Hey politicians, write your own quotes don't just take whatever dribble the press office gives you...

A case in point:

“Whilst at this point in the bid development we have not identified specific schemes being proposed within constituencies, do be assured Coun Groves and the team are working closely with district partners and local stakeholders to ensure the content of the bid has the widest possible impact. We will also ensure we continue to keep local MPs informed as the bid develops.”

Nobody - not even the incredibly bureaucratic Cllr Susan Hinchcliffe - talks like this, yet we're supposed to believe that she actually spoke these words (they were in the press release after all, in quote marks and everything).

This comment is in response to a local MP, who happens to represent the constituency containing Cllr Hinchcliffe's ward, saying that his patch isn't getting a look in when it comes to doling out the transport money for the Leeds City Region. And it's a fudge because the politician (or rather the anonymous press officer - who used to work for the Labour Party no doubt) doesn't want to say the truth - "sorry Phil but we've looked at all the schemes, they've been assessed to death and the only ones that qualify have been put forward - I'm afraid none are in Shipley."

Instead we get a wiffly statement filled with partners, stakeholders and promises of information that doesn't, when you take it to bits, say anything at all about why some schemes are chosen and others aren't. The reader is none the wiser about how the West Yorkshire Combined Authority decides where to splash cash on boondoggles. I suspect this is deliberate- good grief we can't have regular folk understanding how we make funding decision for heaven's sake!

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To understand what's good marketing and what's bad marketing watch the rent-seekers

I'm a marketer. Got all the badges. Used to have a big job telling folk how to to it. And I'm here to remind you that there's two sorts of marketing - the good sort that's about a conversation with consumers so we can meet their needs (and maybe prompt them towards something they'd not thought about) and the bad sort that's about persuading authorities to fix the market so as to allow the client a temporary monopoly or other unfair advantage.

Of course, dear reader, I did the first sort and got plenty of flak for doing so. "Where did you get my name and address", "you're manipulating people with your clever personalisation", and "these profiling systems are exploiting people's personal data". But at no point did I collect, analyse or otherwise use data for any other purpose than to make my advertising and marketing pound stretch a little further - I just wanted to sell you what we'd got in the warehouse.

The bad marketing doesn't get the same criticism, we say little or nothing when the farmers' union lobbies for protectionism or the steel companies rant about 'unfair dumping'. Yet these businesses want to fix the market so as to profit - and that profit comes at your and my expense. It's like this:

Yet lobbying requires resources: the building and office supplies used by lobbyists, the fuel used to ferry lobbyists to and fro in their privilege-seeking efforts, but mostly the time and effort of the lobbyists themselves. And the greater the expected benefit of securing a special privilege, the greater is the amount of resources those in search of such privileges will use in that search. Such resource expenditures are beneficial to the rent-seekers themselves, for these expenditures increase these rent-seekers’ prospects of actually securing the sought-after special privileges that yield rents (that is, excess profits). But from society’s perspective these expenditures are wasteful: the building used to house lawyers who seek rents for their clients is not available to be used for genuinely productive activities (such as serving as office space for tech start-ups, or for lawyers who specialize in helping commercial clients write better contracts).

For lawyers in Don Boudreaux's screed you could insert 'lobbyists', 'PR Agencies', 'Public Affairs Consultants' and a host of other titles all dedicated to the job of getting politicians and bureaucrats to fix markets to the benefit of these agents' clients or employers.

So next time someone has a go at people like me - the good marketers who just use data and information to get you better products and services - point to the lobbyists and ask when that will stop. That is corporate welfare, market fixing and it happens at our cost - Boudreaux gives one example:

I have no idea what Mr. Stohr is paid. So let’s low-ball it – I mean really low-ball it: let’s assume that he’s paid a mere $100,000 annually. If so, then at least $33,333 worth of valuable resources – Mr. Stohr’s time, effort, and creativity – are spent simply trying to maintain that which ought not be maintained, namely, subsidies – a special privilege – for American aircraft manufacturers.

Multiply this a thousand - maybe ten thousand - times just for the USA and you see the extent to which the brilliance of us marketers is turned to the dark side promoting the market-fixing interests of large corporations, labour unions and NGOs. And then the same for every country on earth, the cost of lobbying and those fixed markets to us ordinary consumers is immense. If you want a campaign that will really change the world - put an end to rent-seeking driven by the lobby and by the avarice, the ignorance of politicians.

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On the manufacture of fake news

I know others have commented on this but it's pretty important that we understand that fake news is not simply something manufactured by 20 year old Macedonians or Russian spies. Throughout our media stories are created based on the flimsiest of evidence. Or indeed on evidence that really doesn't exist at all.

Here, from that impeccable establishment media source, The Economist:

The report does not say what proportion of the 53,000 sample tweets related to Ms Cox’s murder, and what share concerned Brexit more generally. When The Economist asked the authors for help, they declined to share their data with us, citing death threats they said they had received since the report’s release. So we undertook our own analysis, examining tweets from June and July that included the terms “Jo Cox” or “#JoCox”—some 341,000 unique messages. Of a random sample of 800 of these, none was celebratory, and just four seemed to be derogatory toward Ms Cox, criticising her support for Syrian refugees, for instance. From this, simple statistics suggest that the true number of tweets cheering the politician’s murder would lie between 0 and 1,500. (The Hope Not Hate report reproduces about 30.) Mr Awan notes that our sample did not include tweets that mentioned only the killer, Mr Mair; it is also likely that some tweets were deleted before our collection.

