FIPP 2009: Top Five PR Manoeuvres
While FIPP had its fair share of genuinely inspiring and thought-provoking moments, there were times when it felt like watching QVC with better lighting – equipped with a mic and a stage and an audience full of the cream of the industry, some felt it necessary to plug their own fabulous product rather than engage in a non-partisan debate. Inevitable, but still groan-inducing. Here we bring you the top five moments of PR ridiculousness.
5. One of the major sponsors was paper manufacturers UPM, who also got their president and CEO, Jussi Pesonen, to address/lobby the audience about the issues facing the paper industry. Which was basically: keep buying paper, for the love of God. In logic so circuitous it might actually make sense, he argued for cutting down trees as the forests that replace them act as “carbon sinks”, sucking up the CO2 generated by other more evil industries (like those making e-readers presumably). He was followed by John Caris, from Dutch printers RSDB, who said of charging for content online: “Forget it… you have to use paper or you won’t survive”. I think that’s what he chants to himself so he can sleep at night.
4. What could have been an interesting presentation from Conde Nast International chairman Jonathan Newhouse, given the fall of Portfolio and the launch of Wired in Italy and the UK recently, turned out to be a cod-poetic treatise on how great print is. “I like the heft of a magazine, and the light glinting off its shiny pages… there is a pleasure in the tactile sensation of paper, and turning a world in your hands”. While he did then say that the internet was pretty cool (“Boredom is banished with a click of a key!”), he eventually ended with this rose-tinted, treacle-lined zinger: “Make a great magazine, with conviction and with emotion… love your readers… the future can be golden, and if you love magazines you can make it come true”. Ooh, I’m welling up!
3. Matt Brittin, Google’s UK MD, must have been a bit worried about opening day two, given the end of day one saw Jonathan Shephard, CEO of the organisers PPA, saying that content producers must “stand up to Google” and that there was “no axiomatic right for Google to build on the content of others”. So Brittin didn’t do like his CEO Eric Schmidt did, and royally piss off every journalist in the room by saying “Try to figure out what your consumer wants. If you piss off enough of them, you will not have any of them”. Instead he just said they weren’t a media company at all, and explained how great Product Search and AdSense are.
2. I’m sure Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, relished the opportunity to promote his big spaceship in front of a crowd of journalism professionals just as its test flights are underway, but if you could spot the synergy between him and the magazine world then you’ve got better eyesight than me. Aside from some tenuousness about keeping businesses compartmentalised but allowing innovations to travel between them, this was really just a nice break to look at some cool wing designs.
1. King of the PR-mongers wasn’t anyone speaking at the event, but a guy in the adjacent exhibition hall flogging some technology that used printed codes that linked to online content. This guy skipped the panel discussions to slide in the side door at the end of each one, and collar people leaving the stage. As an icebreaker when hectoring Gucci’s Nikolas Talonpoika, he offered to trace his family’s history; elsewhere he held people’s hands and stared into their eyes for up to 10 seconds before saying anything. Even PPA staff got pointless lectures on the brilliance of his company. He looked like he played tuba in a Finnish brass band. We salute you.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | May 7, 2009 12:53PM |