Your PR Architect

Last week, my pal Dresden Engle invited me to a big reveal: the re-branding of the Ad Council of Rochester to Causewave Community Partners . The old Ad Council organization, founded decades ago by an advertising manager at Eastman Kodak Co., orchestrated community-wide campaigns that grew awareness for water pollution, distracted driving, and other important issues. And it helped dozens of not-for-profit organizations earn visibility in regional media. The fresh branding helps Causewave differentiate itself from other regional Advertising Councils, as well as the national Ad Council. Now, about the organization's causes: At the event, I met a few PR professionals who are on the high side of age 50. They had that look ; they were networking, looking for contacts who might help them find job opportunities. These pros were in the minority; most of the Causewave celebrants were much younger. As a demographic snapshot, the job seekers were older, with salt-and-pepper hair an...

A few weeks ago, I chided pen make Bic for its sexist ads. I'm not the only one.  Here's an amusing take on what others did with the Bic ad campaign:  http://magazine.good.is/articles/bad-ad-backfires?utm_source=TSE&utm_medium=FB&utm_campaign=pd&ts_pid=2

Thousands of years ago, Bedrock Motors mailed Fred Flintstone a fake granite car key. The mailer promised a chance at starting a new car. Fred went over to the dealer, tried the key, and it didn't work. He was annoyed and left to shoot pool with Barney. By Schumi4ever (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)] , via Wikimedia Commons And this hoary old marketing technique has continued unchanged ever since. I'm sick of it. Even more today, because the fake keys sent by my town's Dodge dealer are plastic and metal -- and therefore not recyclable. If the dealer sends out 1,000s of key mailers twice a year, that's a needless burden on the waste stream. It's bad PR for his business if I mention the name of the Dodge dealer here. But there's just one Dodge dealer in my town. Its name rhymes with "arena." You can figure this out. So...

My earliest PR successes came from creating newsletters for business-to-business clients, alumni, and employees. These publications -- semi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly -- each helped grow relationships between my clients and their constituents (customers). And none of them exist today. Casualties of the digital age? In some ways. In the 1980s, desktop publishing gave almost everyone the power of the press. And some resulting newsletters were ghastly, much like some of today's blogs. But, as the internet grew, printing and mailing costs increased, and managers and marketers switched to online content: e-newsletters, or some other digital solutions. Those managers overlooked an important factor: their audiences . People who view a newsletter as an emblem of a relationship. They're accustomed to physical connections, and willingly invest their resources and time to support those relationships. After spending their workday staring at an optically challenging computer scree...