| CHAPTER 1 |

MOVING PEOPLE, SHIFTING MINDS

The Power of Public Relations

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” —George Bernard Shaw

I was up early, as usual. The night before, I’d put the finishing touches on a client’s New York announcement of a foreign Initial Public Offering (IPO). It had been a monumental affair. The weeks leading up to this day were packed with creating the right messages, drafting and redrafting marketing materials, media training, synthesizing financials into plain English, writing press releases, and scheduling press interviews. For the past two nights, the CEO and I had worked well past midnight, and now everything was in place for the IPO announcement. We were confident it was going to be a great day.

My BlackBerry started buzzing just past 6 a.m. This isn’t unusual; early morning (or late night) calls from staff or clients are par for the course. PR doesn’t end at 5 p.m. and begin at 9 a.m. the next day. This anxious call was no different than dozens of others I’d received over the years.

“Ronn, did you read the paper yet?”

“No.”

“Well, read it now and call me back. Now. Now.”

There it was, in bold print, a major story about a labor-related lawsuit filed against another client, one that had clearly been planted by someone with an agenda against his company. No wonder he was calling at dawn. If it wasn’t handled properly, the lawsuit and accompanying media would have a very negative effect on his business. Okay. I had three hours until my 9 a.m. appointment at a top-tier newspaper’s office with the IPO client for a Q&A followed by daylong, back-to-back national and international media interviews. He was ready—we had worked through the many potential questions, and his answers were as close to flawless as they were going to get.

After a quick conference call with the crisis client’s corporate attorneys, I began drafting a press release for him on the way to the IPO Q&A trading edits and comments with the client and his attorneys on my BlackBerry. When I picked up my IPO client at his hotel, he was in a cheery mood because the overseas markets had opened with a healthy uptick. Good. I felt comfortable telling him that I had a crisis brewing without revealing any details. Still in the car, I continued the back-and-forth with the crisis client’s attorney while my IPO client looked over his notes. Finally, the attorney signed off on the statement with a few final edits, and my client let me fly with what I had. I hit the “send” button on my BlackBerry, and our position on the matter was out the door and on its way to reporters.

Waiting for the first interview of the day for the IPO client, I took a call from a senior staff member who had tried to reach me three times in 15 minutes. That must be some sort of record, so I knew it had to be important. I couldn’t ignore the call anymore.

“Ronn, do you want to spend time today with Muhammad Ali? He’s in town.”

At the time we were representing Ali’s daughter Rasheda. She was in New York to promote her children’s book on Parkinson’s disease. Rasheda wanted to surprise her dad with something different—no easy task for a man who’s done it all, but we pulled it off. One of my employees at the time was friendly with the cast of The Sopranos. Ali was a fan of the show, so we arranged for him to visit the set while they were shooting an episode—but with a twist. At a point when Michael Imperioli, who played Tony Soprano’s nephew, Christopher, was supposed to walk on for a dramatic scene to meet the Mafia Boss, Tony Soprano, Ali walked on instead. With cameras rolling, actor James Gandolfini erupted in laughter and awe. He was surprised, to say the least. The entire cast gave Ali two standing ovations.

And me? I made it just in time to see the reaction to Ali’s walk-on, after completing the daylong IPO media tour and inviting the exhausted CEO to join me on the set (he declined). A framed picture of Muhammad Ali and me still frantically working my Blackberry in a Lincoln Town Car sits in my office as a reminder of the day. As for my other client’s crisis? No longer negative by day’s end; it was not going to be a major story in the next day’s media. With our press release and a few strategically placed blog items stating our position, we were able to spin the story to our advantage. After seeing our statements, the other side’s lawyers decided mediation was necessary. They wouldn’t debate the issue further in the media. The IPO media tour? The interviews went amazingly well, without any hitches, the IPO CEO remains a friend. It’s a running joke between us that he turned down the offer to spend the afternoon on the set of The Sopranos with Muhammad Ali to take a few investor calls.

Another day in the life of running a PR agency.

