I stumbled out of bed, went downstairs and staggered through the Saturday morning ritual of forcing as much finely ground coffee into the espresso maker as is physically possible, to achieve the necessary caffeine hit to deal with the kids’ inexplicable enthusiasm for early morning daylight – which had been audible for several hours earlier.
The next stage, prior to Saturday’s light fluffy pancakes – griddle baked to a golden brown, lovingly stroked with lightly salted butter and smothered with lashings of Canadian maple syrup – was to open the post whilst waiting for the caffeine to make sense of the weekend. So as I sat in the kitchen wearing little more than my nightie and curlers, I was more than a little put out to open a mailer from a publishing house announcing that as a director of Birddog I had been identified as one of the UK’s most successful businessmen and that my profile had been ‘chosen’ to be listed in the said publisher’s directory of most-brilliant-awesome-people 2008.
The mailer told me, at some considerable length, how well wicked I was, how well wicked they were as publishers and what a complete privilege it was for me to be selected for inclusion into this few, this happy few, this band of brothers. I was to be honoured. I was to receive the attention I so rightly deserved. I was to be applauded for my unsurpassed business acumen – and could I please just visit their website and complete further details about how truly magnificent I absolutely am.
I immediately fired up my laptop (not my favourite Saturday morning pre-caffeine activity), located the publisher’s website and searched for the ‘shove it’ button. Duly located, I told them where to go and hope never to be distracted from my pancakes and Canadian maple syrup again.
I’ve never been a big fan of sending business communications into the home – but nor have I realised how vehemently opposed to it I quite clearly am. I’m aware that company directors’ home addresses are readily available from Companies House and I have regular discussions with clients seeking to reach a senior executive audience about whether or not they should use a home address database. I always advise ‘not’ – and now I know why. I can’t actually recall another such mailing that I’ve received at home – either because it hasn’t happened before, or just because I’ve simply refused to engage with it and put it straight in the bin. But this one was different.
I regret to admit that the difference was that I nearly fell for it. Flattery, ego-massage, self-gratification… all of those things are powerful response-generators. I like to think I have a healthy and well-formed opinion of my own ego so I should have loved this. And here’s the thing. If I’d received this mailer at work, I probably would have loved it. The publisher would have been able to build a rather astonishing database of directorial detail that I would otherwise be unlikely to tell my own pedicurist. Instead, they got nothing.
It may well be that the publisher was genuinely just seeking to publish a directory of the great and the good of British business and I’ve just scored an accomplished own-goal. But it didn’t feel right. It felt like an invasion of privacy that, if left unattended, would lead from the database to a mountain of other unsolicited business communications in the home.
There’s work – and there’s the weekend. They’re related, no doubt. But nothing should ever get in the way of screaming kids and Canadian maple syrup.
A fine addition to the list of great British Ideas that didn’t quite work on day one, which currently includes the Millennium Bridge, the River of Fire and the Princess Diana fountain. Not to mention Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower, which opened five years late and promptly celebrated by trapping the project manager 100 feet up for an hour.
Back in 2007, a press release stated that the ‘highly sophisticated T5 baggage system had been designed for performance and reliability… there would be minimal queuing at every stage’. Which turned out to be quite an overclaim.
B2C, of course, is rife with promises that aren’t lived up to. Take the case of a March ASA adjudication; a shopping channel overstated product details, pricing and technical facts (pretty much a full house of errors, I’d have thought).
B2B, however, is relatively clean, as a quick check back through the annals of the ASA shows. The only semi-B2B ad in the annual top ten complaints since 1994 was a mono printer whose features included a nude woman.
But clean though we are, we’re going to have to be even more careful in future. The new Business Protection from Misleading Marketing and Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading regulations may be little more than a consolidation of existing law, but they’ll have an impact on what we can and can’t say about our products and services. No more ‘offer applies while stocks last’ if the product’s unlimited. No more product descriptions which include things we legally have to offer. Maybe even no more advertorials.
In short, from now on, the onus will be on us to be spot on. Hard facts, not weasel words are now the order of the day. And unlike Heathrow, no more flights of fancy.
If I had a pound for every time I’d encountered any of the following words or phrases in a press release, I’d be well on my way buying my own place in London by now. ‘Dynamic’, ‘exciting’, ‘groundbreaking’, ‘maximising’, ‘market leader’ - and my all time favourite… ‘innovative’.
According to the dictionary, being innovative is about “producing something like nothing done or experienced or created before”. Which I find kind of ironic given that the word seems to crop up in just about every other press release I get sent. It’s like whoever is writing a release just plonks the word in when they can’t think what else to put there. Very “innovative”!
And in the past month alone, I must have been contacted by the “market leaders” of at least five different email marketing specialist companies. I’m no mathematician, but that doesn’t quite seem to add up.
The other thing that gets me about press releases is the quotes. For a start, everybody is “delighted” to have been appointed, to have hired somebody, to have launched a new product or to have worked on a pitch. Yes, I’m sure you all are delighted, but are you honestly telling me that people talk like this:
“I am delighted to be joining such a fantastic, market leading, innovative and forward thinking company at this exciting, dynamic and truly groundbreaking time”
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. But honestly, some of the releases I read are so sugary, I could probably dip them in my tea and pass on the granulated stuff altogether. It would be much more useful, and interesting, if these quotes actually said something about what you’re going to be doing in your new role, or why you’re so “delighted” to be joining in the first place.
So if there are any marketers reading this who know they’ll be sending me press releases, much as I will be “delighted” to receive them maybe you could think about toning down the puff and putting in some real “added value”? (See what I did there…)
Now I understand completely that B2B marketers (our primary readers) are not Eurostar’s primary audience, but almost certainly a large proportion will be business travellers, and that isn’t really the point. Surely the primary point of PR is to present your organisation in the best possible light to all possible audiences, not to be picky and shun certain ones arbitrarily. I made it clear to the press office that this was going to be a positive piece – perhaps if I’d said I was going to criticise them I might have gained more traction. Otherwise a polite “no thanks” or “we’re too busy this week” would have sufficed.
PR and PRs can be fickle at the best of times, but it’s Eurostar’s marketing people that I’m really surprises me. Why wouldn’t they want to tell the wider marketing world about what a good job they’ve been doing? Perhaps they think this would be bragging, but from my perspective it just smacks of laziness and/or arrogance. So congratulations Eurostar – you’ve turned a fan into a critic. It’s the ultimate PR own goal, and surely there’s a lesson in this. As our friends at the Eurovision Song Contest would have said, with a suitably French accent: “Eurostar: nil points.”