather lame, especially compared with ads for same category products like KY gel and Trojan condoms. It's a number of middle-aged women talking about their diminishing sex drive due to getting older and having children. Hello out there -- there is nothing remotely "inappropriate" about either, and I can very confidently make this statement as a mother of two almost grown-up children, and as a woman approaching the company's target customer's age.

The company has had its ad pulled from prime time on most major networks -- the very same networks and stations that run male enhancement ads for Viagra and Cialis ad nauseum. Even Facebook pulled the ads after just a couple of weeks.

In the end, Zestra has had to settle for the graveyard shift -- after midnight -- when its target audience is fast asleep, dealing perhaps with hot flashes and worries about their university-bound children and the associated financial obligations. And I can tell you, that is definitely not sexy, on air or in real life.

So why this double standard? Why is it okay to publicize men's sexual needs, but not women's?

Looks like we can't have it both ways

What this situation makes apparent is that while we have become more accepting of certain social issues -- we have no problem watching "The Situation" get his rocks off with several females at a time -- there is still an enormous double standard in acknowledging the comfort level of women's sexuality, in any medium. While we seem to be perfectly fine with ads showing women as sex objects (Heidi Montag, Kim Kardashian, et al.), it suddenly becomes unacceptable once real women start discussing their real sexual needs and desires.

Since when did American media become uncomfortable with recognizing the sexual needs of women equally? Are we less progressive than the Europeans, or even the British -- supposedly prudish -- who quite openly discuss sexual topics like S&M and sex toys in their daily papers?

Watch the ad and tell me what you think. Is it so racy for prime time compared with its male counterparts? Are the networks right to ban an ad like this? And what message are they sending to American women?

Zuckerberg's 100M: Just another Facebook PR opportunity?

According to critics, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is attempting to counter the potentially negative PR fallout from upcoming film “The Social Network” with the announcement of his hefty $100 Million donation to the Newark School Board.

Well, so what? There are millions of young celebrities (Lindsay Lohan, the Kardashians, Heidi Plasticbody, Paris Hilton et al), who have made an absolute mint off of a public who puts them on the cover of US Weekly and keeps them in Halston originals without donating any noteworthy portion of their mostly unmerited wealth to charitable causes.

Yet the media is going after Zuckerberg, who, at 26 years of age may be the youngest philanthropist to donate $100 million to anyone, much less a school board in a depressed area who is in desperate need of it. I have to ask, what's happened to our own values if we chastise a successful American entrepreneur for this? Something is decidedly wrong here.

Instead of bashing him or deriding his gifting by dismissing it as a PR move, why is the media not lifting him up and making him a great example of what young celebs who meet with good fortune can do with their bling? This could well set a trend for the rest of Generation Y – wouldn’t that be great? Instead of Paris Hilton sticking dollars up her nose, she could think about supporting kids’ programs that teach them how to avoid substance addiction, or even mentoring kids to become entrepreneurs instead of clueless heiresses. That would be novel.

At a time when our country is being forced to rethink its values, Zuckerberg's donation stands as a very relevant, much needed and marvelous gesture – at least in my humble opinion.

So why the sour grapes, critics? Almost everything seems to be written off as a PR move these days, but why single out Zuckerberg’s move - one that will bring so much good to so many kids (let’s not forget the community, teachers and parents) who also deserve a chance in life?

I see this as a wonderful example of "what goes around comes around". Good on ya Zuckerberg!

And THANKS.

On Customization

In the world of consumer products and services, new trends are emerging all the time – almost every second it seems. And after 15 seconds, it’s already old.

On Monday, everything is “better, more enhanced,” and by Friday, consumers are gravitating (back) towards something smaller, sleeker and shinier.

Of course, it’s a given that anything high-tech or “smart” like cars and phones is where we are headed, but what are other emerging trends? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal says that now, it’s all about customization.