OPPORTUNITIES ARE THERE FOR THE TAKING

I consider myself one lucky guy. Crazy days like the one I just described make me think about the humble beginnings of my PR firm. Flash back to January 2003, when I had just gotten 5W Public Relations (5WPR) off the ground. At that time, you would have found me sitting by myself in a tiny office in a building in Times Square. My office was accessible only by taking an elevator as high as it would go, walking up two flights of stairs and then across the roof to get to what was basically a shack on top of the building. As you can imagine, I chose to have business meetings at a local hotel or nearby coffee shop. My new one-man firm was called 5WPR, representing the five Ws of journalism—who, what, when, where, and why. Today 5WPR has nearly 100 employees, but back then it was just a desk, a computer, a cell phone, and me.

We bring something new to a tired industry that hasn’t always kept up with the realities of an environment where people type nonstop on PDAs, news sources number in the millions, and Google is the world’s largest media source. News—bad and good—now goes viral immediately, and is spread at the speed of light. We’ve served thousands of clients since opening 5WPR’s doors. The agency is one of the 25 largest PR firms in the United States and was named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing American companies. We are paid to do a job and take our obligations to clients very seriously. 5WPR’s success has been swift because of my personal approach and dedication to PR, as well as that of my exceptional staff, who are well trained, professional, driven, and results-oriented, whether they are working with a start-up or a multinational corporation. Our hands-on, dogged approach works.

We’ve run successful campaigns for companies like Whole Foods Market, Cantor Fitzgerald, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Barnes & Noble Online, Anheuser-Busch, Evian Natural Spring Water, and Bad Boy Worldwide Entertainment Group; two of the Forbes 400 wealthiest people; celebrities including Pamela Anderson, Snoop Dogg, and Ice Cube; political entities such as the president of Serbia, Ukrainian political candidates, Morocco’s Ministry of Tourism, and the state of Israel; and of course, small and regional businesses, as well as private individuals. We have helped companies define themselves and their brands, stay out of the press or make the front page, grow a business, solve critical problems, improve results on the most powerful search engine in the world (Google), and become thought leaders in their industries.

  We have helped companies define themselves and their brands, stay out of the press or get on page one, grow a business, solve critical problems, improve results on the most powerful search engine in the world (Google), and become thought leaders in their industries.

PR can be an incredible change-making business—and it is enjoying a well-deserved growth stage. Companies and people are beginning to recognize that the old way of building consumer or public equity is changing. IBIS World, a media research firm, says PR spending in 2010 was $9.73 billion and forecasts it will increase to $12.82 billion by 2015. The growth is in part due to PR’s ability to participate in a more nimble and flexible way with the new methods by which people consume media, including social media. That sounds promising until you compare it with ad spending, which even after annual declines in recent years is about $210.5 billion a year in the U.S. The PR business is a tiny piece of the pie compared to advertising; there’s no reason why it can’t continue to grow and take advantage of its agility in the marketplace.

Unfortunately, a lot of what passes for public relations is lacking because it’s ineffective, irrelevant, and intangible. Negative (or alternatively, overly romanticized) public perception of the industry is fueled by pop culture portrayals that are completely unrepresentative of what real PR work entails. Consider, for example, the character Samantha in Sex and the City. No remotely successful PR pro spends half the day shopping and eating lunch and the other half seducing the UPS deliveryman. PR is far from a glamorous profession (though it can entail plenty of drama). Various reality TV shows have also purported to show how the business works, and they’ve been way off base. It’s among the reasons why I have turned down two reality show offers through the years. All press is most certainly not good press.

Disappointing results from badly conceived or lackluster PR campaigns have also made potentially great clients gun-shy about hiring PR firms. There’s a concern that PR will be a money-suck with little or no return on investment. The blame for these difficulties can be placed firmly at the feet of an industry that hasn’t always kept up with changes in the world and hasn’t taken seriously its role as an integral part of a business’s success, including business and brand strategies.

One of the aims of For Immediate Release is to reveal the power that modern PR has to help brands innovate, market, and message well. My goal is to demonstrate that PR is for everyone. It helps entrepreneurs earn more, small brands become household names, Fortune 500 companies preserve and grow their positions, and personalities and politicians maintain and increase their credibility and relevance. And it helps all of the above rapidly increase brand value. If you have a great idea, product, or service, PR can do a lot to cut through the noise and let the world know. I offer insights into what I believe are instructive PR stories of some companies and brands I don’t represent, as well as insider stories from those I do.

