Spin Alert

The “idiot” in question is seventy-seven-year-old Al Ries, a marketing strategist for more than twenty years and co-author, with his daughter and business partner Laura, of the inflammatory best-seller.

Al Ries was not present for the AMA sessions in Toronto. It takes a considerable amount of cash, more than $25,000 (U.S.) plus first-class travel expenses, to get him out of the Atlanta office where he and Laura run Ries and Ries Focusing Consultants. A bona fide business guru, Ries is preaching to companies throughout North America a message as simple as it is controversial – stop wasting billions of dollars trying to build your brand through advertising. It doesn’t work. “You can fan the flames with advertising,” Ries argues, “you just can’t start the fire.” What does work, says Ries, what is a whole lot cheaper and more effective in making people pay attention if you’re launching a new product or service, is public relations.

Why? Because the root problem of advertising is that no one believes it. “No matter how creative the advertising,” Al and Laura write, “no matter how appropriate the medium, there is just no way around the issue of credibility.” A survey of Americans and Europeans undertaken in January 2003 revealed that only 12 percent said they believed that advertising was trustworthy. In a recent interview, Al Reis declared that “anything you say about yourself is now automatically suspect.”

The secret to public relations is the “third party effect,” and the best way for it to happen is to hire skilled public-relations practitioners with a nose for “news” and the ability to get your message to your audience through the “filter” of the media.

“To get something going from nothing,” the Reises write in The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, “you need the validity that only third party endorsements can bring.” Judy Lewis, co-founder of the Toronto-based PR firm Strategic Objectives, echoed that sentiment when she told the AMA crowd last year that public relations possessed the one thing that advertising lacked – credibility. And while people might not believe what advertising tells them, they still believe most of what they read in the paper.

The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR is filled with examples of how public relations has helped launch some of today’s best-known brands – The Body Shop, or Botox, or Linux are all house-hold names that were built with little or no advertising. Or Starbucks, which spent only $10 million in advertising over its first decade. Or Krispy Kreme donuts, which manages to attract scads of free media attention whenever it decides to enter a new market. (Not cited in the Ries book, but another excellent example, is Vanilla Coke, which spent no money on paid advertising until three months after its launch in the spring of 2002. But with a PR campaign that cost only half a million dollars, Coke managed to secure more than 1,500 “individual broadcast placements” in the U.S. alone, reaching an audience of 92 million consumers.)

Judy Lewis of Strategic Objectives told the Toronto crowd about her strategy in launching Whole Foods Market, an upscale American grocery chain that opened its first Canadian store in the city’s trendy Yorkville district. The local media treated the store’s arrival as if it were a major news story, significantly decreasing the need for costly advertising.

You can’t blame Al Ries or Judy Lewis or others in the PR industry for taking what the media offer them. If they can convince enough editors, hosts, producers, or reporters that the launch of a new flavoured soft drink or the arrival of a new donut or grocery chain is “news,” why should they fork out the money to buy advertising? So what if various media outlets choose to deprive themselves of precious ad revenue by surrendering some of their valuable editorial space to free publicity?

But what about the effect on readers, viewers, and listeners? When news values have become so debased that the media stop being a filter against spin, and instead become a sieve that allows it to pass through virtually unobstructed, then we have a serious problem. The media are putting their credibility at risk when they happily dress up marketing material as news, and they allow themselves to simply be a conduit for other people’s spin.

It’s not an entirely new phenomenon. You can find newspaper editors and reporters railing against “free puffs” as far back as the nineteenth century. The great American editor Horace Greeley told an overly-persistent press agent back in 1854 that “if you want to use the columns of any journal to promote your own or some other person’s private interest, offer to pay for it, there is no other honest way.” But two recent books published in England make a persuasive argument that in the modern struggle between public relations and the press, it is PR that is gaining the upper hand.