"Apparently the PR business, in which I have participated since 1970, has changed," veteran PR man and Writing Boots regular Brian Kilgore wrote yesterday on Facebook.
He quotes PR blogger David Gallagher, who paraphrases Lynne Anne Davis, president of the Cannes PR Jury: "New PR is now demonstrating its full channel agnostic power for building trust with authenticity and driving meaningful change in minds, societies and lives."
"Balderdash," Kilgore harrumphs. I don't suppose Kilgore would be any more moved by Davis's Deep Thoughts about "the power of true."
The exchange reminds me of my long gone mentor Larry Ragan, who once wrote a headline I remember more than two decades later. The head appeared over Larry's mocking condemnation of a prissy association-sponsored study that attempted to define "Excellence in Public Relations" as necessarily involving "two-way reciprocal communication," or some such highfalutin jive.
In his piece, Larry cited a contemporary PR campaign that was resulting in a windfall for a women's clothing company.
The headline, hammered out on Larry's manual Royal typewriter and gleefully retyped into the Aldus Pagemaker 5.0 newsletter template by yours truly:
"Does selling scads of brassieres constitute 'excellent' public relations?"
Now that, my friends, is the power of true.
Back when I was in the brassieres business, we decided to give a free brassiere to everyone who came to the brassiere company’s annual meeting.
The way to do this, for anyone busy channeling their agnostic power instead of just doing some thinking, is to give each person a coupon, because you don’t know whether Mr. Swartzman, with 800 shares and nothing better to do today than come to the meeting, wants to “lift and separate” or “stand up and be counted.”
AS to Larry’s question – selling scads of brassieres is the kind of PR action linked to a project with a start and stop date that wins awards from the associations.