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On the occasion of PRSA's 50th Anniversary.
Address to the North Texas Chapter
Public Relations Society of America at Park City Club, Dallas
November 20, 1997
My friends,
The last time I spoke with your chapter was a breakfast meeting at the Chapparal Club seven years ago. Before that, fourteen years ago. And still earlier, almost 20 years ago. So I was sorely tempted to dig out ore of those old speeches and use it again. That's assuming it would still be relevant. Well, I haven't done that. I'd rather look ahead for leadership than deal in ancient history.
But just one personal note: coming back to meet you again, I'm amazed to find that after all these years, I seem to be the only one who has aged.
And along with me, perhaps public relations itself has aged. Just as with the aging process for individuals, perhaps our own vision of our profession has become clouded. Maybe we're no longer seeing things as clearly as we need to, in order to survive — and thrive — in the new millenium. And surely, only if we lift the cloudy veil and see very sharply what's happening around us can we can lead change in our profession, in our organizations, in our corporations, our agencies.
Yes, technology has changed dramatically the work of a public relations professional in recent years. Instead of mailing out news releases, or even using bicycle messengers to deliver them personally, as we used to do in New York City, today you use PR Newswire or the Web, or broadcast fax, or satellite distribution. Instead of selecting individual editors and media you want to target, you let those wonderful computer programs do it for you ¬more thoroughly, more accurately, and much more quickly than you yourselves could do. Granted, technology has fundamentally changed our professional work. But that's not the most important change that has happened to public relations.
What has changed fundamentally — and I think, to our detriment — is that we have increasingly positioned ourselves as communications experts rather than as public relations professionals. As a consequence of what we have done to ourselves, management more and more often has been skipping over us and turning to others to head the public relations function. Lawyers, financial people, marketing people. You name it.
Why has this been happening? I think the reason is that some folks have lost sight of what public relations is all about, what we are supposed to be doing. Public relations is about how our organizations relate to the public. Public relations isn't getting publicity. That's a tool. Publicists can use it. Public relations isn't lobbying. Lawyers can do that. Public relations isn't doing worthwhile community activities. Human resources people can do that.
Public relations isn't "making the boss look good." Flatterers and opportunists can do that. Public relations isn't product publicity to support the marketing effort. Product publicity is a powerful tool. But it is only a tool of public relations.
Public relations is all those things, surely. But it's something much deeper and broader than all of these tools put together. It's studying and understanding how to influence public opinion. We have, or should have, or should try to have, special qualification to influence public opinion and subsequent action. Public relations is researching and measuring and judging what our corporation or client must do to survive in the turbulent democratic society that surrounds us. And then having the ability to apply what we've learned.
Most lawyers aren't trained to do that. Don't think that Kathy Fitzpatrick is typical — professionally trained as an attorney and also as a public relations professional. There aren't many Kathy Fitzpatrick's around. Most lawyers are trained to help the corporation survive and prosper only in the world of law and contracts and litigation — argument in the courtroom. A lawyer friend of mine tells his favorite lawyer joke: "The preferred method of birth control among lawyers is their personalities." The best lawyers are fighters, combatants. Perhaps angry people inside. Perhaps quiet spoken, well-mannered and smooth. But fighters nevertheless. Their concern is to win the fight. To them, public opinion is secondary. If you've ever heard legal counsel advise the CEO to say, "No comment," you will recognize how many attorneys think.
And publicists aren't trained primarily to influence public opinion. They're trained and skilled in getting a story into the media. They have expertise at making a story interesting, newsworthy, favorable to their employer. A really good publicist knows how to develop "angles" that will stimulate an editor's interest. Successful publicists judge themselves by how much publicity they get. A tough calling! They measure it by the inch and the yard and sometimes, clippings or videotapes by the pound. Sometimes, they try to calculate its cash value by comparing it to the cost of advertising space. (That's a no-no).
Marketing people are trained to identify the most likely purchasers of a product or service, and then to be able to figure out the most efficient and least costly way' to communicate the message to them. They know the most persuasive way to tell customers why they should make the purchase. Nothing is more important to a corporation's survival than that. A skilled product publicist is very important indeed, and that's why CEO's value them so highly. But product publicity and marketing support aren't the whole story, either.