However, I have omitted some of the names and altered details at my discretion to protect clients. The client stories you do read are written with permission, and most of the larger brands we work with are not mentioned for legal and privacy reasons. Confidences and secrets are kept and maintained.

PR is a mix of journalism, psychology, and lawyering—it’s an ever-changing and always interesting landscape. There are many points of view about PR and what it can, can’t, and should do. My observations don’t come from a classroom; they come from what I have observed, experienced, and gleaned during workdays that usually start before 6 a.m. and go past 10 p.m., never knowing exactly what each day will bring. A crucial insight I’ve learned is that personalization is what gives PR remarkable strength and resonance. I’m so happy I’ve been given the opportunity to share what I’ve learned in this process. It’s all in a day’s work.

THE 24/7 ROLLING PRESS CONFERENCE

Times have changed drastically. When people ask me what my next few days will look like, I often ask them if they know what the top headline in the newspapers or the most popular Google search result will be tomorrow or next week. Since they can’t predict either, I can’t tell them what I’ll be doing. The digital age has created a 24/7 rolling press conference that has changed the face of PR forever (marketing and advertising, too). Around-the-clock cable news stations, social networks, newswires, bloggers, tweeters, and “Diggers”—everyone is in PR these days. Whether they realize it or not, anyone commenting on the Internet or participating in social media is doing PR. They’re creating trends if they are commenting on stories, tweeting, and making videos that are spread quickly and able to reach millions within hours. Pros are competing with or reacting to mommy bloggers, self-styled political pundits writing from their basements, and anyone in the street with a smartphone sending live messages and uploading videos.

Want proof? The world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, was killed in a top-secret mission. Who broke the news of his death first? It wasn’t CNN or Fox News. An individual on Twitter got the news out before any of the major networks. Keith Urbahn, chief of staff to former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted the following: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.”

  When people ask me what tomorrow or next week will look like, I often ask them if they know what will be the top headline in the newspapers or the most popular Google search result.

Businesspeople with brands to protect or build can never leave the “podium” (those who know me know that my BlackBerry and cell phone rarely leave my hand). In fact, for many years I kept my BlackBerry by my side all night. In an ADD world, everyone expects instant responses and immediate satisfaction. Try not calling back or e-mailing your best friend for 24 hours; he’ll probably think you died. Getting a “couldn’t be reached for comment” mention in a newswire story that runs on 80 websites, simply because a reporter didn’t get a call back within the hour, is not a result you want. Businesses are required to continuously keep on top of what’s going on and to have the ability to give quick but thoughtful responses. This has made the world of professional PR even more complicated to navigate. A lot of people are flying blind on the PR front, and it’s not just because of the relatively recent rise of social media.

Many PR agencies were, and still are, out of touch. 5WPR stands out among the crowd. There was, and is, no other Top 25 PR agency with a CEO under the age of 40. Many PR agency owners don’t actually use the latest technology because it feels so unnatural to them (very few PR agency CEOs blog and/or tweet). They are not moving forward as quickly as the world around them is progressing. So it’s not only their age in years that makes them old—it’s their attitude and tired way of thinking. There are plenty of successful people who defy their age every day. Sixty-something Donald Trump isn’t “old” in terms of his approach to business; forty-something Sarah Jessica Parker is a fashion icon and trendsetter; eighty-something Warren Buffett is a futurist when it comes to investing—and the list goes on.

Unfortunately (though fortunately for 5WPR), there are few such forward-thinking people in PR. A couple of years ago I sat on a panel at a conference with a nice, elderly female CEO of one of the five largest PR firms in the world. She was asked two questions about the youth market and PR, and in response talked about the power of the baby boomer generation. I’m not disparaging baby boomers, but I wouldn’t exactly characterize them as part of the youth market. The Q&A exchange is symptomatic of the basic problem with a lot of what passes for PR thinking today. Too many of us have cotton in our ears—if we can’t hear the questions, how can we give the right answers?

