Guerrilla P.R. 2.0

Wage an Effective Publicity Campaign without Going Broke

Michael Levine

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061982866
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

The world's most widely used and seminal introduction to public relations—now fully revised and updated for the 21st century with online strategies that work

Every Fortune 500 corporation, movie star, and scandal queen knows that a good publicist is essential to building success and maintaining public support. But if you're a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or an undercapitalized beginner seeking an edge in a highly competitive arena, it's unlikely that you have your own high-powered publicist.

Guerrilla P.R. 2.0 offers all the resources necessary to mount your own campaign and get the media exposure you need. In clear and concise language, Michael Levine, one of the top public relations counselors in the country, reveals the same procedures he uses every day to get press on major stars—and how those strategies can be utilized on little or no budget. You'll learn how to think like a publicist and map out the perfect strategy for success.

1

A Brief History of Time…
and Newsweek and USA Today

Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

The Nature of Media

More than four decades ago, Marshall McLuhan, the father of modern communications, wrote these immortal words: “The medium is the message.”

Today I would amend that to “The medium is the media.” Our civilization is utterly dominated by the force of media. After our own families, no influence holds greater sway in shaping the text of our being than do the media that cloak us like an electronic membrane.

We all think of ourselves as unique, unlike any person past or present. Indeed, what gives human life its divine spark is the distinct quality of every individual. Yet, in many ways we are all the same. The task of market analysts, pollsters, and demographers is to identify those characteristics we share and to group us accordingly. If you are in your early fifties, male, Caucasian, a father of two, earn $100,000 or more, and listen to a Top 40 radio station, there are total strangers out there who know an awful lot about you. That’s because they understand a lot about your upbringing.

They know you watched The Mickey Mouse Club in the fifties, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in the sixties, and Saturday Night Live in the seventies; became environmentally conscious in the eighties; and were probably sorry ABC canceled Thirtysomething in the nineties. They’ve got your number because they understand the role the media have played in your life from the moment you Boomed as a Baby. Today, in America, we tune in to over 9,000 commercial radio stations, 1,100 television stations, 11,000 periodicals, and over 11,000 newspapers with a combined circulation of nearly seventy million. This doesn’t even take into account online radio stations, blogs, podcasts, video feeds, iTunes, and pay-per-view events.

These are the sources of our opinions on everything from nuclear disarmament to Madonna’s recent adoption. Nobody likes to be told what to think, but all of us, every single day, are told precisely what to think about.

As Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson show in their insightful book Age of Propaganda, the mass media are most effective in terms of persuading the public for two primary reasons: First, they teach new behavior; second, they let us know that certain behaviors are legitimate and appropriate. So if the media are encouraging certain buying patterns, fashion trends, and modes of thinking, the unstated message we receive is “It’s okay for me to like that, do that, feel that.”

In this way our culture evolves, is accelerated, and is disseminated. Like the transcontinental railroad of the nineteenth century, the media link every city, gully, farmhouse, and mountaintop in North America.

Regionalism is fading. The American accent is more uniform; our penchant for migration and blending in is like the smoothing out of a great national blanket. We are fast becoming one.

A common grammatical error occurs when people say “The media is” rather than “The media are” (“media” being the plural of “medium”). Yet, I sense people who say “the media is” are on to something. They perceive the many arms of the media—TV, newspapers, radio, etc.—as part of one monstrously monolithic creature. The media are “one,” too.

Consider “Baby Jessica” McClure, for whom my firm donated public relations services. Jessica was the toddler from Midland, Texas, who fell down a narrow pipe in her backyard in 1987. For thirty-six hours, America was mesmerized by press coverage of her rescue.

Acting as a concerned neighbor, the media conveyed Jessica’s plight to the nation. The private agony of the McClure family became the anguish of all America. Think of it: the temporary suffering of one “insignificant” little girl stopped the world’s most powerful country dead in its tracks.

(Then, to canonize the experience, the TV movie version of Jessica’s story made it to the small screen within a year. You may draw your own conclusions.)

Without those cameras there to catch it, and those TV stations to broadcast it, Baby Jessica’s ordeal would have made absolutely no impact on anyone other than her family and those who saved her. Because of the media, all of America for two days became part of Jessica’s family.

Contraction and Expansion

Journalists and talk-show hosts like to claim they’re in the information business or the news business. But you know and I know they’re in the money business just like everyone else. Because practically all media are privately held profit-making ventures, they behave much like any other enterprise, looking for ways to increase the bottom line.