According to Sarah Needleman @ WSJ, business experts are claiming that more consumers are buying more custom-made products. One 27-year-old New Yorker paid $1,250 for a custom mattress that he designed and purchased on Create-a-mattress.com.

And it doesn’t stop there. Customizable products are popping up all over the place. Check out a company called Rickshaw Bagworks – I just customized a cover for my iPad (and no, I did not get paid to write that!)

If you can buy it, it seems you can customize it.

But let’s think about it…. Customizable products are more laborious and expensive to build, right? So, how does this model work given today’s economic climate? “Experts” believe that it is the economy that is the contributing factor to the growth of this trend. That and companies like TreeHouse Logic who are developing the back-end technology so that you and I can beddazle our toasters. And while customized products may seem a little more expensive than off-the-shelf, they still don’t compare with spending big bucks on luxury items (jewelry, cars, and lavish vacations). We still gotta have a little luxury in our lives, and customization is filling that spot.

What about the business model, is it sustainable, profitable? Startup costs are reduced as most of these businesses operate solely online, with limited inventory and a JIT mindset. Quoting from the WSJ, Dace Venture Finances stated that the number of custom businesses they finance has gone from just one or two to thousands in a very short time. Customizable.com also stated they currently have 1,000 listings, up from just 300 in 2009.

Maybe I’m on to something.

21st Century Hotel Public Relations: 10 Approaches Your Granddad Never Thought Of

I wanted to share a great article written by TravelInkd’s Jennifer Rodrigues for Hotel Business Review on the future M.O.'s of hospitality PR. The content is relevant, though, to any industry working its way into the new millennium.

The practice of public relations for hotels, like the practice of public relations for all industries, has steadily evolved over the years. In the last decade, however, change has come much more rapidly. The channels of communication have opened wide, and what was once a single three-branched media river has multiplied (or divided?) into thousands of individual streams. Through these streams flows a volume of information no one thirty years ago could have even begun to fathom, let alone process.

This means there is a wealth of public relations strategies available that leverage the nature of this information delivery delta. For lodging, an industry that sometimes seems hopelessly tethered to past practices, these strategies and tactics can appear daunting, foreign, or even irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Hotels are entirely capable- one might even say well-poised - to execute 21st century public relations strategies. Because the core product hotels are delivering is an inherently personal one (the guest experience), it lends itself to well-targeted, personalized communications- which, of course, are the hallmark of 21st century public relations.

So without further ado, here is our list of ten next generation public relations approaches hotels can and ought to be exploring right away. Some may not be revelations in the truest sense of the word (anyone not running a hotel from a cave in Antarctica knows about Twitter and Facebook), but all of these are strategies that hotels in general have not engaged to their fullest potential.

Tweet!

Twitter is the ultimate mash-up of personal and broadcast communication. As such, it is the penultimate 21st century PR tool. Tweeting relevant, gripping information is an excellent way to build awareness and engagement among your followers (hopefully loyal, previous and potential guests). It’s also a way to develop an identity through content, or a way to reinforce an existing brand. Where most hotels get tripped up in Twitter is by being inconsistent tweeters, or slow responders. Create a Twitter strategy, and make someone in the marketing and PR department accountable for monitoring your feed and executing the strategy on an ongoing basis.

Facebook (ings)

In terms of identity and brand image control, nothing comes close to Facebook and its siblings (LinkedIn, etc.). It is a platform to put forth the best aspects of a hotel, and a sounding board for new initiatives and consumer interaction. The same pitfalls that affect hotels’ usage of Twitter apply to Facebook: a lack of appropriate commitment, a lack of relevance, and a failure to foster real interaction. As such, the same remedies apply: install a social media point person, have them feed relevant information into the profile, and require accountability for responding to ‘friends’. Again, this isn’t something that you can do just once or twice a week. Social media is a full-time job and a communication tool that needs to be taken seriously or else you risk wasting time and resources, as well as alienating your friends and followers.