Who’s Got Our Back? Institutional Apathy

Aside from old attitudes that often prevail at the highest levels of the industry, there’s no effective organization that advocates on behalf of the PR industry. No group educates large potential clients (big businesses, professional and nonprofit organizations, trade associations, and so on) about the value and importance PR can have on their bottom lines. The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) touts that one of its biggest attributes is “networking and professional development.” As a CEO building a business and career, I wonder if professional development is something a small industry association can do better than a professional development consultancy could? Is networking within the PR industry something I even want to encourage for junior employees, who may use it to job-hop? Wouldn’t it be better for PRSA to bring together business leaders in other sectors and educate them on the ways PR can help their brands and their bottom lines? Similarly, the Council of PR Firms exists with a valuable purpose to promote excellence in the field, share best practices in firm management and other valuable efforts—but they barely, if at all, speak to the outside world.

Doesn’t it make sense for industry leaders and PR’s professional organizations to regularly meet with large Fortune 1000 companies, for example, to educate and enlighten them about the value of PR? It doesn’t happen. This kind of institutional apathy and misdirection has hurt the entire PR industry.

In contrast, the advertising world has strong and effective advocacy groups. Its national trade association, American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), educates and inspires brands and businesses to spend money on advertising. The marketing world has the American Marketing Association (AMA), which also campaigns on behalf of the industry to business leaders. The organization goes directly to businesses and business leaders and educates them as to the value of marketing to their various industries. AMA also educates its members on business development so they can do a better job selling and promoting their services. AAAA offers a robust series of professional-training workshops and business-development seminars.

If there were more organized outreach on behalf of PR I believe there would be more businesses spending money on PR, and the entire industry would benefit. The lack of similar industry-wide support is one of the many reasons the budgets, size, and revenue of the industry are so much smaller than related industries like advertising and marketing.

Forethought, Not Afterthought

Public relations is an amazing business that offers people, brands, personalities, politicians, nonprofits, foundations, hospitals—you name it—an incredible chance to leverage their strengths and shape public opinion. Who better than a seasoned and forward-thinking PR person to anticipate, analyze, and interpret public opinion and attitudes? PR’s biggest advantage over marketing and advertising is the seemingly independent third-party recognition and endorsement it provides—an incredible asset in a crowded, distracted, and confused world. Understanding this point is critical because the right publicity has profoundly more credibility than ads and marketing campaigns. The public feels that when an objective third party—a television show, magazine writer, newspaper journalist, blogger, social networker, or radio reporter, for example—features a company or person in a positive light, that entity is authentic and important.

  PR’s biggest advantage over marketing and advertising is the seemingly independent third-party recognition and endorsement it provides—an incredible asset in a crowded, distracted, and confused world.

Brands have to pay attention not only to personalization, interaction, conversation, efficacy, and social responsibility, but also to their advertising campaigns. Why? Because image is everything and unlike yesterday’s Mad Men era of bold slogans and catchy jingles, today’s consumer requires a genuine-seeming approach rather than a forceful, overpromoted, and overproduced one. The most effective way to reach people is to engage them directly, personally, and organically—things PR can do more effectively than other forms of marketing. So why doesn’t it do it more often?

Simply put, PR is a field people don’t know enough about. The entire industry needs to do more to educate people about what PR is and what it does. Businesses also have to realize that PR is perhaps the most efficient, economical, and powerful way to connect with customers and constituents. If you’re like most CEOs or brand builders, you wake up thinking about business challenges, sales, stock prices, and the like, without considering how PR can help with those issues. As a result, PR is often seen as a “frill” or afterthought—a line item that can easily be cut from a budget. That’s a shame, because PR assists in beefing up the lifeblood of a business. We can counsel companies of every size and advise them on a number of issues, from marketing materials and employee engagement to board matters and shareholder communications. Done well, PR frames debates, shapes opinions, changes minds, averts crises, helps ring the cash register, and motivates individuals and groups to take action. We can, and should, be another voice in the room and in the C-suite, solving business problems from the beginning as part of the strategic team.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

What’s rarely talked about is the relatively low cost of PR, compared with much larger budgets necessary for effective advertising and marketing campaigns. In short, PR is the cheapest and most effective form of marketing. A well-executed PR strategy can achieve huge returns. And good PR results can be leveraged and used for years after a campaign ends. 5WPR has pulled off award-winning, revenue-generating campaigns that have changed the course of businesses—from a start-up content provider that created such a PR stir it was bought by a competitor 75 days postlaunch, to a billion-dollar health care company that needed constant, consistent press in order to recruit stronger staff members.

