Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Repeat as necessary... and  it's always necessary.

Just moments after President Donald Trump's surreal, whirlwind press conference came to a close Thursday, the Trump campaign sent out a very strange email.

 

The email posits that the media is an enemy that must be deflected, inviting recipients to take a survey about how much they hate CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and all mainstream media. "Instead, you — the American people — are our last line of defense against the media’s hit jobs."

 

But there's more. As if to drive the point home with the hammer of Thor, the 25 questions are branded "the Mainstream Media Accountability Survey."...

When Donald Trump gathered the press at Trump Tower 20 months ago to announce his unlikely candidacy for president, he reportedly paid actors to fill the marble lobby and cheer.

Not much — and everything — has changed since.

On Wednesday morning, when the president-elect once again faced hundreds of reporters from around the globe gathered in his lobby -- this time for his first press conference in seven months — Trump filled the room with paid staffers who clapped and cheered as he blasted members of the media as purveyors of “fake news.”

It was Trump’s method of battling back an extraordinary report that U.S. intelligence officials have presented both Trump and President Barack Obama with unverified allegations that Russia has compromising information about the incoming 45th president, including about a reported salacious encounter in a Moscow hotel room....

The TV media no longer conceal their disdain for Donald Trump’s ludicrous spinners. Jake Tapper raps Rudy Giuliani for defending Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns and chides Paul Manafort: “These things, just because you say them, they’re not true!” CNN’s Brianna Keilar takes Kellyanne Conway to task for insisting Trump did not mean to say he’d lock up Hillary Clinton. (“I’m talking about what your candidate is saying, which is more important than what you are saying about this. He is saying she has to go to jail. He is not talking about she has to stand and be judged. He is saying she has to go to jail.”) And practically everyone treats the hapless Jason Miller as a liar, a fool or both.

Bias? No, these TV journalists can no longer bear to pretend Trump’s people are saying anything resembling the truth and are annoyed they have to put them on air essentially to lie to the American people....

It was late morning on Friday, October 16, when Elizabeth Holmes realized that she had no other choice. She finally had to address her employees at Theranos, the blood-testing start-up that she had founded as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, which was now valued at some $9 billion. Two days earlier, a damning report published in The Wall Street Journal had alleged that the company was, in effect, a sham—that its vaunted core technology was actually faulty and that Theranos administered almost all of its blood tests using competitors’ equipment.

The article created tremors throughout Silicon Valley, where Holmes, the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, had become a near universally praised figure. Curiosity about the veracity of the Journal story was also bubbling throughout the company’s mustard-and-green Palo Alto headquarters, which was nearing the end of a $6.7 million renovation. Everyone at Theranos, from its scientists to its marketers, wondered what to make of it all....

During my eight years in the Obama administration, there was an offhand comment uttered from time to time in the hallway after something went off the rails, "It's a communications problem."

 

The reality is that is the case sometimes, but most of the time the problem is much larger.

 

Some of the major fumbles of the first few weeks of the Trump administration have been due to the communications team: whether it was the sloppy rollout of the executive order on immigration or the series of television interviews with senior officials who were either unprepared, out of the loop or pompous enough to think they could wing it with a network anchor.

 

But not all the problems are communications issues....

Congratulations, US media! You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a deep disdain for your trade.

Here are some tips from Russia.Vladimir Putin’s annual pressers are supposed to be the media event of the year. They are normally held in late December, around Western Christmas time (we Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas two weeks later and it’s not a big deal, unlike New Year’s Eve). Which probably explains why Putin’s pressers don’t get much coverage outside of Russia, except in a relatively narrow niche of Russia-watchers. Putin’s pressers are televised live across all Russian TV channels, attended by all kinds of media — federal news agencies, small local publications and foreign reporters based in Moscow — and are supposed to overshadow every other event in Russia or abroad.

These things are carefully choreographed, typically last no less than four hours, and Putin always comes off as an omniscient and benevolent leader tending to a flock of unruly but adoring children. Given that Putin is probably a role model for Trump, it’s no surprise that he’s apparently taking a page from Putin’s playbook.

I have some observations to share with my American colleagues. You’re in this for at least another four years, and you’ll be dealing with things Russian journalists have endured for almost two decades now. I’m talking about Putin here, but see if you can apply any of the below to your own leader....

Does anyone really believe that story?” Donald Trump said, at his first press conference in more than five months. He was referring to a dossier that BuzzFeed had published the night before, which contained unproved allegations of material that the Russians had supposedly gathered to blackmail Trump. The press conference might not have gone half as well for Trump if that story hadn’t been out. Trump looked angry, in a way that, as anger sometimes does, left him more rhetorically focussed. The rambling defensiveness that criticisms often provoke in him was not so visible. His grandiosity, his resentments, and, at moments, his crudity were all on full display, but not in a way that is likely to alienate his supporters.

 

The first question asked of Trump was whether he had been briefed by American intelligence about the alleged Russian efforts to compromise him, as CNN had reported. He said that he couldn’t talk about classified intelligence, but he did have something to say about what had been publicly reported. “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” he said. “And it was gotten by opponents of ours, as you know, because you reported it and so did many of the other people. It was a group of opponents that got together—sick people—and they put that crap together.”...

We've seen a lot of intentionally silly press releases over the years. But this one, sent out by Colle+McVoy for client Cub Cadet, is not kidding around.

The Minneapolis agency recently helped the industrial brand launch a new line of Cub Cadet PRO Z commercial riding mowers. These are seriously badass machines. They have the only Triple 7-gauge steel deck on the market—the thickest, strongest steel deck in the industry. Landscapers apparently love the stuff, as it lets them clear rugged ground without worrying about destroying the mower.

So, what kind of press release does such a Terminator-style mower deserve? One that's also made out of Triple 7-gauge steel, of course.

You can see more photos of the thing below, which was sent to consumer and trade media. It weighs 14 pounds, 13 ounces, the agency tells us. It's the standard 8.5-by-11 inches, but its 0.625-inch thickness is impressive. 

Oh, and this "press release on steroids" was also shipped in a custom crate with a crowbar. Because you can always use an extra crowbar....

Political press conferences are pointless, and mostly about media showboating.

This isn’t something reporters are supposed to admit. We’d all like more chances to see a potential presidential candidate on the hot seat. But these days, at these things, the heat isn’t on. I cringe at press conferences more than I learn from them, because they usually degenerate into shout-fests based on questions that are rarely designed to elicit any new information, but rather a response to the other party’s latest talking point.

“Reporters ask questions not to get information, but to get a reaction,” Susan Milligan wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review last year. “And even with that strategy, they rarely succeed.”

With social media, candidates don’t need to rely on reporters to convey their views. That in turn means that stories that break news are rarely produced by press conference. So why the ongoing obsession with press conferences? Could it have something to do with a need to justify the money being spent by mainstream news organizations to keep reporters on the campaign trail, versus the exclusive content they take away from that investment?...

Donald Trump's national spokeswoman Katrina Pierson explains why she wore a necklace made of bullets on live television.