🥱When the client wants boring interviews.
Big PR doesn't work the way you think it does: Context Collapse #179
Years ago, when I had just gotten laid off from my advertising job and was just getting started freelancing, I was working with one of my first clients.
My direct clients were a very large PR agency you have probably heard of if you work in media. They hired me to work with their client, an extremely large consumer technology company that you’ve heard of by simply existing as a human being in the world.
My brief1 was to conduct and write a series of articles based on interviews of executives at the company that were destined for both press packs being sent to journalists and to internal publications that were being sent to employees and customers. I had worked as a journalist forever and ever, and they wanted to hire an interviewer who had media training and knew how to ask questions while making VIPs feel at ease2. My client, the large PR agency, had one goal they clearly stated for me: Do what I can to make their clients’ executives interesting to journalists.
Most of the executives had routine interviews. They spoke competently to their expertise, but making them stand out was pretty hard. The big consumer tech company had very specific jargon and a very specific internal culture and getting my clients’ clients to speak in a voice that would scream to a bedraggled New York Times or Wall Street Journal reporter READ ME! was hard.
I mean, friends, sometimes you have interviewees who don’t know what their hobbies are or struggle to talk about the TV shows they like or the books they read. Sometimes you can’t fall back on the common universal topics of sports or pop culture. So you do what you can to build out a few gems.
But one of the executives was different.
They came from a working-class background and were open in the interview about feeling out of place at the prestigious private university they attended. They had opinions about industry competitors they freely shared that were respectful while still being interesting. They spoke freely about their company’s products and about how certain products were loss leaders. Honestly, this executive spoke in pull quotes3.
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If I were still working at FastCo, I would have loved to interview this executive. So I did what I would have done as a journalist and wrote a damned good article.
But I was new to corporate communications and subcontracting with very large PR agencies and the institutional cultures of very large consumer technology companies.
While my profile of the standout executive was a hit with the PR agency editor who I submitted it to, it landed with a giant thud with the agency’s clients and caused headaches for the PR agency’s account manager4.
I accidentally commited a major sin of PR life: I made things complicated for the client’s client.
The big consumer tech company’s PR liaison had several notes about the article I submitted to the PR agency they hired to do their communications work for them. In the article, the executive discussed competitors and praised what they did well and criticized what they didn’t. The executive was honest about one of their well-known products being a loss leader whose real purpose was to get consumers to spend money on expensive accessories. The executive spoke about feeling out of place as a working-class kid at a university the company has a very profitable business relationship with.
Whoops.
So some poor soul internally at the PR agency rewrote the interview with the executive. Everything was massaged into an inoffensive mixture of words that extolled the virtues of the big consumer tech company’s products and included a healthy dose of hip-during-the-late-2010s industry lingo. They basically wrote an interview that never happened.
My client’s client loved it.
You see, I didn’t realize that I wasn’t hired to get my client’s client media coverage. I was hired to make sure my client had a good working relationship with their client and that the account ran smoothly. Smoothly, in this big PR agency-working-with-their-very-large-client context, didn’t necessarily mean delivering results for the client. Results, here, meant the client feeling comfortable with the PR agency.
Whoops.
Anyway… here’s the thing: Had the big PR agency included a lightly edited version of the original interview, they almost certainly would have been able to get their executive on TV as a talking head or get a feature in a newspaper/magazine or two. But that would have caused so many internal challenges for the PR agency’s client (Why is this executive being interviewed and not another? Why are they talking about our product that failed and our customers seemingly forgot about?) that it would not have been beneficial, in purely mercenary corporate politics terms, for anyone at my client’s client.
It turns out that getting press coverage for my client’s client, in this particular case and this particular circumstance, would have been beneficial neither for my client or for their client.
(Shrug)
And, friends… that is how the sausage is made.
"Brief” = industry term for an assignment/outline of a deliverable. In your typical agency situation, the brief is developed after meeting with the client for the goals of making a project plan that won’t go kablooie when actually working on the project. Your goal is to do inside of your control (lots of things happen outside of your control, as happens in this world) to make sure it doesn’t go kablooie.
This really wasn’t the reason I was hired; I was new to consulting and thought of myself too highly. The main reason I was probably hired wasn’t for my writing and interviewing skills (though that helped); it’s because my clients telling their clients they hired a former journalist for a bunch of well-known publications looked much more prestigious for them then having an internal employee conduct the interview. So the industry goes.
"Pull quotes” = quotes that are pulled from the text of an article and put in a separate box or column on the screen/page. You know them when you see them.
Account managers at advertising/PR/marketing/comms agencies, in my opinion, have one of the most thankless jobs in the industry. Sometimes it’s great, other times you’re negotiating peace treaties 60 hours a week.
This was so frustrating to read about! I hate that so much money is spent on blowing smoke.
I have been there. Sometimes, in these big, multinational conglomerates, it feels like the work is akin to politics - about certain people keeping their fiefs in line rather than moving the business forward. So strange how that happens.