We’ve represented Bad Boy Worldwide Entertainment, and portrayed “Bad Boy” CEO Sean Combs and his executives as a group of incredible innovators and respectable business leaders, including a former NYPD sergeant and a Harvard Business School graduate. This helped position the company to be more acceptable within corporate America. We’ve worked for $20 million companies that doubled in size after their PR campaigns went into effect, and on campaigns for companies like beauty brands in the prefunding stage. We’ve also worked for some of the biggest and most established consumer packaged goods companies in the world, for a fraction of what it would have cost them for the same impact with advertising. In short, PR can change your world.

Multinational, multibillion-dollar brands use megaexpensive, worldwide advertising campaigns, as they should. For instance, according to Ad Age’s Leading Advertisers Index, Disney’s and General Motors’ total advertising budgets are about $2 billion a year each; General Electric and News Corp. each spend about $1.5 billion. Each company also uses PR to get its message out to large swaths of the public, as well as to micro and niche audiences. Small businesses can’t afford to advertise on an equivalent scale; PR is one of the few affordable ways niche brands and entrepreneurs can make a meaningful impact across multiple platforms.

This is especially true today when dealing with audiences who are fragmented and distracted. Your core audience could be checking her iPhone while your TV ads run. Or perhaps she will glance at and flip past a full-page ad in a glossy magazine, not even noticing a smaller one. Ads have to appear in dozens of such magazines over a period of months for a reader to take note. According to media analytics experts, you have to reach at least 25 percent of your target market at least 15 times over a period of several weeks for an ad to motivate them to take action on what they’ve seen.

Just a Hint of PR Makes a Difference

Even a relatively small $100,000-a-year PR campaign can create core messages, result in stories in relevant media publications (which creates marketing collateral as well as business leads if they land in the right outlets), and shape a company’s image in a positive manner. We represent a New York cosmetic surgeon who pays $100,000 a year or so for public relations. Each year, six weeks into the new campaign, he calls to joke he’s already paid for the campaign because of the business he gets after media appearances. For doctors or other kinds of experts, there is much more credibility from appearing on a news-format program than there is from an ad.

A large company we work with can afford big advertising campaigns—it’s a $200 million-a-year revenue firm, and they do advertise. Still, the company also pays us about $350,000 a year to regularly place the CEO in top-tier and relevant media to discuss market trends in its industry, secure targeted digital and traditional media opportunities for their key executives, and position certain divisions the right way. The company hears from us daily and gets results weekly. Its return on investment (ROI) on a relatively small investment is tremendous in terms of business leads, consumer awareness, and shareholder support.

We represent Hint Water, a small bottled water company founded in 2005 owned and run by a husband-and-wife team based in California. We’ve worked with the brand since 2007, and it has grown very quickly. As you can imagine, competing in a space dominated by Nestlé (Perrier, Poland Spring, and others), PepsiCo (Aquafina), and Coca-Cola (Dasani) is demanding. Representing the company is like juggling while running a mile a minute because our efforts for this company have to compete against the results achieved by competitors’ multimillion-dollar ad campaigns. Hint is a $30 million-a-year company. Successful? Yes, very, but a $10 million marketing budget, let alone one worth $100 million, is not in the picture for them at this stage of the game. Yet to enter or even survive in the beverage industry, sizable marketing efforts must be made. Clearing the clutter is one challenge; staying alive among behemoth worldwide icons that own 50 percent of the industry is another. Big beverage brands don’t exactly skimp—their national marketing and advertising campaigns stream across every medium and platform, and include exclusive deals with elite celebrities and top-level events like the Grammys and Oscars. How can a small fish possibly survive in a massive ocean when swimming with sharks? PR.

