Posts Tagged ‘public relations’
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”*…
In his invaluable newsletter, Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick unpacks the full– and forlorn— story of the online travails of Kate Middleton (AKA Catherine, the Princess of Wales) and considers its implications…
… As Charlie Warzel wrote, “It was always going to end this way. The truth about Kate Middleton’s absence is far less funny, whimsical, or salacious than the endless memes and conspiracy theories suggested.” But this also wasn’t a simple case of the unruly masses being Bad Online.
Yes, the #WhereIsKate hashtag was initially spread by the Sussex Squad, a royal fandom subculture that hates Prince William and believes Kate is, at best, sort of racist. And a lot of the early gossip was motivated by an impulse to give Kate a taste of what Meghan Markle is still experiencing at the hands of the UK media. But if you’re looking for someone to blame all of this on, it’s clearly Kate’s press team and, by extension, everyone in her life that supposedly cares about her. There were countless moments where her press team could have squashed all this, but they didn’t. Instead, they let a woman who had just discovered she has cancer become a global laughing stock and, at one point, made her apologize for it! Absolute sicko shit.
But this is also just how our various institutions work — or more accurately do not work — now. Over the last 25 years we have slowly uploaded every part of our lives to a system of platforms run by algorithms that make money off our worst impulses. Well, the ones brands are comfortable advertising around. And for years we have wondered what the world might look like when we crossed the threshold into a fully online world. Well, we did. We crossed it. This is what it looks like. And it is already too vast and complicated and all-encompassing to blame any one individual for how it functions. If we want something new, we’d have to smash the whole thing and I don’t think that’s going to happen. So let’s hope PR people, at the very least, can figure out how to deal with it going forward…
Those of us in post-colonial North America, might ponder the implications of this sad tale for matters closer to home– public health, meme stocks, and perhaps especially our looming elections…
The saga of #WhereIsKate: “How we got here,” from @broderick.
* Eleanor Roosevelt
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As we lean back and think, we might recall that it was on this date in 1881 that a celebrated hoaxster took on partners: “P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus: The Greatest Show on Earth” joined forces with James Bailey and James Hutchinson. By 1887, the re-branded circus went by the name “The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.”
“Not all private equity people are evil. Only some.”*…
But as Rogé Karma explains, that could be enough to cause big trouble, as a large and growing portion of our economy is disappearing behind a veil…
The publicly-traded company is disappearing. In 1996, about 8,000 firms were listed in the U.S. stock market. Since then, the national economy has grown by nearly $20 trillion. The population has increased by 70 million people. And yet, today, the number of American public companies stands at fewer than 4,000. How can that be?
One answer is that the private-equity industry is devouring them. When a private-equity fund buys a publicly traded company, it takes the company private—hence the name. (If the company has not yet gone public, the acquisition keeps that from happening.) This gives the fund total control, which in theory allows it to find ways to boost profits so that it can sell the company for a big payday a few years later. In practice, going private can have more troubling consequences. The thing about public companies is that they’re, well, public. By law, they have to disclose information about their finances, operations, business risks, and legal liabilities. Taking a company private exempts it from those requirements.
That may not have been such a big deal when private equity was a niche industry. Today, however, it’s anything but. In 2000, private-equity firms managed about 4 percent of total U.S. corporate equity. By 2021, that number was closer to 20 percent. In other words, private equity has been growing nearly five times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole.
Elisabeth de Fontenay, a law professor at Duke University who studies corporate finance, told me that if current trends continue, “we could end up with a completely opaque economy.”
This should alarm you even if you’ve never bought a stock in your life. One-fifth of the market has been made effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators. Information as basic as who actually owns a company, how it makes its money, or whether it is profitable is “disappearing indefinitely into private equity darkness,” as the Harvard Law professor John Coates writes in his book The Problem of Twelve. This is not a recipe for corporate responsibility or economic stability. A private economy is one in which companies can more easily get away with wrongdoing and an economic crisis can take everyone by surprise. And to a startling degree, a private economy is what we already have.
America learned the hard way what happens when corporations operate in the dark. Before the Great Depression, the whole U.S. economy functioned sort of like the crypto market in 2021. Companies could raise however much money they wanted from whomever they wanted. They could claim almost anything about their finances or business model. Investors often had no good way of knowing whether they were being defrauded, let alone whether to expect a good return.
Then came the worst economic crisis in U.S. history…
Read on for a bracing account of: “The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy,” (gift article) in @TheAtlantic.
* Paul Krugman
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As we clean our glasses, we might spare a thought for Ivy Lee; he died on this date in 1934. A publicity expert and a founder of modern public relations, he was among the first to persuade business clients– foremost among them, the Rockefeller family– to woo public opinion. Ultimately he advised rail, steel, automobile, tobacco, meat packing, and rubber interests, as well as public utilities, banks, and even foreign governments.
Lee pioneered the use of internal magazines to maintain employee morale, as well as management newsletters, stockholder reports, and news releases to the media. And he did a great deal of pro bono work, which he knew was important to his own public image; during World War I, he became the publicity director for the American Red Cross.