To do that they must expand their consumer base—that is, their audience. They must give the customer what he or she wants. So if your local news station runs a few too many five-part specials on the illicit sex lives of nuns during sweeps month, remember they’re only trying to please the viewers.

Creating a successful product means citizens may not always get the information they need. A Harvard researcher found the average network sound bite from presidential campaigns dropped from 42.5 seconds per broadcast in 1968 to just under 10 seconds in 1988, where it appeared to stabilize; the number stayed the same through 1996. That translates into roughly sixteen words a night with which to make up our minds on who should run the country. We absorb more information, yet understand less than ever before.

This is a logical consequence of big media. Their existence depends on keeping the audience tuned in. If TV station “A” covers candidate “B” droning on about farm subsidies, most of the audience will probably switch to station “C” running a story about the stray cat raised by an affectionate pig. Station “A” would be wise to ditch candidate “B” and send a crew out to film Porky and Tabby.

Along with this contraction of information is a parallel expansion of media. Because social scientists have us so precisely categorized, outlets targeted to specific groups flourish. O: The Oprah Magazine caters to mature, high-income women. Men’s Health appeals to middle-income, fast-tracker men. Essence aims for black women.

Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul, and Mary, tells a great story in his stage show to illustrate how narrowly focused we’ve become as a society. In the 1940s and 1950s we had the all-encompassing Life magazine. Then we cropped our vision down to People magazine in the seventies (all of Life wasn’t good enough anymore). Things tightened up even more with Us. Now we have Self. Somewhere, there’s just gotta be a magazine just for you. I can just imagine it: on sale now, Fred Morgenstern Monthly.

Not only do we see more media outlets, but the flow of information has likewise increased dramatically during the past few years. Fax machines, cell phones, high-speed modems, fiber-optic cable, low-power TV, satellite downlinks—all have reshaped the way we get our information, when we get it, and what we do with it. And the Internet has changed things even more. (See Chapter 4.)

During China’s “Goddess of Democracy” protests in 1989, the students kept in touch with the outside world via fax. Instantly, China seemed to leap forward from feudal empire to modern nation. Vietnam was the first “we’ll be right back after these messages” war. As napalm rained down on the jungle we saw the war live as it happened. We had no time to process information or analyze events as we were barraged by them. Because of improved communications, the Gulf War had the same effect, only with infinitely more drama. The media may have accelerated the process of dissemination, but as we found out in the days of the first supersonic jets, breaking the sound barrier did not, as some scientists feared, cause planes to disintegrate. Likewise, instant news did not cause us to psychologically disintegrate.

With the Iraq War and its “embedded” reporters, access was quick but limited. We got the information immediately, but not all the information—at least, not at first. Technology had improved to the point that reporters could report on any event anywhere in the world at any time and it would be seen immediately, not after the tape (or earlier, film) had been sent and processed and edited. Vietnam may have started the trend, but by Iraq, technology had really changed the entire process forever.

There’s no way to assess what this means to society. To be carpet-bombed by information must have far-reaching consequences to our civilization, but that’s for future observers to sort out. Today, we face an intimidating media-driven culture. Anyone looking to succeed in business must first master the fundamentals of navigating the media. To reach customers, donors, or investors—to reach the public—one must rely on the media as the prime intermediary. The methodology to achieve this is known as public relations.

The Nature of Public Relations

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

—Robert Frost

I’m often asked whether public relations is a science or an art. That’s a valid question. In science, two plus two equals four. It will always equal four whether added by a Republican from Iowa, a shaman from New Guinea, or an alien from Planet X. However, in public relations, two plus two may equal four. It may equal five. It may equal zero today and fifty tomorrow.

Public relations is an art.

As in any art, there are rules of form, proven techniques, and standards of excellence. But overall, it’s a mercurial enterprise, where instinct is as legitimate as convention. Public relations was once defined as the ability to provide the answers before the public knows enough to ask the questions. Another P.R. pundit once stated, “We don’t persuade people. We simply offer them reasons to persuade themselves.”

Consider it more than simply a way to attract attention or influence people toward buying your product. Public relations is an art that creates an image (hopefully, an accurate one, but certainly a polished one) of you and your business, and presents it in a controlled, planned fashion that will convey exactly what you want to say without having to be obvious about it.