Now, as the report notes, it's terrible if even one Tweet celebrates a murder but the thrust of media coverage - driven by the original Hope Not Hate press release of this shocking study - was that such activity was commonplace when it wasn't.

We see this pattern repeated by newspapers again and again with the thread of fake news creation often going back to a press release from a worthy organisation like a charity or campaign group. From sugary drinks and booze through to vaping and fracking the misuse of evidence, even the creation of evidence simply to generate a news story, is widespread. Journalists used to challenge and question the claims made by those issuing press releases but it seems today that there's either no time or no inclination to do that basic journalistic job of checking the facts before publishing.

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Barak, BP and the principles of PR

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Now it may come as a surprise to those with any knowledge of my political career, but I won a prize for PR once. There it hangs – on the wall of the office – a facsimile of the front page of PR Week resplendent with my prize-winning prowess.

It is on this basis (and I appreciate that it’s a pretty limited basis) that I am going to talk about BP. Or “British Petroleum”, as the Americans like to call the company in an act of guilt displacement almost unmatched in recent times. It would appear that, because of a major oil spill at an American-owned, American-operated drilling platform commissioned by BP, the company has found itself up to its armpits in the proverbial sticky-stuff.

More importantly, what we have seen is the meeting of corporate PR with political PR – and the political PR of the American left to boot. Let me explain.

Effective crisis public relations is predicated on three things – honesty about what is happening, description of the remedies and response in place and the constant availability of senior management in presenting these issues. The theory – that stuff I got the prize for – says that this approach will work. There will still be a crisis but the firm will be seen as having accepted responsibility, responded appropriately and that this response is led by the most senior people in the organisation. BP have done this well – as an example of applying the crisis PR playbook it is spot on. But the playbook didn’t reckon on politics.

The principles (and I use that word loosely) of political PR can be described as – don’t accept responsibility, attack someone else or shift the blame and avoid any careful, factual consideration of how to respond to the particular crisis. Politics is – as the man said – a dirty game and BP have fallen foul of Barak Obama’s need to protect his rather fragile poll position. And the fact that there’s a ‘foreign’ company to blame is a godsend. POTUS couldn’t have wished for a bigger gift horse to snog.

Barak Obama’s actions – once he’d made it clear it was “somebody else’s fault” – have been driven by the polling responses, applause and focus groups not by any coherent strategy to address the problem. Every step has been to reinforce – through attack campaigns, dissembling and what amounts to misinformation – the culpability of a ‘foreign’ company (that happens to be 40% US-owned). The full might of the Obama machine – press, PR, social media – has been directed to blaming BP rather than to working with the company to address the problem.

And, sad to relate, this negative, unpleasant and (according to the PR textbook) wrong campaign is working. It’s a sad world.



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PR, lobbying and the logic of bribery

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To appreciate what follows you need to understand the purpose of marketing. Now a great deal of guff and twaddle has been written – some of it very expensively – about marketing. There are more definitions of this dark art than I’ve had dinners.

The primary function of marketing is to create monopoly. Forget about the process definitions or the self-serving Chartered Institute of Marketing descriptions – our aim as marketers is to create the information imbalance allowing our employing company to realise a profit.

To create this temporary monopoly there are a range of options, strategies and tactics available to the marketer. Here are two of them:

1. Invest in brand development, advertising and direct marketing with the aim of securing your product a dominant place in the mind of the potential buyer. This takes a long time, costs a great deal of money and requires a whole load of spending every year.

2. Invest in persuading the Government to change regulation, pass laws and allocate budgets so as to protect your business interests. This is the role now adopted by many PR & lobbying agencies and is pretty cheap and very effective.

Now, so long as Government takes it upon itself to regulate the behaviour of businesses, it will always be in the interest of those businesses – alone or collectively – to target government rather than to target the buying public. Think about it for a minute – for £1 million pound in donations to the minister’s favorite charity (at present using the name Labour Party) and a hint of lucrative future consultancy employment you can get the Government to change the law protecting your industry from new entrants, innovation and foreign competition.

Compare that to the amounts you would need to spend on securing a dominant share of mind? Not just £1 million pounds this year but the same next year and the following years. In fact year after year until you decide you’ve had enough!

Some PR and lobbying has pushed aside other parts of the marketing business by offering a wholly debased product – unmeasurable chitter-chatter, access to “key decision-makers”, the buying of editorial coverage and the manipulation of the media agenda. Now we can add loads of pretty pointless flim-flam about social media as a new cherry on the top!

Don’t get me wrong – PR is a very useful tactical tool (and I even won a prize for it once) – but as a core communications strategy it can run fairly close to unethical. The logic of lobbying is, after all, barely distinguishable from the logic of bribery!

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