It's difficult to imagine how Detroit could further botch its pitch for a federal bailout. The latest PR disaster for the automakers came before the three CEOs of Chrysler, Ford and GM even set foot in the Capitol yesterday.
“It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high-hat and tuxedo,” quipped Rep. Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat taking part in the hearings.
Lawmakers picked up that outrage and ran with it from there.
The automakers have a strong case for a bailout but have made little progress on the PR front presenting such a move as both necessary and vital to the U.S. economy. Part of the problem is a complete lack of ownership (or remorse) for its current state that borders on denial.
Harris makes the case that GM has adapted in recent years and solely blames the global financial crisis for the doldrums. Former Rep. Dick Gephardt, who’s been cashing checks from Detroit, made a similar case in a letter to the Times about Friedman’s column, although he also took a whack at federal energy policy as another culprit.
Protecting management and mounting a defensive PR push for a $25 billion check is not the way to win hearts and minds of taxpayers and lawmakers, but it’s the only message from Detroit that’s getting through.
A little humility in admitting they were late to the hybrid market and pushed a truck-heavy slate of vehicles when the consumer tide was on the verge of change would do wonders toward chipping away at the perception of an out-of-touch industry traveling on a private jet to nowhere.
New York media treasure Pete Hamill and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol erupted into a verbal brawl yesterday over the Pentagon’s ban on showing pictures of coffins of returning soldiers from Iraq.
Voice of the people Hamill can’t get enough of them, while the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard sees it all a bit unseemly.
Kristol defended the restriction as a “matter of taste.” Hamill, a former columnist and editor-in-chief of both the New York Daily News and New York Post, wants as many coffin pictures as it takes to arouse public opinion against the continued occupation of Iraq. He wants images of “blood on the ground.” Kristol retorted that people understand soldiers die in wars. Americans, after all, are not “idiots,” he said.
Hamill bemoaned tight military control over the media that was instituted after Vietnam, where reporters could go anywhere they wanted to report on the fighting. Kristol doesn’t believe the current media are hindered by the Pentagon. He noted that CBS, a mainstream media outfit, broke the news about Abu Ghraib.
Christopher Buckley, author of "Thank You for Smoking" and contributor to the Daily Beast website, agreed that a Vietnam “mindset” controls policymakers in the Pentagon. He sided with Kristol about controlling media access in the age of the 24/7 news cycle. “Just imagine if CNN was around during the D-Day invasion,” he said. A few days after the beaches were taken and allied forces were “mired in the hedgerows,” CNN would have questioned “whether the invasion was worth it.”
Buckley added a dose of levity to the proceeding. In talking about his high-profile endorsement of Barack Obama, which led to his departure from the National Review, Buckley said he is still waiting for his ambassadorship. Host Arianna Huffington kidded that Buckley may be appointed to the Court of St. James. “More like Equatorial Guinea,” he replied.
While the green era is entrenched among us, one long-held tenet of the environmental movement has come under scrutiny: recycling.
Long the backbone of the righteous, environmentally conscious citizen, recycling got a renewed (no pun intended) look at its efficacy from Popular Mechanics magazine this month.
What could be better than re-using the material from a product that has already been spent, right? Well, what if more energy is going into to hauling material and producing the recycled product? That would certainly take the wind out of the sales of many a green citizen and marketing campaign.
PM’s Alex Hutchinson took an in-depth look at whether we’re doing more harm than good in recycling 82 million tons of garbage each year. The magazine is followed up on a New York Times Magazine piece from the 1990s that found some contradictions and inconsistencies in the recycling craze – for example, saving a tree creates less demand for wood pulp so timber companies sell their tree farms … maybe to condo developers.
But the price of recyclable products has risen since then and some municipalities are getting paid for their waste when, at the outset of recycling, towns were previously paying to have it hauled away.
The answer to the question about recycling, like most big questions in our society, is “it depends,” although it seems like an overall positive to me.
As PM notes, it takes 96 percent less energy to make aluminum from recycled cans than it does from its raw form of bauxite. Net win for recycling there as there is with plastic bottles (76 percent less) and newsprint (45%). But recycled glass only uses about 21 percent less energy than starting from scratch, and some materials are “downcycled” into products that can’t be further recycled like synthetic clothing fibers or carpets.
Bad PR Play of the Day: The Tampa Bay Rays, the worst-to-first franchise whose fairytale season ended abruptly in the World Series last month, are raising ticket prices on their fans, who saw the first winning season in Rays history in 2008. Granted, the increase is relatively small. But any increase in this economic climate is a bad play. The PR-challenged NFL, by contrast, said last week it would cut playoff tickets prices by 10 percent and wound up with this PR-staffer-couldn’t-have-written-it-better headline from Reuters: “Price of NFL Playoff Tickets Lowered to Help Fans.”
Svelte Sells? Further validating the Edelman-assisted Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, researchers in Australia found that skinny models could be turning off consumers in advertising while plus-sized models could be sparking them to buy. Female consumers in the coveted 18 to 25 demo said they felt better and more likely to buy a product after viewing images of “larger” models after responding indifferently to the thin spokeswomen.
Cheers for the Downturn: The old joke that liquor stores and lawyers always see a recession boom is proving to at least be half-true. Although the Times reported that even law firms are swinging the ax these days, the Daily News said today that the booze business is providing at least some hope for New Yorks. As all else is failing for many in the Big Apple, bartending school is looking better and better. Bartending schools have seen an enrollment spike of as much as 25 percent, the News reported today, as folks look for second (or first) recession-proof jobs in the pubs.