All of these experts are very important indeed ? the lawyers, the accountants, the marketers, the publicists. And let me add one more category to the list of very important people: the Information Technology people. Corporate survival requires the IT people. Look what's happening right now to the once-great Union Pacific Railroad. Since the Union Pacific merged with the Southern Pacific Railroad, their IT people have so far failed to merge the two different data systems. Whole trainloads of perishable goods are reported as running back and forth across the southern desert — lost for weeks to the shippers, to the destinations, and even to the railroad itself. In this disaster, you can understand that IT people are not one bit less important than public relations people. So let's stop saying that public relations people should have a preferential seat at the elbow of the CEO and have his ear. While we're at it, let's stop our arrogance in trying to educate the CEO to the value of public relations.
Instead, let's try to improve our skills in public relations, in the art of influencing public opinion favorably toward our organizations. I'll give you several examples of the difference between being a "communications expert" and a public relations professional.
The current issue of The Public Relations Strategist carries Steve Crescenzo's article about public relations at the Walt Disney Company. If you missed the issue, I urge you to track down a copy and read it thoughtfully. The gist of it is that Walt Disney has the best product publicity you can get, the best publicity marketing support you can get. But no more. And a lot less. Crescenzo found that The Disney Company doesn't practice public relations.
Its management obviously fears the media. It gives signs that it fears its own employees.
Great publicity, and yet an absence of corporate public relations, have engendered attacks and boycotts from assorted groups ranging from the Southern Baptist Convention, who didn't like the way the company regarded Gays, to some Native American activists who didn't like the way Disney portrayed Pocahontas. Some feminist activists are attacking the company also, complaining that Disney sends "the wrong message to girls." The Catholic League doesn't like The Disney Company because the League doesn't like a program on ABC Television, which Disney owns.
My experience tells me that in the long run, these attacks, which The Disney Company seem to consider as "little details" will add up to big trouble. The Company's non-public relations policies may be giving rise to a public impression of a big institution that cares only about today's box office receipts, and not too much about what little country will think about it tomorrow.
Indeed, look at the price of Disney stock, and you know that the company is riding high these days. The boycotts have made no difference at all to the company. But public opinion changes very slowly in favor of, or against, an institution. And by the time public opinion, whether positive or negative, has crystallized, it will be too late to create a public relations program to save things.
And that brings up a personal experience of my own that illustrates the difference between sound public relations policies on one hand, and good publicity on the other. In that same current issue of The Public Relations Strategist that I mentioned a moment ago, Fraser Seitel, the editor, included an article I wrote about the massive public relations activities designed to save the Bell System back in 1983. At that time, an army of 1,700 public relations people were employed in the Bell System. In my article, I expressed the opinion that the AT&T public relations people had conducted a superbly thorough and very expert professional public relations program. But they failed because in tile late 1970's and early 1980's, public opinion had turned totally sour and hostile to all the large institutions of our society.
A dozen years later, it is clearer now than it was to us then why the effort failed. It really didn't make much difference what public relations did or didn't do to defend the Bell System. Public opinion just didn't care one way or the other what happened to the Bell System. They didn't care because many — or most — Americans already had lost trust in both their government and all large institutions in the nation. This resulted from both the Vietnam War and Nixon's crimes of Watergate. The AT&T Company surely was also a victim because at that time, it employed over one million people. Much too big to be trusted.
Well, that's the way I see it a dozen years later. But now, a close friend has suggested to me that maybe I'm wrong. My good and old friend, George Hammond, who was President of the Public Relations Society of America, in 1969, and was Chairman of Carl Byoir and Associates, sees it differently. George says it indeed was a public relations failure. Our public relations failure. He believes that AT&T could have won its fight for survival if years earlier, it had been carrying out a two-pronged public relations program and policy.
As to its public relations activity, George Hammond feels that its 1,700 public relations people, should have more sharply focused their communications effort on telling the public what the Bell System was doing to serve them; to show how it operated and why it believed that it served the public interest.
