Brad Kay and Adweek’s Brian Morrissey have been IMing.
Turns out Morrissey isn’t wild about PR practitioners.
I’m a reporter. If I had my druthers, I’d never deal with PR people. Nothing against them. I’m sure the vast majority are great people. PR, like the ad world, is still all about ‘impressions.’ That leads to spray and pray. The other half of PR is controlling access. Both parts of it inevitably rub me the wrong way. The best PR is the PR I don’t notice – the ones who make a connection and then stop trying to act like a middleman to “add value.” PR people don’t like to hear this, I know. Not all of them are like this, but trust me so many are. I’m amazed how many PR people there are. There must be hundreds of different ones that contact me. It seems like as media shrinks PR grows.
Thankfully, he does appreciate bloggers.
John Battelle, David Armano, Noah Brier, Umair Haque, Fred Wilson, John Furrier, Techcrunch. Among just ad blogs, agency spy was awesome until SuperSpy left. I enjoy AdPulp too.
Thanks for the vote of confidence (that sounds like an afterthought), Brian.
As for the PR peeps, I’d like to relay one of my own pet peeves. I regularly receive pitches addressed to Matt and Danny. But I’m not Matt, nor Danny. I’m David. Just to be clear, I receive the exact same email three times over, all three of which I immediately mark as spam.
[via Tangerine Toad’s tweet]
Interesting that Morrissey allegedly hates PR, as Adweek is essentially a collection of press releases. While Morrissey tends to be more of a reporter than others at Adweek, there are still too many press releases posing as editorial content.
I have to come to the defense of Brian. He is open to talk, but he’s smart and correct to call bullshit.
There is so much bullshit out there in the web 2.0 PR world. The world of what I call “head fake” PR is over.
PR is about connecting things to the public that has value to those audiences. Great PR is PR that isn’t obvious except in helping deliver value to users. The web is different now and new communication vehicles are available to connect to audiences and “vituraly present” products and services – that formula is unknown by many. In my opinion (and I see all the PR work being done out there) very few are approaching PR in the right way.
David: Never an afterthought.
Twit: Thanks? I’m biased. I think you’ll find quite a bit more at Adweek than warmed-over press releases. Sure, there is some of that, mostly as a result of busy people unable to keep up. It’s the same story at most media organizations. I’ve never written anything that completely pleases me, but not from a lack of trying. My colleagues are uniformly smart, hard-working people who do some good stuff. We can all improve. I’m sure even you can, whatever you do.