It becomes a question of credibility. If your neighbor tells you that the Dow Jones average for today has dropped 100 points, you would have no reason to disbelieve him, but you wouldn’t necessarily take his information as unquestionably reliable. Maybe your friend got the information wrong, or received it from an unreliable source. He could have just found out at the bar after his third drink, or from a former stockbroker who’s bitter about being fired from his job. He has, if not low, then at least questionable credibility on that subject.

But if The News Hour with Jim Lehrer tells you that stocks dropped 100 points, you will probably not even consider questioning that statement. To be fair, you’d have little reason to question it. Serving as a respected news outlet for decades, The News Hour delivers stock reports every day from reliable sources and has very high credibility. Even if the show makes a mistake, you are more likely to believe it than your neighbor’s true information.

I define what I do as gift-wrapping. If you package a bracelet in a Tiffany box, it will have a higher perceived value than if presented in a Kmart box. Same bracelet, different perception.

Consider the case of one Jean-Claude Baker, the adopted son of Josephine Baker, who owns a restaurant in Manhattan he named after his “maman”: Chez Josephine. In the spring of 2007, Baker, as is his custom, decided to send postcards with images of Maman to 15,000 of his closest friends. A P.R. standard: the targeted mailing.

Because the image he had chosen for the 2007 year’s postcard was, at least technically, a bit risqué (Ms. Baker was depicted topless), Jean-Claude decided to make sure his mailing would be in compliance with the postal code. No sense spending a lot of money on postcards and postage if the cards won’t make it through the mail.

He set out to his local post office in Manhattan, showed the clerk behind a window the postcard, and asked if there would be any problem with the mailing. The clerk took a look and, without consulting a superior, said the image was pornographic and could not be sent uncensored through the mail.

Jean-Claude felt the ruling was a little prudish, but he didn’t want to violate the law. He had the image on the postcards altered so that the word “CENSORED” appeared over Maman’s mammary glands. But no, he was told once again that a tiny amount of breast was visible, and the postcards were not suitable for the U.S. Mails.

Mr. Baker, who does not lack for Guerrilla instincts, had a third version of the image (which had always been an illustration, not a photograph) made, covering any part the Post Office might find offensive. That incarnation was allowed through.

Still, it ate at him (and at his desire for publicity). Jean-Claude contacted civil liberties attorneys and postal attorneys, as well as officials of the U.S. Postal Service itself. In the end, it was agreed that the original illustration, unaltered, would always have been acceptable for mailing.

Some business owners might have been put out by such a rigmarole, while others might simply have accepted the original ruling and moved on with the censored mailing. Not Jean-Claude Baker.

He got on the phone to the press.

On May 9, 2007, an article chronicling the case of Chez Josephine v. U.S. Postal Service appeared in the “About New York” section of the New York Times. It noted, among other things, that Jean-Claude, whom it said had been running his restaurant “unburdened by excess modesty for 21 years,” decided to send out the original postcards, image unsullied, to his 15,000 patrons. He even got an apology from the Post Office.

And he set a press conference for the day of the mailing—one day after postal rates increased by two cents. It was expected to be well attended.

What strikes some people as tasteless self-promotion can be a brilliant Guerrilla P.R. maneuver. Here, while admittedly Jean-Claude was stuck with the bill for 15,000 postcards and had to pay an extra $300 (the two-cent postage increase, which wouldn’t have been necessary if the first postcards had been approved) to send them, he also came away with a charming story in the most visible newspaper in the country—and certainly in the city in which his business is run—for the cost of a phone call.

It’s even a funny story. But where another business owner might have seen an embarrassment (Baker said the postal clerk had said, loudly, in a crowded Post Office, that he was trying to send “pornographic advertising”), Jean-Claude saw an opportunity. And for one day, at least, his restaurant on West Forty-second Street was featured in hundreds of thousands of newspapers in his hometown.

And now, he’s gotten me to write about it in this book. Bravo, Jean-Claude!

Perception Is Reality

Don Burr, former CEO of a popular low-cost 1980s airline, once said, “In the airline industry, if passengers see coffee stains on the food tray, they assume the engine maintenance isn’t done right.” That may seem irrational, but in this game, perception, not the objective truth, matters most.

It’s a matter of broken windows, as defined by a study of crime areas by two sociologists in the 1980s. In James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling’s “Broken Windows,” published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1982, it was put forth that when a tiny crime—a broken window in a remote warehouse—was left unrepaired, it encouraged the perception that the area was not well policed, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Other Books by Michael Levine
• Copyright
• About the Publisher