Your PR Architect

After having written about Chipotle restaurants' PR crises several times in the past year, I pledged I wouldn'tgo back to that trough again.  Yet, there's more negative news today about the beleaguered eatery. So, I'll just let the New York Daily News do the talking. This calls for more than a simple re-branding. How do you say "Leadership Change" in Spanish?

I'm completely aware that this article is paid for. It touts a Rochester, NY automobile dealership, and one employee's love of an heirloom Pontiac. Which we never actually see, because the dealer sponsoring the copy sells Chevrolets. 1966 Catalina, by Tino Rossini (Flickr: Catalina) [CC BY 2.0 ] via Wikimedia Commons Nonetheless, I have a quibble or two with it. Veteran PR practitioners will recognize this ode to Chevrolets as "advertorial." The new term is "sponsored content." If you want to know the price range of a new Corvette, that's about the only newsworthy aspect of the story. Whatever we call it, I made a good living writing it for a spectrum of clients. Sponsored content, well presented, demonstrates subject matter expertise that creates a halo effect for a client and/or his/her brand. To be fair, the Gannett Rochester operation labeled this honestly: "This story is produced and presented by our sponsor." Sponsored edito

Lethal Weapon -- a bromance ? FOX Broadcasting recently barraged Twitter users with paid Tweets to promote its TV re-boot of the 1980s “Lethal Weapon” films. You’ll need to be a superb Twitter surfer to avoid them. PR practitioners run a risk in carpet-bombing social media audiences with overhyped promotions. They can alienate as many potential viewers as they attract. Actor Danny Glover, not in the new Lethal Weapon TV series, Photo credit: Georges Biard [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons In fact, FOX got dusted by Twitter users, many of whom weren’t old enough to see the 1987-1998 Danny Glover-Mel Gibson buddy pictures. The TV studio – largely bankrupt of original ideas since “Glee” – positioned the new series as a bromance . That word didn’t exist in run of the original films, which leaned heavily on gunplay, banter, and exploding toilets. Is bromance anything more than a piece of forced marketing-speak? (Not counting the short-lived MTV reality series of 2008-09.)

By U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Aaron Peterson. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons As communicators, words are our currency. And lately, it feels as if we've been using counterfeit currency to grab readers and viewers. It's time for news writers and video pundits to change the way they use metaphors borrowed from authentic disasters and conflict. PR copywriters, too, although if we're at all sensitive, we won't describe a new product "exploding" across the marketplace. I hope. Last week, one of the presidential candidates flailed in the week's news coverage. Countless newsreaders said he had ignited a "firestorm" by lashing out at a Gold Star family that criticized him. A few days later, another story talked about a controversy "exploding" across the nation's newspapers. Firestorm? Get serious. A real fire storm is a wild fire of great intensity. It's something to be fought, and firefighters'