The one and only rant you need to hear about bad PR
By Stefan Constantinescu on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 5:52 PM PST In Marketing
Ewan Spence is a free spirit in the smartphone world. He speaks his mind, even though it can get him into trouble, and I admire him greatly for that. There is one thing about being an editor that we don’t write about, but it is a part of our daily routines. Spam. No I’m not talking about making your penis larger or wiring 20 million euros into your bank account, I’m talking about companies who feed us overdrawn metaphors, sentences with absolutely no meaning and hopes mascaraed by contempt thanks to a phrase equivalent to the score played played at ones’ funeral, you know the one I’m talking about, “coming soon”.
I’ve seen several people write about this very topic over the past year. The one that sticks out, apart from Ewan’s piece, is Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson who essentially rips the entire consumer electronics industry a new asshole.
It takes balls my friends. Testicles that weigh so much you need a horse and carriage appointed by the king himself every time you wish to head to the market hall to purchase your daily recommended dose of thunder and lightening. Ewan, Joel and I all have friends in the PR industry, and the only way you get true friends in this push and pull world is if you call them out on their own bullshit.
Exhibitions like CES, MWC, CeBIT, etc, are not about new hardware, software and services. They’re essentially giant parties where PR people treat themselves to a long evening of drunken debauchery that is the equivalent to a circle jerk for a mans ego. When morning comes and that pressed shirt touches your clean skin after you showered away your deepest regrets for joining a company who hasn’t made anything cool since that free pen with a pulsating LED you give to the new bloggers on the block, remember this: You carry the torch. You are the foot soldier in the fight that companies face every quarter to add an extra million to their bottom line. We, the press, we’re the people who tell the world if your product is brilliant or utterly useless. Please talk to us in English, nor PR talk, please be a real individual and acknowledge that there are other people in your space doing the same thing you are.
The PR person who drinks a cup of coffee with you the next day and talks about how much money he lost on a bet, another companies’ product or actually cares to listen to your opinion of what it is he is trying to push, that ladies and gentleman is a PR person who can be my friend.
That is a soldier who recognizes he is part of something bigger than himself.
Joel is an awesome blogger, Gizmodo lost it after he left – its totally humourless and self righteous now. Bing Boing has been going downhill too – ie a lot of the other bloggers on that site are crap. He needs to start another – why dont more geeks have decent humour and talk sense.
How I wish every journalist wrote about these things, around the time they mysteriously end up with an article that contains all the “facts” and talking points their anonymous suppliers feed them. But well done pointing out that this is how things work sometimes.
As a language professional, part of my job is to translate press releases. Do you know how bad that is? They can’t write even a single meaningful sentence.