Tell Your Own Story

What the social media tools (and the other tools mentioned here) afford hotels is the ability to tell their story on their own terms. This, however, is not limited to social media communications; indeed, the practice of telling your own story is applicable across mediums. This is certainly not a new idea, but it is a concept that has become much easier to put into practice in the last few years. Hotels must become more willing to craft a story around notable aspects of their operations, and effectively transmit that story through multiple information outlets. Now, a hotel can post any story they wish to their Facebook page or blog, but when it comes to convincing a traditional broadcast media outlet to pick it up, relevance, interest and craftsmanship become important. This is where the distinction between a story and an announcement becomes acute, and where hotels need to become aware that telling their own story in the right way to the right person is the only way to get noticed.

You can read the rest of Jennifer's article on the iThinkInk blog here

All Thumbs (and No Brains)

I read a great article in AdAge this week entitled RIP, the Press Release (1906-2010) -- and Long Live the Tweet that beautifully (and comically/tragically) demonstrated how corporations and celebrities are increasingly leaving important (and not so important, but somewhat curious) newsflashes to their twitter accounts instead of their press-release wielding PR professionals.

“The long-suffering, much-maligned press release, I'd argue, finally died this summer, thanks particularly to JetBlue and BP, with a little moral support from Kanye West and just about every other celebrity with thumbs,” rants Simon Dumeno.

I’m partially in agreement.

The deafening death rattle of the old press release is, indeed, winding down, and there’s no stopping technology, or fool-hearty and self-absorbed celebrities, but surely no one could hardly argue that tweeting your own 140 character press releases is the way to go?

The press release had a hard enough time being heard before Twitter and other mediums, and the PR industry is, in part responsible for this. It probably lost a goodly portion of its audience to a lack of discretion in determining what was actually newsworthy – or not. Add to that the advent of the internet, and the industry has had to swim even harder upstream as every fool with a keyboard clamors for their 15 minutes.

But from a PR perspective, in the longer term these wanton tweets are most likely going to generate massive amounts of damage control revenue for my industry, after all, someone has to restore their decorum?

Don’t get me wrong, I know that tweeting has its place in our digital society, but with every “advancement,” we are witnessing a decline in the quality of our communications, the beauty of prose and of rhetorical speech.

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote an article for MediaPost’s Marketing Daily "You Think You Know PR?": my message is just as, if not more so, relevant today.

Good storytelling is an art and the public’s reality is only, for most intents and purposes, as real as how it is perceived. And WE, PR professionals, still mould that perspective more skillfully than anyone, (whether for positive or negative results).

Good storytelling can incite emotions, can make us buy triple-stack hamburgers when we're not hungry or cause our minds to create fantastic what-if scenarios. Good stories can make us cry, laugh or feel sick. Even better, good stories can make journalists pick up the phone or hit the reply button to our emails, saying, "Tell me more, I want to know." They are the reactions that good storytelling can invoke, and I don't think that's something we can do with a micro-tweet or pushing a one-size-fits-all template that's been approved by corporate because it's safe and sounds good to the CEO.

Stories and storytellers have been around for thousands of years, influencing people and their decisions. Media needs good story tellers desperately, and I believe it always will.

The press release is not dead, as reported by AdAge, but it is being "re-tooled." It’s an evolutionary phase and the fittest will survive. A ground-swelling demand for quality content will occur and we’ll be here providing it long after celebs and corporate drones devolve into 10 thumbed quacks.

You’ve Been Self-Served!

There’s nothing like hard-hitting “studies” to put the fear of God in folks. Who, after all, wants to read that their marriage is potentially doomed, or that their partner might collapse and die of a heart attack, or that their sex life is rather pathetic?

Well that almost sums up a new “study” from the very caring people at Westin Hotels & Resorts. Their “Wellness in Travel” survey tells us that we’ll feel soooooo much better and productive after a vacation. I could have told the marketing people at Westin these obvious facts without their commissioning a costly “survey.”

Oh wait, wait, I already wrote about the need for vacations back in July 2010 (All Work and No Play), but minus the survey.

