Cool vs. Old School: Public Relations Faces the Information Age

by Dustin Beilke

Judging by the 1999 annual conference of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), non-profit public interest groups can look forward to some good news and some bad news in the bold new cyber future.

Titled "Surfing the Information Tidal Wave,"the conference was held October 24-26 at the Hilton Hotel in Anaheim, California. Seminars and workshops bore titles such as "Mergers and Acquisitions: Public Relations' Critical Role," and "Counteracting Anti-Corporate Online Activism."

As the latter title indicates, the bad news is that corporate America is ramping up its PR efforts to undermine grassroots activists. The good news is that the best mouths in the public relations industry don't seem to know what they're talking about.

Take, for example, the two keynote speakers at the conference, Gary Hamel and Al Ries.

Hamel, a professor with ties to the London Business School and Harvard Business School, provided the opening night keynote. In an address littered with buzzwords and trendy internet references, he talked about the information age as "the end of bullshit," "the end of progress," "an antidote to denial," and "the enemy of orthodoxy." Echoing a mantra that would be repeated throughout the three-day conference, Hamel said it is essential for public relations and marketing professionals to be ahead of the e-world curve.

In these rapidly changing times, Hamel said, "incumbency is a disadvantage. Never has incumbency been worth less." In other words, if you invent something and make it profitable, all you are really doing is setting yourself up for a fall when the next Monster.com comes along and makes an even bigger killing at your expense.

Throwing around words like "radical" and "revolutionary," Hamel urged his audience to think creatively and stay ahead of the competition. Indeed, he told the several hundred white, middle-class and overwhelmingly corporate PR practitioners who assembled to hear him speak that "You have to be a novelty addict. Go cool hunting . . . search for underappreciated trends . . . find transcendent themes . . . follow the chain of consequences . . . look for history's recurring patterns."

Fair enough. But 24 hours later Al Ries and his daughter Laura Ries had a different message. They specialize in "brand building," and the secret words to remember about building a successful brand, according to Al Ries, are: "You don't have to be good, you just have to be first." You sell something by "getting inside the mind" with publicity, Ries said, not advertising. "Publicity provides the credentials that create the environment for advertising," Ries said to great applause. "The way you get into the mind today is not by having a better product or service, it is by being first," he said to knowing nods.

The way the Rieses see it, firms achieve success when their names become synonymous with products people decide they want or need. Mercedes built its brand by being a company known for having really good, really expensive, luxury cars. The company is doing itself a disservice these days, Ries says, by dabbling in the production of less luxurious cars that more people can afford. "They are diluting their brand," he said.

But doesn't being first make one the incumbent? And hadn't Hamel previously said that being first is a disadvantage? This apparent contradiction did not seem to bother any of the well-dressed conference attendees.

Rutting Out the Grassroots

As for the provocatively titled workshops, they too delivered less malevolence than PR Watch readers might have expected. I was not the only conferee who seemed a little disappointed when the moderators urged us all to play nice.

The workshop with the most lurid title was "Corporate Imperialism: Public Relations' Global Challenge," led by John F. Budd of the Omega Group. The workshop started off with Budd asking, "Is the ugly American back, and what can we do about it?"

Despite the promise of its name and Budd's tantalizing opening question, the workshop failed to deliver and the attendees could be counted on both hands by the time it ended. Budd's message was that American corporations are now much more visible abroad than the United States government or military. With this presence comes a greater responsibility for companies to at least respect and consider other cultures and nation states. As examples of Ugly American activity, Budd mentioned Coca-Cola's tendency to buy up and shut down local soft drink companies all over the world, and McDonald's overly defensive reaction to French farmers, but he did not spend much time analyzing those two fascinating cases. Instead he talked about his successful personal experiences working productively with non-American flacks and businessmen, to the snores and blank stares of the clearly unenthralled.

The workshop on mergers and acquisitions contained benign lip service about putting employees' feelings first, though workshop facilitator Ian Campbell admitted, "your shareholders are your primary audience." Obviously employees aren't, since mergers and acquisitions frequently involve worker layoffs.

Another speaker at the same workship, Sherry Hemingway, described her experience managing PR for the 1998 Northwestern Mutual Life/Frank Russell Company merger. The experience, she said, taught her a valuable lesson about the docility of prestigious news organizations like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. "What I found so amusing was that they would very willingly stand in queues and stick to very rigorous time schedules, and they were absolutely used to it," Hemingway said. "I was pleased with the media treatment."

The workshop on "Counteracting Anti-Corporate Online Activism" was led by moderators James Alexander of eWatch and James Lukaszewski of The Lukaszewski Group. They stressed the importance of "active listening," of allowing opponents their right to speak, of the difficulty of pursuing intellectual property cases against online sites. They noted in passing that a lot of activist sites have a professional look to them and could teach some corporations a thing or two about maintaining an attractive web site.

The real revelation at that workshop came when Alexander and Lukaszewski asked if audience members had any questions. In rapid succession, the attendees asked:

• Is there any way of tracking activists online?
• Should you identify yourself honestly when interacting with activists, or should you pretend to be someone else?
• What about using third-voice services to go after enemy sites and objectionable messages?

Alexander and Lukaszewski claimed to answer these questions with their homilies to honesty and straight shooting, but I sensed in the audience a disappointment about the lack of red meat. PR pros are not accustomed to fighting out in the open or on a level playing field, and they don't want to start now.

For the PR pros assembled at the conference, the growth of the internet seemed to evoke a greater sense of fear than opportunity, even though the corporations they represent already own most of the internet and are acquiring a greater proportion of it every day.