Where the Fishermen Ain't -- Phil Gomes' Thoughts on PR, Social Media, and Blockchain Applications

"The Spin Crowd" and Falling in Love with Your Own Ideas

Trying to pull a higher-level message out of the fifth Spin Crowd episode was tough, I'll admit. Nevertheless, it's Simon "Sweater Vest" Huck (rather than Jonathan "haircut" Cheban) that provides the basis for discussion here. 

Executive-producer-slash-best-friend-slash-meal-ticket Kim Kardashian got CommandPRPublicity to work a New York charity event for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. On the flight from LAX to New York, Simon had the bright idea of having a baby gorilla walk the red carpet. ("PR gold" he called it.)

I haven't seen such a glaring example of tone-deafness since KISS came out with "I Was Made For Loving You."

Of course, doing this would have been a disaster, as confirmed by a call to the client and a meeting with Kardashian. Moving forward with the baby-gorilla idea would have only served to exploit the species that the Fund is looking to save.

But, dammit, a gorilla was going to walk that red carpet! So, the team finds a gorilla suit, conscripts the contractor working on Cheban's condo and... presto! Simon has his gorilla.

I would've settled for the invisible monkey.

Most of the time when you look at a PR campaign and wonder "What were they thinking?" you can very often attribute the problem to a single cause: a team fell in love with an idea early in the creative or planning process. In those situations, the team sees the communications objective as something that exists in service of "The Big Idea" rather than the other way around. 

This is intellectually dangerous. What's worse, the PR people involved start focusing on solving communications problems in ways that they find interesting instead of ways that are important to the client. Big difference.

I'd write more about this topic, but someone did it better and made it more interesting. Check out these ideas about brainstorming, discussed earlier on this blog, from Zack Urlocker. 

"The Spin Crowd" and Work/Life Balance

We knew this was coming: One of The Spin Crowd's spinners had to choose between her boyfriend and CommandPR in episode four.

So, first-year-associate Erika and her improbably named boyfriend Coco had a date weekend set, only to have a New York client event at the same time put our heroine in quite the little moral quandary. Long story short, she chooses work, her boyfriend understands, and they kiss too long at the airport after Erika gets there at the last possible minute, thus surprising only the most plot-impaired among E!'s audience.

Here's the story: Yes, PR is very unpredictable. Wildly so, especially if your expertise happens to be online community engagement and preparing companies for same. I'm often brought in on crisis- or issues-related assignments that have scuttled many a weekend, cancelled dinner plans, or resulted in many consecutive weeks of 60 hours or more. 

Brass tacks, you have to like your work and anticipate chaos. Sure, you can very quickly get too much of a good thing, but I often think that PR is for folks who are looking for a career rather than merely a "job". 

"The worst vice is ad-vice," Al Pacino said in The Devil's Advocate. (A movie that, incidentally, was truly about work-life balance.) Nevertheless, here are some thoughts on achieving some measure of equilibrium. I will admit to you that I'm not always the best at all, or even most, of the following items, but here they are anyway:

• Draw the line. Sure there are going to be crazy weeks, but try to take advantage of the not-so-crazy ones. Try to get periods of "norm" to balance out the extremes. No one ever died wishing they spent more time writing press releases. There will always be work to do, but finding the appropriate stopping points is important.
• Use your vacation days. I think it's silly how people believe themselves heroic if they leave a large balance of vacation days on the table when they expire. (The vacation days, that is, not the people.) It doesn't make you heroic; it makes you a sucker and a burnout candidate. (At one place where I worked, the employees took so few vacation days that the balance was actually a heavy liability on the company's financials, making the company less attractive for acquisition.) In a month, I'm going to be in Brazil with the in-laws for two weeks and shooting more FlipCam video for my cachaça documentary. Based on the fact that I work my ass off to such a degree that OSHA might require me to install handrails, here's my degree of guilt about it, rendered just for you in actual size: .
• Delegate if your org chart permits. Most people who work the insane hours do so because they feel that they have to do everything themselves. Give others a shot, especially if it involves challenging them with higher-level tasks. If you hire the right people, they'll welcome the opportunity. 
• Try your best to ensure you're working on clients and industries that you're interested in. It's the only way your work will feel less like work. As a colleague once told his group, "You either fight for the kind of business you like, or risk getting assigned to the ones you don't."

The biggest part for me? Well, I have a very understanding wife. 

Jonathan and Simon's handling of the situation was predictably lame, though, especially since they trotted out the old "...well if you want to be a schoolteacher" tripe. (Reportedly, this is a popular motivational comparison among publicity-seeking heads of PR firms.) This leads me to believe he doesn't quite know how hard schoolteachers work. 

Additional highlights from this episode:

• In the very beginning, Simon is riding with Jonathan insisting that they stop by the drugstore, where Simon picks up laxatives. When Jonathan inquired as to Simon's purchases, he tells his boss that the question was none of his business. Um, I'm sorry... If you just bought laxatives and you're riding in my car, then it most definitely is my "business."
• Frustrated with the delays in a ribbon-cutting ceremony that CommandPR is managing, Shannen Doherty complains that things need to speed up since he has a meeting to go to later. Your viewer was shocked that 1) Doherty actually had something else to do, and 2) didn't break anything in a fit of anger.
• Making fun of Jonathan panicking about a homeless guy's bivouac ruining his shot is just too easy. I'll stop now.

