Is PR still powerful when public opinion no longer matters?

Farzana Baduel (00:04):
Hello. Hello, my God. Welcome. Welcome. It is Friday. Friday. Yay for some.

Doug Downs (00:10):
Yay.

Farzana Baduel (00:11):
Now, welcome to The Week UnSpun, a weekly live look at the world through the eyes of PR professionals. And my name is Farzana Baduel. I'm sitting in London.

David Gallagher (00:21):
I'm David Gallagher, also in London.

Doug Downs (00:22):
And I'm Doug Downs, somewhere in Canada's Rocky Mountains. It's mysterious.

Farzana Baduel (00:28):
Now we have an awful lot to talk about today. We've got Operation Midway Blitz in the United States, a quick take on what brands and communications can learn from President Trump, a new report on leading in the era of compounding crisis, and we're going to explain that and unravel the UK Government logo. Oh dear, something not quite right has happened there. I see that. And then also, if we have time, we're going to talk about my discussion that I had with the Beeb about the upcoming Netflix biopic on Victoria Beckham. No time for that? Oh, let's hope. Now there's also just a little touch on breaking news. We have got Palestinians who have started to return to Gaza’s north as Netanyahu thanks Trump for securing a ceasefire. And that has just come up on BBC News. Now over to you, Doug.

Doug Downs (01:24):
Yeah. So while Trump might be earning some headlines internationally, nationally the headlines aren’t entirely in his favour. This is the National Guard issue. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, otherwise known as ICE, has launched major enforcement operations in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, sparking protests and intense criticism. In Chicago, for example, the campaign known as Operation Midway Blitz has led to hundreds of arrests in just a few weeks. Federal officials claim they’re focusing on undocumented immigrants with criminal records, members of gangs, but reports show that many of those detained did not have serious charges, and in some cases they’re citizens who were later released. Arrests have sometimes been carried through with tactics that feel deceptive, like summoning people to routine check-ins and then detaining them. Civil rights groups have filed lawsuits alleging unlawful arrests and constitutional violations. The large show of force with armoured vehicles, helicopters and chemical agents has created the impression that entire neighbourhoods are under siege rather than simply being policed for residents.

(02:33):
This does not feel like routine immigration enforcement but like a military operation unfolding right there on their streets. Meantime, in Oregon, the pattern is centred around protests at the ICE field office in Portland. Demonstrations have mostly been peaceful, but federal forces have responded with tear gas, tactical gear, and mass arrests. About 60 people have been detained since the summer, many tied to protest activity rather than violent crimes. To local communities, seeing the National Guard and militarised federal agents deployed against protestors feels less like law enforcement and more like government suppression. That whole image of soldiers, heavy vehicles, chemical weapons in American cities echoes moments of deep division in US history, raising fears that the country is moving toward internal conflict. David, I found this pretty jarring to watch throughout the week, and there definitely are PR ramifications here. The framing and the messaging have been all over the place.

David Gallagher (03:35):
Yeah, and you and I talked about this earlier in the week, and I think if we thought we had more time, you were going to break down some of those frames, and maybe we can come back to that if we do have a moment. I think sometimes we have this opportunity in this discussion to step back a little bit and think what are some of the bigger questions or conversations we could be having as PR people. And I think this whole campaign raises some practical, pragmatic, maybe even forgive me, I said I wouldn’t get on a soapbox and maybe I will, but almost existential questions for us. If you think about how this administration is changing virtually every part of the landscape that we operate in, it’s changing the media and news environment, it’s in my view undermining the validity of the legal system, it’s forcing the business community to deal with an audience of one rather than the public, and it seems to be making the message that if you’ve got money and tanks, you’re pretty much the only game in town.

(04:25):
And I guess what I’m getting at is that if public opinion is being made not to matter, why do we matter? What’s the role of the PR person in a world where public opinion has been put to the side? I think that’s what we’re seeing unfold in slow motion, and I really hope that these interventions aren’t just setting the stage for intentional violence against American citizens.

Doug Downs (05:06):
And the juxtaposition of Trump’s persona, his narrative internationally, I mean Farzana talked about it off the top, being portrayed at least in the Jerusalem Post as a peacemaker. Locally, it depends on which outlet you watch, read, or listen to, peacemaker or warmaker. He’s changed one department from Department of Defense to Department of War. Right. So the entire narrative about his persona is changing.

David Gallagher (05:36):
I know you wanted to maybe extend on this story. What lessons can we glean from Trump’s communication style?

Doug Downs (05:46):
Well, there are some positive things. Andy West had a great post and Farzana, I think you were part of the panel on Trump and his communication style. And I said to Andy online, Trump is the most effective communicator of our age, fight me. And he said, no fight. He said, you’re right. Whether the effect is good or bad, that’s the whole discussion. Farzana and I did an interview for our Stories and Strategies podcast with Mark Lowe, and it doesn’t come out until October 21st, but we did the interview last week and Mark really touched on something that Trump does extremely well, and he called it the big idea, a good theatre for us to study as PR pros when it comes to the attention economy.