Of course, Westin’s survey is nothing more than a very common marketing tactic used to publicize an issue or societal concern, in this case the productivity and wellbeing of American workers.

The silly thing about this survey – which is incredibly self-serving -- is that it highlights why Americans aren’t going on vacation – they are fearful about losing their jobs, and that they either don’t have the cash or want to hang on to what little they have left. Staycations are our new vacations!

I don’t know about you dear reader, but if I am already stressed about work and my financial state of affairs, taking off on a vacation is the absolute last thing I would be doing. It’s almost impossible to “check your stress” at the airport with worries like that, don't you think?

And as for experiencing more ‘wedded bliss’ on vacation... you simply save up the arguments over money for when you get back home.

How do you feel about taking time off? Do you feel stressed just by the thought of going away and leaving work behind?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

VH

You Give PR A Bad Name

Another column, another ethics dilemma.

It seems the issue of ethical behavior can't stay out of the limelight right now. While the Democrats are grappling with the newly created Office of Congressional Ethics and two of their own representatives under investigation for, ahem, questionable behavior, the Federal Trade Commission is coming down on PR companies that are misleading the public by posting fake reviews on behalf of their clients.

My thanks to the FTC for giving this rather silent, but ugly, issue the attention it deserves.

A few weeks ago, a PR company was fined by the FTC in what I believe to be a first for the PR world (correct me if I am wrong.) The agency, which shall remain nameless in this column, represented a number of games developers, including the creator of Rock Band. Thinking itself very clever, the agency assigned staffers the roles of guest bloggers and reviewers, who got to work on creating fake consumer profiles and posting glowing but fake reviews.

For about six months, the PR agency owner and her crew duped consumers on iTunes into believing the reviews were posted by gamers for fellow gamers -- people they thought they could trust for an authentic, first-hand take on the game.

Dirty tactics

While the goal of generating positive reviews is clearly a huge focus for agencies involved not only in product-centric PR, but who also earn revenues from product sales (the agency in question earned commission from game sales, so positive reviews + sales = more money in its bank), misleading consumers like this is both unethical and dirty. Actually, let me rephrase: misleading consumers is unethical and dirty, period.

At what point in planning out a client's launch or PR strategy is fraud considered as an active component instead of creative or even traditional approaches? Was it desperation, client pressure or, perhaps, greed that drove this agency to lower its standards -- if it had any to begin with?

Instead of spending six months creating fake consumer profiles and reviews, the agency should have spent its time on:

Creating awareness about the games through clever or even outrageous PR and social media outreach tactics
Encouraging users to post reviews -- positive or not -- via community building, and engaging consumers transparently through social media channels.
Clearly, the agency chose the easy-and-sleazy option instead of relying on talent and good old-fashioned hard work.

The sad part about this type of dirty tactic is that it is so simple to do, and the FTC is going to have a hell of a time policing it. With social media, anyone can create a profile and post countless reviews, potentially influencing consumers.

And that's precisely the point: if any review that a consumer reads is in fact a manipulated, marketing ploy designed to influence a purchasing decision -- by a marketer and not a consumer -- then full disclosure must be given. Always.

Truth in advertising

The FTC makes it very clear that companies engaged in online marketing -- and yes, this does include PR firms -- need to abide by long-held principles of truth in advertising.

"Advertisers should not pass themselves off as ordinary consumers touting a product, and endorsers should make it clear when they have financial connections to sellers."

A PR agency should never be held responsible for the content of consumer reviews, especially in our increasingly social media-ruled world, and our clients must be educated about the actions that agencies can and cannot take, no matter how big the payout or stakes.

Laws have been created to protect consumers from misleading practices. Manipulating and faking reviews is tantamount to fraud and premeditated deception. If agencies and online marketers continue duping consumers in this way, they are cutting off the hand that feeds them. And if consumers can no longer trust review sites or even social media recommendations, then what do we all do?

It’s actions like these that give PR a bad name.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=135621&nid=118525