PR Darwin Award

Two weeks ago, Sotheby’s International Realty’s public relations officer in South Africa – Maurice Levin was fired three months into the job for publicising an internal memo from owner Lew Geffen which urged franchise holders to persuade luxury house owners to reduce their prices by 25% due to an anticipated 40% decline in house prices.

Levin apparently turned the memo into a press release and the first thing Geffen knew about it was a phonecall from Levin revealing the good news that he’d arranged a radio interview to discuss the impending property meltdown. The owner hung up on him, presumably in a hurry to speak to Personnel. More surprising though is that two weeks after the firing, Mr Levin still doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong.

He’s even been using his PR skills to get press interviews in which he has criticised his former boss for not sticking with the comments in his internal memo. Showing the sort of PR insight that secured his exit, Levin explains that there was a difference between what the chairman would say in private and what he was prepared to say publicly:

“Clearly what he tells his franchise holders – who cough up millions to carry the company name – is not what he tells the general public, otherwise he’d not have been perturbed by the media’s possession of the document.” Levin says.

Clearly he was in the job three months too long.

BBC journalists - black book or black hole?

Not enough regional stories are finding their way to national news according to Mark Thompson speaking in Wales this week. The BBC chief suggests the blame lies with regional networks holding on to the best stories – and why wouldn’t they?

I wonder though if he thought as far as where the stories the regions get come from. In my experience it is far easier for PR agents to pitch stories and build relationships with regional broadcast journalists than with the national network. I can pick up the phone to or email regional broadcast journalists with no problem at all, but try phoning up Kate Silverton or Jeremy Paxman and see how far you get.

Of course you wouldn’t really expect to get through to the anchors but maybe a designated underling or researcher. But no, when you phone the main BBC news office, you’re requested to send your release to a general email address, with no specific journalist name to follow up with. Effectively you’re dropping it into the great BBC black hole of news and hoping it gets noticed.  

Over time, you build up contacts, but it’s a haphazard process. If the BBC published a list of news journalists and their sectors for PR agents to talk to, in the same way print publishers do, they’d get a great many more regional stories and better targeted ones too.

David Davis and the decline of the spin doctor

I feel compelled to resign on a point of principle. Political spin doctors used to have some influence in British politics, but lately, the gaffs just keep coming, including last week, surely the biggest howler by a leading conservative since Michael Portillo started installing those phone lines or William Haig wore a baseball cap.

It’s no wonder the Lib Dem comms chief Jonny Oates has given up and gone back to his agency, Labour’s PR guru since January, Stephen Carter is surely not far behind. Barring a couple of minor incidents David Cameron has progressed relatively unscathed, but then he was a PR man before he was an MP. Gordon Brown is about as far from a PR as you can get, which was once touted as his strength but is now leaving him defenceless in the face of a media kicking (decent of Mr Davis to divert some of the blows though).

Resignations used to be the last chance for politicians to slip away with their reputations intact, but Mr Davis presumably thought he could step out, then step back in again via a by-election, performing some sort of resignation hokey cokey and emerge with his reputation enhanced. The media were baffled, then scathing, Cameron said it was ‘a brave move’ which is code in any walk of life for foolhardy. I assume at no time did he run it past a PR adviser.

So I’m going to resign and then re-hire myself ten minutes later – it’s a small, selfless act which I hope will show everyone that I will not stand for this appalling decline in the influence of political spin doctors anymore.  Bring back Campbell, bring back Mandelson – all is forgiven.