Mark Lowe (06:31):
It always has been, not just in terms of the attention economy, but throughout history, I think the two things feed each other. So obviously there are learnings that come from the commercial space and the branding space that come into politics. I think in our present moment, brands probably have more to learn from politicians than the other way round. So I would say whatever you think of Trump or whatever your political approach is, he’s a genius attention entrepreneur. And I think it’s no accident that his background was effectively as a TV producer because this is the first thing that he understands. He also understands the power of a mimetic idea, so a big idea which symbolises something really important. So the building of the wall is the prime example of that on the right, build that wall. It’s not a realistically achievable thing, but it is totemic. It symbolises something a lot bigger.

David Gallagher (07:24):
When does that air, Doug, the full interview?

Doug Downs (07:25):
October 21. So not next Tuesday, the Tuesday after.

David Gallagher (07:30):
Okay. I’ve got to give you a quick reaction, and I probably will be a little more passionate on this. I’m kind of responding, obviously as an American, I’m involved with several pro-democracy organisations and I recoil when people start a conversation saying whatever you think about Trump, I kind of know what’s going to come after that. So putting that to one side, I do struggle with trying to reduce the administration’s policies to a case study for brands. To me, that’s like saying what are the management lessons we can learn from Vladimir Putin? I think maybe there’s a lesson you could learn, but I don’t know if that’s the source I would go to. And these studies, these case studies, it’s not the same as the Gwyneth Paltrow astronomer case that we talked about a few weeks ago or the Cracker Barrel issue and its logo.

(08:17):
I know Mark and I think he’s a thoughtful guy, so I don’t mean to criticise this based on one little clip of an interview that I haven’t fully seen yet. He does make an interesting point about the wall being a memorable symbol, but the big idea wasn’t the wall. And I just want to make that true. The big idea in Trump 1.0 was us versus them. That was the idea. The wall was the symbol. I think in Trump 2.0, as your first story suggested, the new big idea is the enemy within. I don’t really know what the symbol is going to be for that, but I do have to point out I’m very reluctant to pretend like this is an abstract clinical analysis of a great presenter and that there are not real-world implications to what he’s trying to do and what these policies are.

Farzana Baduel (09:01):
I think it’s a fascinating age for communication and you can’t reduce it down to one or three lessons learned from the Trump administration. I mean, for instance, if you look at his advisers around him, both in his first tenure as well as the second, you had advisers like Steve Bannon who would talk about the art of using a velocity of messaging that just flows one after the other, so much so that the opposition doesn’t have time, because they’re always on the back foot, to actually counter the narratives being put in. And so you do have an awful lot of thinking in how to really undermine the opposition. So I think there are a lot of takeaways, but there are so many that you actually have to go into one particular aspect and then draw the lessons rather than the entire administration. Every day there are lessons to be learned in terms of what’s effective and what hasn’t been effective.

David Gallagher (10:00):
So I’m biting my tongue, and as Farzana knows, there was a panel that I was invited off of for fear that I might not be able to unstick myself from the political end. So I’m trying not to do that here. But I have to say, as communications advisers, are we really saying that the lessons we can learn from this administration are flood the zone with misinformation, challenge every institution and system, blackmail the media environment? Is that really what we’re saying are the lessons we can learn? Are there actual discernible, useful, positive messages? And if we are, are we going to shine a light on things like the wall? And I say, in my view, normalise using symbols for bigger ideas that I don’t think any of us would actually support in any context or environment. I just feel like we’re running the risk of trivialising and normalising acts from this administration in the communication space that we’re going to regret. We’re going to look back and say, we probably didn’t see this for what it was, and we tried to make it similar to any other type of case study that we’d look at. I just think that’s a dangerous thing for us to do. Where are we going next, Farzana? Remind me what we’ve got next.

Farzana Baduel (11:11):
Next, we have leading in the age of compounding crisis.

David Gallagher (11:15):
And I will try to make a little bit of a segue here. I think there were half a dozen events in the UK that I saw that were all about leading during this time of uncertainty. I went to one — great set of conversations — about how we can muster our better instincts to lead during this time of ambiguity. But an agency, a big agency called FleishmanHillard — I have to acknowledge I did have some connection to them when I was at Omnicom — issued a report, and it’s one of the better reports I’ve seen in this space. It’s called Leading through the Era of Compounding Crisis.

I like that for a couple of reasons. One, my own consultancy uses the word compound, so I think it’s an interesting way of looking at the cumulative effect — that we can no longer look at a crisis and put it in a certain category on the shelf. It does have a complex, cumulative effect and it tends to morph into other types of issues.