Rather than preparing a bust for the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame to mark his massive achievement of getting Yahoo up and running, Yang now slithers from the corporate stage. His stubbornness surrounding a refusal to negotiate in good faith a takeover bid from Microsoft has forever tarnished Yang's reputation. [Full disclosure: this blogger has never owned directly a single share of either Yahoo or Microsoft.]
Yang is guilty of pride of ownership, putting personal goals and emotions way ahead of what is best for the enterprise and people that it employed. An entrepreneur like Yang never wants to sell out to an "evil empire" such as Microsoft. Life, however, is hard. Personal preferences must play second fiddle to the greater good, especially when you are not holding any aces in your hand. Yahoo was a lot bigger than Yang. It is now vastly diminished.
Yahoo is yesterday's news in the fast-moving technology world. It is toast. The 40-year-old Yang is responsible for the sorry state that the Google laggard finds itself in these days. Jerry's "just say no" response to Microsoft's $47.5B takeover offer for Yahoo has left the company in the deep hole that it finds itself in. That Microsoft offer was pegged at $33 a share, a far cry from the current $10.63 price that Yahoo stock is currently trading for.
Yahoo is paying dearly for Jerry's grand hubris. His back-up plan, an advertising program with Google, has now collapsed and the former high-flier is laying off workers as fast as it can issue pink slips. Jerry, at least, has a gig for now.
Yang's resignation highlights in boldface what is wrong with Corporate America. He should have been canned by the board for stiffing last year's Microsoft offer.
The board was a patsy. Where was Yahoo's management-loving directors such as Gary Wilson, ex-CEO of Northwest Air; Ron Burkle, supermarket magnate and dear buddy of Bill Clinton; Eric Hippeau, former CEO of Ziff-Davis, and Vyonesh Joshi, executive VP at Hewlett-Packard?
They will now go crawling to Redmond, Wash., to beg Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to renew his acquisition bid. That bid will be a fraction of the original offer, which will be Yang's sorry legacy.
Activist investor Carl Icahn pressured Yang to accept the Microsoft bid. He won a battle with Yahoo, which placed two allies on the board: Frank Biondi (ex-CEO of Viacom) and Mark Chapple (president of Hawkeye Investments) during the summer.
Social media-powered moms took Johnson & Johnson out to the digital woodshed over the weekend in the latest show of PR savvy from that consumer bloc online.
A Tweeting and blogging backlash against a Motrin ad caused J&J’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare to pull the ad and apologize today.
Many furious mothers saw the campaign suggesting that moms who carry babies close to the body in “bjorns” or other harnesses tend to get more aches and pains than others.
“These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean, I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain; it’s for my kid,” reads the ad’s female voice-over. “Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. And so if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.”
Kathy Widmer, VP of marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare, posted a statement online today to apologize and say the company is removing the ad from all media. “We are parents ourselves and we take feedback from moms very seriously,” Widmer assured.
Granted, there is a backlash online against the so-called MotrinMoms with many seeing an overreaction on their part. But there’s no question mobilized digital moms are a force to be reckoned with in the consumer products space and that more advertisers and PR firms will be giving their campaigns a final mommy-proofing before they’re launched.
Goldman Sachs is America’s best managed financial company. It is Wall Street’s leader and since September (thanks to the Federal Reserve Board's decision to shore up the financial system) the No. 4 commercial bank in the land.
Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein, who received $68.5M in cash and stock in `07, is among those executives who asked the board’s compensation committee to skip bonuses this year. Don't fret about them. The seven key guys won’t be showing up in soup kitchens any time soon. They will receive a $600K pay packet in `08. A Goldman spokesperson says the execs are passing up their bonuses because it is the “right thing to do.” You can say that again.
This blogger understands that the bulk of Wall Street comp is tied to bonuses, but when does the reality that “happy days are not here again” sink in? The Goldman execs did the comp committee and its chairman James Johnson, the former CEO of Fannie Mae, a huge favor. Goldman’s stock is down 60 percent this year. Blankfein is cutting the 32,000-member work force by 10 percent. The company reported a 71 percent drop in third-quarter net income to $810M. Revenues were down 51 percent to $6B.
Though Goldman’s performance tops competitors on Wall Street, which these days resembles something out of “Night of the Living Dead,” it is not up to the bank’s sterling track record. Also, Goldman is likely to report its first-ever loss as a publicly traded company when it reports full-year results in December. The impending PR fallout from that deficit would have been compounded had the comp committee doled out bonuses to the Big Seven. The media would have roasted Johnson and the rest of the comp committee.
Hats off to Blankfein for a savvy PR move, though one wonders how any executive deserves a one-year compensation haul of $68M.
In a play reminiscent of 
Kristol defended the restriction as a “matter of taste.” Hamill, a former columnist and editor-in-chief of both the New York Daily News and New York Post, wants as many coffin pictures as it takes to arouse public opinion against the continued occupation of Iraq. He wants images of “blood on the ground.” Kristol retorted that people understand soldiers die in wars. Americans, after all, are not “idiots,” he said.
What could be better than re-using the material from a product that has already been spent, right? Well, what if more energy is going into to hauling material and producing the recycled product? That would certainly take the wind out of the sales of many a green citizen and marketing campaign.
Rather than preparing a bust for the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame to mark his massive achievement of getting Yahoo up and running, Yang now slithers from the corporate stage. His stubbornness surrounding a refusal to negotiate in good faith a takeover bid from Microsoft has forever tarnished Yang's reputation. [Full disclosure: this blogger has never owned directly a single share of either Yahoo or Microsoft.]
That is why the decision of 