“There are two kinds of pedestrians- the quick and the dead”*…
The story of one of the greatest public opinion campaign “victories” in American history…
In the 1920s, the auto industry chased people off the streets of America — by waging a brilliant psychological campaign. They convinced the public that if you got run over by a car, it was your fault. Pedestrians were to blame. People didn’t belong in the streets; cars did.
It’s one of the most remarkable (and successful) projects to shift public opinion I’ve ever read about. Indeed, the car companies managed to effect a 180-degree turnaround. That’s because before the car came along, the public held precisely the opposite view: People belonged in the streets, and automobiles were interlopers…
In the 1920s, the public hated cars. So the auto industry fought back — with language: “The Invention of ‘Jaywalking‘,” from Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99).
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As we watch our steps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1923, at the outset of the campaign to push pedestrians off of streets, that the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company (supplier of tires for Ford’s Model T, and the largest tires company in the U.S.) introduced the first production “balloon tire.” Unlike earlier solid rubber or simple pneumatic tires, the balloon tire fitted an inflatable inner tube inside a rugged outer tire, providing both better handling and a smoother ride. Firestone also bragged of greater longevity and more economical driving, though those benefits never clearly emerged. But what, of course, Firestone’s innovation did usher in was the era of the flat tire.
“The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret”*…
Edward Bernays, second right, with other delegates of the Committee on Public Information to the Paris Peace Talks, 1917
Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, began his professional life as a press agent. But with the advent of World War I, he found his true calling when he served on the Committee on Public Information, the war-time propaganda office, in the Wilson administration. After the armistice, he took his experience in shaping public opinion, as guided by his uncle’s emerging theories, into the private sector, helping to establish “public relations” (and later modern advertising) as professions…
Bernays’ methods… opened a new chapter in public relations, a profession that he and others pioneered in the 1920s. Bernays was not the first man in the field. There were a handful of others before and beside him, notably his great rival Ivy Lee. Bernays, however, may have had the greatest impact. He bolstered the new profession with theory, gave it a philosophical framework and processed the findings of the blossoming psychological disciplines by coming up with new methods of manipulating the public. Although practically invisible to the outside world, Bernays became an influential architect of modern mass persuasion techniques, which continue to inspire the PR industry. Harold Burson, CEO of Burson-Marsteller, one of the world’s largest PR enterprises, was quoted in the 1990s as saying: ‘We’re still singing off the hymn book that Bernays gave us.’
Bernays was related to Sigmund Freud on two sides: Freud’s sister Anna was Bernays’ mother and his father Ely, a grain merchant, was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha. Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891 and emigrated to the US with his parents a year later. He was to die on March 9th, 1995 at the age of 103 in Massachusetts. Another member of the Freud family followed in his footsteps: Matthew Freud, who is considered one of Britain’s most successful PR men.
Influenced by his famous uncle, with whom he corresponded regularly, Bernays got to understand the power of the unconscious, of universal longings, of emotions and instinct. He exploited them for whatever he had to sell: artificial flowers, racehorses, gramophones, politicians, ideologies. No matter what it was, he often worked according to a certain dramaturgy, which his biographer Larry Tye described thus: ‘He generated events, the events generated news, and the news generated a demand for whatever he happened to be selling.’ In Bernays’ eyes, generating events was one of if not the most important task of a PR adviser. He himself labelled it as the ‘creation of circumstances’, the staging of apparently spontaneous events to influence people’s behaviour, according to the wishes of the clients. This was genuinely innovative, because until then business advertising was relatively straightforward: extolling the product and its functional advantages. Bernays, by contrast, aimed at the unconscious and trusted in the indirect method. ‘It’s like shooting billiards’, he once pointed out, ‘where you bounce the ball off cushions, as opposed to pool, where you aim directly for the pockets.’…
More on the uncanny ability to mould public desire that made Edward Bernays one of the 20th century’s most influential – yet invisible – characters, the architect of modern mass manipulation: “The Original Influencer.”
And for more, both on Bernays and on the world that he did so much to create, see Adam Curtis’ award-winning documentary Century of Self. It’s available in four hour-long “chapters” or here, in its entirety. Either way, it’s eminently worthy of a watch:
* Salvador Dali
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As we muse on our motives, we might spare a thought for a man who had absolutely no time for lies of any sort, Immanuel Kant; he died on this date in 1804. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790). But he made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy as well; for example: Kant’s argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work. And his description of the Milky Way as a lens-shaped collection of stars that represented only one of many “island universes,” was later shown to be accurate by Herschel.
There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
– Chapter 11, Metaphysics of Morals
The Culture of Commerce, Advertising and Marketing Edition…
In an infographic!
click the image above, or here, to enlarge
More of creator George Ellis’ work on his website, The George Report. [TotH to Mediabistro]
As we insist that the bartender reach for the top shelf, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that the Beatles’ stranglehold on the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 was broken. From the leap of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to #1 in early February, the Fab Four held the pinnacle for three and a half solid months– longer than any popular artist before or since. Over the course of those months, the they scored three consecutive #1 singles (also a record); held all five spots in the top five in early April (another record); and had a total of 14 songs in the Hot 100 in mid-April (yet another record). But on this date in 1964, they were pushed off the peak by an unlikely challenger: 63-year-old Louis Armstrong and “Hello, Dolly!”
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