For less than 0.000001 percent of what the big fish spend, PR helps this small fish stay relevant and reach and excite its consumer targets. Best of all, it delivers name recognition. Through massive yet strategic media relations that span from 30-minute business features on Hint’s husband-and-wife team on CNBC and a profile in the business section of The New York Times to product placement in People and other national magazines, Hint can compete with the big-brand ads on the next page or the commercial break. We have also been able to facilitate well-deserved “water of the year awards” editorial coverage in Self, Health, and Good Housekeeping magazines, along with strategic, positive business-oriented pieces in Forbes and Time. In fact, I would argue that a top national magazine editor’s backing of Hint is more valuable than a full-page advertisement. Consumers trust an editorial endorsement over an ad every time.

  How can a small fish possibly survive in a massive ocean when swimming with sharks? PR.

All of the editorial coverage for Hint earns millions of impressions per month, which is serious visibility. To the consumer, the brand strategy is more about communication than promotion, or at least that’s the perception. Since the way in which the consumer sees or hears about Hint is through editorial coverage, product sampling, and/or social media and crowd-sourcing, the consumer has a greater tendency to believe the claims made about it because they come from sources seen to be more “organic” and authentic than brash marketing or ad campaigns. Of course, Hint is an excellent product—the best PR in the world couldn’t hope to accomplish much if the water didn’t taste great and offer good value.

In Hint’s case, PR has made a real footprint not only in the beverage space but also in the marketing industry. This company is widely recognized in the beverage industry as having gained its popularity through nontraditional marketing efforts. A couple of years ago, a friend at a major beverage conglomerate told me that the BusinessWeek feature we secured about Hint’s husband-and-wife team hangs in the office of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for one of their beverage brands and is on the company’s “Watch What They’re Doing” list. This small fish is a game changer.

TRIAGE AND THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POWER OF PR

Among the issues I discuss later in this book is how PR is necessary in transforming crisis situations or rehabilitating brands or personalities who have gotten off track (for any variety of reasons, including mismanagement and scandal). Immediacy is the key. When something terrible happens to a business, a skeptical public often sees traditional advertising as disingenuous—and advertising can have a tendency to backfire. The handling of the BP oil spill remains a classic example of advertising as bad crisis management. The $50 million campaign the company developed with Purple Strategies (not BP’s usual agency, the more-established Ogilvy & Mather) tried to convince the public that BP felt really bad about the spill and was on top of getting it cleaned up.

The money spent on the campaign was widely publicized, with placements from ABC News to The Huffington Post, but was viewed as misspent by the people of the Gulf Coast, along with many others who were paying attention. Few believed the advertising’s claims anyway, especially residents in the area, because they could see with their own two eyes that no such cleanup was really happening. Trying to ban reporters from filming the cleanup on public beaches made matters even worse. You can’t fight reality—or cell phone cameras (“civilians” became reporters, too, or at least important sources to tell the outside world what was going on at the shoreline—a kind of grassroots communication and activism we have seen proliferate around the world).

Had BP spent its money more carefully on charity in the community and allowed reporters to have more access than they were given (the lack of which angered them, and they said so), perhaps the media would not have skewered the company to the extent it did. The company would have still taken a lot of heat, but it could have turned some of the negative PR around. The use of more subtle social media campaigns would have won over more people, more quickly, and would have generated decent or perhaps neutral media, rather than the pure butchering BP took, and rightfully deserved.

That $50 million could have been used quickly on much more meaningful, and I would say more positive, expenditures, like helping people who lost their jobs because of the spill. Can you imagine the help this could have provided, and the great stories that could have been generated?

BP isn’t the only huge company that screwed up PR when it had a chance to do better. Look, PR cannot eliminate a crisis that has happened, but it can soften the blow, make apologies resonate, and help rehabilitate fallen idols (or CEOs, as the case may be). AIG dropped a half million dollars on a posh private banquet, just days after receiving a huge federal bailout. A few weeks later, CEOs from the Big Three auto companies flew in separate private jets to Washington, D.C., to ask Congress for a $25 billion bailout, without any turnaround plans prepared. For businesses and brands a fraction of the size of BP, the same strategy during a crisis applies. You always have to ask yourself, “What is the best way I can solve this problem, maintain or salvage my reputation, and regain my customers’ trust?” Make a PR misstep and it can cost your brand dearly.

At the end of the day, PR is about connecting with your designated audience in good times and bad, and telling an effective, compelling story. If you can do that, you’ve won.