Even more important, as to policy, its Board of Directors, its officers and its public relations leaders should have questioned every single day whether its basic corporate policies still served the public interest. George feels that a change was needed not simply in its public relations activities, but in its very substance as a corporation. Criticism of the telephone monopoly was growing; communications technology was undergoing a revolution — wireless, digital, fiber optics, and so on. Perhaps telecommunications had become too big for one company to provide exclusively. Perhaps the AT&T corporate structure had outlived its usefulness to the public and needed change.
Instead, the Board defended its entrenched hundred year-old monopoly. A sound public relations policy would have explored whether changes were needed to allow AT&T to survive in a new competitive environment. In other words, George Hammond emphasizes, public relations isn't just communicating, however effectively it's done. Good public relations means relating to the public by best serving the public interest. That lesson obviously hasn't reached the officials of the Walt Disney Company.
Then there is the tobacco industry. This is the industry that has grown and prospered mightily for the last fifty years by selling more cigarettes every year, even if they have to go to Eastern Europe to reach those record-breaking sales figures. This is the industry that in 1953 received John Hill's counsel from Hill and Knowlton to sponsor honest independent scientific research to find out whether cigarettes really did cause cancer. (It wasn't quite so certain forty or fifty years ago, even though the evidence pointed in that direction.) Well, you know the story. Litigation discovery has revealed internal corporate documents that tell us what the managements knew at the time. The tobacco companies did research all right. But whenever the results were harmful to the companies, they suppressed the data, stopped the research, and said nothing. Nothing about the research anyway. Instead, this was what we heard: I read from Insight Magazine, May 19, 1986, from an interview with Gerald H. Long, then the president and chief executive officer of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.
Question: Have you ever had personal doubts about being involved in the tobacco industry when you have thought of some of the health consequences of smoking?
Answer: I smoke a little over one pack a day. I have four grown children who have the right to smoke if they want to, or not. Two of them smoke, and two of them do not smoke. That is their own personal choice. If I saw or thought there were any evidence whatsoever that conclusively proved that, in some way, tobacco was harmful to people, and I believed it in my heart and my soul, then I would get out of the business and I wouldn't be involved in it. Honestly, I have not seen one piece of medical evidence that has been presented by anybody, anywhere that absolutely, totally said that smoking caused the disease or created it. I believe this. I'm sitting here talking to you with an extremely clear conscience.
Well, that was the industry's line for forty or fifty years. They got away with it while sales and profits soared. Their so-called public relations machine was awesome ? or was it their lawyers?
In some of those years, I was involved with the American Cancer Society, that great voluntary institution. I made more than one public speech on the record, saying it was easy to criticize the tobacco industry, but the question was, what constructive and helpful advice should public relations offer to the industry? My advice 20 and 25 years ago was: stop advertising and promoting cigarettes. Stop all of it. I said then that no one, not the most severe public health critics of smoking, favored a ban on smoking. The critics objected rather to the advertising, the sports tie-ins, the promotions to entice more young smokers. And I felt that if the leader — Phillip Morris and R. J. Reynolds — simply agreed to stop all advertising of whatever kind, public hostility would slowly diminish and finally stop. And their total promotional budget would suddenly become increased earnings. I seem to remember the figure at that time as about two billion dollars a year. And since nicotine even then was generally recognized as addictive, any decline in advertising and promotion would erode sales only very slowly over the years. Even if the companies stopped advertising, smokers wouldn't stop smoking. And if one single cigarette company announced that it would stop all its advertising, the two other leading cigarette companies would be forced by the pressure of public opinion to stop also. One company wouldn't gain an advantage over its competitors. That would eliminate brand switching, one company's brand gaining at the expense of another, which they feared so much.
Well, you know what happened: nothing. They ignored the suggestion. They increased their "public relations efforts" to buy goodwill. Cigarette companies' "public relations? consisted of providing financial support to the arts. Hardly a symphony orchestra, a ballet, a theatre company in our country hasn't been supported in substantial part by the cigarette industry. They effectively silenced the culture-loving intellectuals. When did you last read or hear a criticism of the industry from the intellectuals? The attacks on smoking have come instead almost entirely from the medical and scientific communities.
