Posts Tagged ‘oil’

The Mel Gibson/Oksana Grigorieva row that has been consuming America whole for the last few weeks has taken a new turn, according to the TMZ website, with Oksana’s publicist Steve Jaffe leaving for pastures somewhat less argumentative.

The big question racing round the media and the net is: did Jaffe walk or was he pushed? But in an age when the big news organizations are repositioning themselves as verifiers of the news, given the predominance of the blogosphere and the Twitterati as breakers of the news, it’s never going to be as cut and dried as that.

According to RadarOnline, and quoted in the Mail, Jaffe has stated: “The case was so all encompassing in terms of my time and the strict orders by the judge. I have other clients in serious crises who require my time.” Read the rest of this entry »

All brands in this new age require a long-term strategic overview of every potential threat. The corporate vicissitudes being thrown up by the 21st century means that communication and PR skills must be, of necessity, embedded in the captains of industry. After all they are the brand custodians. But looking at BP, and Tony Hayward in particular, that lesson has clearly not yet been learned.

Problems can no longer be brushed under the carpet – corporations need to be fearing the worst and preparing to deal with it in public. The brand narrative of the big corporations needs to be played out transparently and in public.

BP in particular has neglected to consider how devastating a corporate crisis – especially one so mismanaged from the top – can be in this age of instant opinion, globalised rolling news, social media and febrile politics. They were still locked into a comms crisis planning scenario built in the 1990s in the wake of the Brent Spar disaster when the spill in the Gulf of Mexico occurred. They had not planned any new PR approaches at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Scathing and probing headlines are continuing to castrate and castigate BP’s hapless crisis PR endeavours, further to my blog of the other day. Disapproving chatter clutters the web and denunciatory journalists, bloggers and commentators continue to feed on the corporate leviathan’s swift downward trajectory.

The latest casualty in the ongoing debate about the oil spill fiasco is the global PR financial shop Brunswick. Alan Parker’s stately independent whale has made a habit of maintaining the lowest of profiles. Accomplished, circumspect and effective, Brunswick are respected in the financial orbit for their tactful and discreet diplomacy. The company have successfully produced a number of Richelieu figures, many of whom have gone on to the most powerful corporate multinationals.

The diabolical fix their client is in has started to spatter even their enviable brand reputation with the sticky, oily residue of failure. Brunswick now face a very public, very uncomfortable test. There was a time when the solemn and sober Alan Parker would, like Zelig, be visible at every corporate disaster; an undertaker with a reassuring demeanour. But no more. Crisis comms have not been one of Brunswick’s most effective tools of late. Read the rest of this entry »

As BP’s reputation slips further down the plughole, its PR strategy is beginning to look like an envelope without an address on it. The comms department believe big emotions come from big statistics. Lazy damage limitation tactics are fuelling the storm – they should be pouring oil on troubled waters metaphorically rather than allowing it to happen all too literally and panicking about how to respond.

And that’s the essence of it; the battalions of BP’s PR flaks are doomed because of the failure to fix Ground Zero. There’s a very thin line between success and failure in PR. For every day that the toxic spew gushes from the wound in the pipeline, the PR effort’s sheer futility becomes ever more obvious. If the engineers could only plug the leak, we would be viewing a completely different outcome. Read the rest of this entry »

The confidence and utter belief in the State of Israel the Israeli government have displayed, as they justify their violent attack on the ships attempting to bring aid to Gaza, is breathtaking. Both factions in any war tend towards insanity of some sort, but Israel organise theirs with terrifying rigour.

They have an enormous number of silent supporters waging their PR war for them, and some not-so-silent ones. Take the NeoCon pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz, for example. After the Gulf War, he advised American Jewish leaders to incorporate mention of Iraq into every mention made of Israel because “Saddam will remain a powerful symbol of terror to Americans for a long time to come. A pro-Israeli expression of solidarity with the American people in their successful effort to remove Saddam will be appreciated.”

Israel has a global network of people helping them ride any PR storm. There is always a PR storm and they always seem to ride it. After Gaza residents, in the wake of the Haiti disaster, started a well-documented campaign to send money to Haiti because they were ‘in the same state’, a number of bloggers reporting this were attacked and, in some cases, silenced. Read the rest of this entry »

BP’s PR machine has been in overdrive of late; their latest effort at saying “look how hard we’re working to sort the oil spill out” is a live roving webcam monitoring the clean-up effort. I’ve tried to go on it but it’s never operational – either broken or offline. Whether that’s by overload of people looking or by design remains to be seen.

I wonder what Barnum would have done? Yesterday, I went to see an exhibition on him for the 200th anniversary of his birth in Sheffield at the National Circus and Fairground archive at the University of Sheffield, run by Vanessa Toumin. It was brought home to me once again that Barnum never lost an opportunity to network with the famous people of his day, such as Mark Twain, and make sure that he and his ideas were deeply embedded in the 19th century conversation. Read the rest of this entry »