They touch on a lot of issues that are personal areas of interest of mine — misinformation (I’ve been trying for at least two years to get companies to think about this as a corporate issue rather than just a government or public health issue). They talk about cybersecurity, kind of related to misinformation. They talk about geopolitical uncertainty.

This is the last thing I’ll probably say about Trump today. Nobody wants to actually label that. I’ve been in 50 meetings with chief communications officers and they will talk about American policy, they’ll talk about geopolitical uncertainty, but they don’t want to name what’s actually happening and what’s behind that. I’ll put that to one side.

The thing that I thought was really interesting though — and I did want your particular reaction — they talked about crisis as an impact on profit. And for some reason that headline just really jumped out for me. I thought, I’ve been talking about crisis for years and its impact on reputation, value of reputation, trust, institutional trust, and I think that’s the right thing to do.

I don’t want to get a whole bunch of emails saying I shouldn’t back away from that. We do need to think about institutional trust and reputation. But when you frame the impact of a crisis in the language that I think most CEOs and boards are sensitive to, you say, “This is actually going to impact your EBIT in the next quarter if you don’t deal with it this way,” you’ve got their attention. And for some reason that just struck me as a masterful way of talking about this. Maybe everybody’s been talking about it and I’m just hearing it for the first time, but have you heard crisis management framed as margin protection?

Farzana Baduel (13:46):
Yeah, absolutely. Because I’ve spent 16 years working across government and corporate and also charities. And it’s really interesting because the people who are very attuned to reputation as an asset are the politicians, because they know that’s their currency and that’s what’s going to help them remain in power. And the others are charities because they rely upon trust for donations and for delivering their work.

But the ones that don’t sometimes get it are usually the private sector, because if you look at a lot of the leadership, the CEOs often come from a finance background. And so therefore, as a former accountant myself, the way that I normally communicate with boards and with CEOs is by really bringing in that language so that they can understand. There’s no point talking to them about these vague, abstract terms.

What I talk to them about instead is, “Well, actually this company in your sector had a reputational crisis and here’s the lovely little graph about their stock market price and how it was there — and then it ended there.” And that’s enough to scare the bejesus out of them into actually understanding the value of it.

So I think going to leadership in the corporate world, particularly those with a financial background (and often the CFOs who also release the budgets for the comms side) is really about speaking their language. And that’s classic PR. PR shouldn’t be us PR people assuming everyone else is a PR person and has the same passion and understanding and nuance of what PR is.

But effective communications, what PR should do, is know their audience. If the audience are money men or money women, you need to talk in that language. So you talk about reputation as a balance sheet item. You talk about story in terms of value. And you demonstrate evidential points and you bring it close to home by saying, “Here’s a lovely case study of your mates in your industry and what happened to them.” And one of the biggest motivators in life — and this is general — is fear and the avoidance of pain.

Doug Downs (15:42):
There was an Oxfam study done, I think about 10 years ago, looking at the impact of crisis on stock prices, because it always fascinated me — the BP oil spill, right? In crisis training we were always using that example. And what the Oxfam study found basically was that the perception of how a company responded to a crisis is what impacts the stock price.

If the company is perceived to have responded poorly, there’s absolutely a negative effect on the stock price. It does tick back upward, but it’s very slow — as in, a couple of years to get back to where it was. Whereas if a company is perceived to have responded well to a crisis, there’s the dip, but then there’s this automatic rebound and a monetary benefit. The company’s stock price actually benefits from the crisis having happened if you are perceived to have recovered well.

Farzana Baduel (16:38):
I mean, actually it can be harnessed — crisis — to demonstrate how effective you are. Because if you look at it, crisis, I think the Chinese have a double meaning for the word crisis.

Doug Downs (16:46):
Yeah, I’ve heard that.

Farzana Baduel (16:46):
Yeah, it also means opportunity. And I think you look at crisis as an opportunity to demonstrate to your stakeholders, both internal and external, that you know what, we’ve got it. Because the biggest issue in crisis is not actually the underlying crisis, it’s the response to it. Time and time again, we see it all again, a non-apology, sorry not sorry, late apology, not really getting a handle and a grip on it.

Doug Downs (17:22):
I’m sorry you were offended. I’m sorry if you didn’t understand.

Farzana Baduel (17:24):
Yeah, clearly your issue, not mine. And so that is the issue. So I think when a crisis happens in your organisation, instead of thinking, oh no, actually think to yourself, oh, let’s lean in, here’s an opportunity, let’s demonstrate we know what we’re doing and let’s just make sure. And it’s not rocket science. An apology should be an apology. It should be heartfelt, quick, and none of it is complicated. But it’s extraordinary how every time there’s a public crisis, PRs get together and say, what were they thinking?