So now — years and years later — the roof is finally falling in on the tobacco companies. The details of the settlements remain to be worked out. My point is, the tobacco industry should have practiced public relations forty or fifty years ago. It seems inescapable that had they recognized that advertising and promoting cigarettes didn't serve the public interest, they would be a lot better off today. Instead, they practiced so-called public relations, phony public relations, that related to the public only insofar as it could conceal facts, lie, and distract with false issues like freedom of choice, and so on.
I want to make another observation about what we need to do if we are to lead changes in public relations. We need to recognize that a deep current of American public opinion is quite hostile to government and corporations generally. It is a residue of the events of twenty years ago. Where it manifests itself today, among other places, is in the jury box. Remember McDonald's spilled container of coffee? That was the incident where an 81-year old customer bought a container of hot coffee from McDonald's, sat down and held the paper container between her legs in order to remove the lid. When she pulled off the cover, some of the hot coffee spilled and scalded her. Her lawyers said McDonald's should have known better than to sell such hot coffee. They had found letters in the McDonald's file complaining about hot coffee. And there had been some cases of previous scaldings too. The jury agreed with the plaintiff that it was all McDonald's fault, and awarded her almost three million dollars in damages for her coffee spill. (That amount was later sharply reduced on appeal.)
But think a moment about that case. McDonald's survives by selling coffee the way people want it — very hot. Doesn't it look to you that the jury felt sorry for the poor woman and figured the big McDonald's had — as the plaintiffs lawyers like to say — deep pockets?
Now, I happen to think that McDonald's has one of the soundest public relations policies anyone could reasonably hope for, with a very high standard of integrity, sensitivity to the public interest, to the community. But that isn't and wasn't enough to protect McDonald's Corporation against a three million dollar damage award. McDonald's case is a prototype, a sharp example of the need of corporations and organizations to deflect or minimize the currents of hostility. To minimize such underlying hostility, it isn't better publicity that's needed. Corporate officers and public relations directors need to carefully examine corporate policies that may be antagonizing customers, employees and the general public unnecessarily. Public relations professionals should be looking at problems like this — not for vague idealistic reasons, but to estimate probable long-term consequences, whether for good or bad, for the corporation.
Of course, it isn't only corporations whose public relations officers need to look at the activities and policies of their organizations. What about the church leadership that chose not to prosecute its National Treasurer who had swindled several million dollars of church funds? It was well-intentioned but utterly misguided "compassion" that caused the Bishop to decide not to cooperate with the District Attorney. It outraged church members — the folks who had contributed the funds that had been stolen — who found the Bishop's decision morally offensive and irresponsible. When receipts from the Sunday morning collection plate suddenly dropped as a result, the church "leadership" reversed itself and then adopted a policy more in harmony with the public interest. They agreed to cooperate with the prosecutors. All the kindly words about "Christian compassion" couldn't outweigh a fundamentally wrong policy of excusing and rationalizing grand larceny.
It wasn't bad publicity that damaged the Church. It was a bad policy that needed correction, a policy that members perceived as being contrary to ethical standards of integrity and therefore contrary to the public interest.
Many Americans, including many public relations professionals, think that the "media" — to use Richard Nixon's favorite pejorative — create the public relations problems that corporations and non-profit organizations face. I don't share that viewpoint, even though I recognize the bias of some people in the media. In a free society, newspapers, television, magazines, now the Internet, are sacred guardians of our liberty against the corruption of power. Instead of blaming them for reporting the assorted sins they dig up, I would rather have us lead our organizations to do the right things in the public interest, and then we won't have to worry so much about what people say about us.
Someone said to me recently: "Everybody lies. But it doesn't matter, because nobody listens." Let's not play that game. Let's not play the game of superficial self-serving publicity. It's a dead-end for our companies, even though, as the cigarette industry has demonstrated, it's sometimes possible to get away with it for years and decades. Let's be leaders, in our profession and in our organizations, in our nation, by helping companies and organizations to adopt sound public relations policies that will justify public trust and earn their survival. That's where the future lies for all of us, for our profession, and for America too.
Thank you.
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