But, before I do, check out ValleyPR's fisking of this show:

So, enjoy The Spin Crowd as you might enjoy any other reality nonsense (hey, I like a good train wreck as much as the next guy). Just don’t tell me it’s public relations.

"The Spin Crowd" and Inter-Agency Cooperation

The third episode of E!'s flack-o-rama reality series brought up an important element of agency life, though one that is little-discussed in schools and corporate training programs: inter-agency cooperation.

In this installment, Jonathan and Simon take on billionaire Alki David's assignment to make his girlfriend (model and swimsuit designer Jennifer Stano) "famous." Our heroes are surprised when in walks the twin sisters (blondes, natch) that together form another consultancy, Duet PR. Alki's vision is that Jonathan and Simon would handle Jennifer's celebrity PR and the Duet girls will tackle the promotion of the swimsuits themselves. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

As the two firms immediately get into competitive name-dropping, jockeying for the client's favored-nation status, I was thinking that many viewers would find this to be an unusual situation in PR.

Is it? Find out more after the jump. 

"The Spin Crowd" and Pro Bono Work

It wasn't my intent to turn this blog into The Spin Crowd blog, but I recognize that I count fair number of students as readers. Some of these students might watch the show. 

The thing is, I've given enough talks at schools to know that popular culture greatly influences what young people think of PR, from movies like Thank You for Smoking and Phone Booth to shows like the one we're talking about here. Hopefully, I can help some students by putting some reality into this "reality show." I may not get to posting my thoughts as soon as the episode comes out, but hopefully they'll go up in just enough time so as not to be completely useless. 

In any event, it's an interesting springboard from which to discuss various realities about PR. 

So, the second episode of The Spin Crowd featured some fairly standard reality-show set pieces. We had Summer, the uppity nineteen-year-old asthmatic mysophobe, get into it with assembly-line Hollywood PR babe Lauren. In parallel, President Jonathan and VP Simon (also roommates!) went out for a walk to try and iron out their differences. (Yes. Videographed evidence of people walking in Los Angeles and in plain view. Try to suspend disbelief.) 

Most important, however, was the show's treatment of the concept of pro bono work, that is, professional services donated for a worthy cause. 

More after the jump.

E!'s "The Spin Crowd"

There are two principal issues that affect how PR is perceived in the popular imagination:

1. No one knows what you do for a living, often confusing your trade with advertising or simple publicity, and
2. People who think they know what PR is learned what they learned from shows like E!'s The Spin Crowd.

For those of you who haven't yet experienced the latest basic-cable-conveyed inconvenience to the poor electrons that zip through the wires leading up to your cable box, The Spin Crowd is like MTV's PoweR Girls, only without the excitement of having Lizzie "Terror of the Hamptons" Grubman at the helm. 

Instead, we have Jonathan Cheban, whom the Post referred to as "The Devil Makes Everyone Else Wear Prada." In the first episode, Cheban browbeats a first-year associate into getting her lips plumped with collagen injections, calling her "homely" to her face and encouraging her to "step it up". (This is Hollywood, after all.) Post-plumping, he enthused that he just couldn't wait to get her in front of the clients, only to flip out when the associate informs him that she wisely opted for a more temporary procedure. Cheban's VP, Simon Huck, exacted revenge on the associate's behalf by playing on his boss's vanity and talking him into undergoing a painful cryo-removal process for his love handles. 

Just another day at any PR firm, right? 

Later, Cheban dangles a raise in front of another associate if she would just get their client's celebrity spokesperson Mario Lopez to take his shirt off. (The spokesperson, incidentally, does not use the client's product, which is a tanning aid of some kind. Total regulator-bait, for sure.)

I'm once again reminded of Charles Ferguson's severe appraisal of PR professionals in his book High Stakes, No Prisoners:

The [PR] women are smart, hard as nails, ruthless, and often stunningly gorgeous. The rank and file is completely dominated by attractive young women, various combinations of dragon lady and bimbette, whose job is social lubrication — opening doors, getting interviews, pushing you through a crowd toward sometone they're just dying to have you meet.

...

The [PR] men generally reminded me of my reaction to Clinton advisors like Dick Morris or David Gergen — greasy, overweight, amoral, somehow pathetic even when extremely successful.

Granted, watching newly hatched Hollywood publicists compile media lists or editorial calendars probably doesn't make for the best TV, to say nothing of being hunched over a computer writing a three-year-long strategic plan. So, I recognize that a lot of the show's shooting and editing is done for dramatic effect.

But I can't help feeling that this does a great disservice to PR, which has only relatively recently started to be taken seriously as a strategic, corporate-management-level discipline. (Not that I expect many folks to care, especially the media outlets that will review and report about this show.) 

I entertain myself by imagining that this show does for the public's perception of PR what CSI did to jury pools across the United States. Just as real lawyers and criminologists will chuckle and scoff at the ten-minute DNA tests and the Beautiful Mind-like deduction powers of the protagonists, I think I might actually enjoy how far from reality this reality show gets.