David Gallagher (17:58):
There’s a great little mini case, and I’ve mentioned this podcast before, Compounding Business, about Deloitte and basically a report they prepared for the Australian government and used AI, which I think most consultancies do, and I think that was probably disclosed, I can’t remember that part of it. But the report had several hallucinations in it, some quotes attributed to people that didn’t exist and references to things that weren’t there.

And Deloitte refunded, my understanding, part of the fee for this but didn’t apologise and didn’t really acknowledge it further than that. And to your point, Farzana, I think that was a missed opportunity to acknowledge the wrong but actually, if not turn this into an asset, at least turn it into a teachable, learnable moment and set some standards going forward. So Farzana, tell us about this Netflix thing that you spoke about. You mentioned you were doing this and I misunderstood. I was in Mayfair and there was a big Netflix filming going on, and I thought you were being filmed there, and I realised actually it was something else. So set us straight. What were you talking about?

Farzana Baduel (19:03):
Do we have a video that we can push in?

BBC Announcer (19:06):
This is an example of what’s known in the trade as an authorised access documentary. To assess the PR strategy for Brand Beckham, I was joined by Farzana Baduel, founder of public relations company Curzon PR.

Farzana Baduel (19:20):
I think you get an inkling of the strategic thinking behind the documentary in terms of the timing. So they dropped the trailer a couple of weeks ago, Fashion Month September happens to have a fashion brand. As we speak, there’s a pop-up at Selfridges. So there’s definitely a commercial play. And I think if you think about the brand trajectory of Victoria Beckham’s fashion brand, it was loss-making for a number of years, and it turned a corner when they went into beauty.

But also what happened when they went into beauty, all of a sudden she had to attract a mass market because a lot of people couldn’t afford a £2,000 jacket or skirt. And so she had to go and do the mass play. But now everyone can buy a bit of Victoria Beckham with an eyeliner, for instance. And so actually having a documentary on Netflix with mass appeal and mass exposure really helps from a commercial perspective.

So basically what happened is the BBC producer was looking for a PR spokesperson, came across this show, The Week UnSpun, and invited me in to come and have a chat about it. And it was incredibly daunting. I love the BBC, but they had me speaking on this segment right at the end, and they had the editor-in-chief of The Economist, two people from Panorama, and then I think they had the BBC’s Russia correspondent. So of course, as a PR, I was absolutely terrified to be in a room with these journalists.

And I don’t know what it is about PRs and journalists, I always feel really nervous around them and slightly fangirly. And I just had to really suppress my instinct to act professional in that BBC studio and not just jump on them and pitch a client’s story to them. So I was really proud of myself not to jump on them.

But really it was about whether there is a decline in journalism and the impact on society where documentaries are no longer having this sort of rigorous editorial control. Instead, you’ve got Victoria Beckham whose husband is producing documentaries from a production company that he’s a part owner of. So what sort of pushback, what sort of resistance, and do the public actually know the difference between a documentary, say, from Panorama versus one that’s created in-house?

And of course, you had Michelle Mone who did a documentary that landed poorly, but actually now you can see how good PR around a documentary can craft those moments of vulnerability so it doesn’t look like a puff piece. So that was what the conversation was about. It’s available on BBC The Media Show if you want to watch the full show. I had a glorified all of, I think, barely two minutes, but I was grateful just to be sitting in the same room as journalists that I admire. But absolutely fascinating. What’s your take, Doug and David?

Doug Downs (22:08):
Well, I thought you nailed it, that they’re going for a different audience and trying to diversify their message.

David Gallagher (22:14):
Well, I thought you nailed it too. I know we’re out of time. We need to get a former colleague of mine who did PR — actually a current colleague for both of the Beckhams after he left our agency — I would love to get him on and hear his take. But you raised some great questions about the role of documentaries. Do the average consumers understand how they’ve shifted? So I thought it was a great conversation. So much I wish we could have gotten into, but I think we touched on a lot. Doug, you want to take us out? We’re going to see you next week.

Doug Downs (22:44):
Live and in person, yes. I am coming to London. I’m going to spend some time with Farzana and then David and Farzana together. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a long way to travel, right, different hours and all that. I’ve been acclimating myself by eating beans on toast for the last two weeks, so I’ll be ready.

That is all the time we have today. I’ll leave you with a last thought, a quote from Jane Goodall, who passed away nine days ago: “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Well said.

Hope you enjoyed today’s discussion. Special thanks as always to producers Emily Page and David Jedi. The Week UnSpun is a co-production of Curzon Public Relations, Folgate Advisors and Stories and Strategies. If you’d like to join the Advisory Club mega chat, please get in touch with David on LinkedIn. See you next week. Have a killer weekend.