PR is alive and well ... and that's no joke

“You have seen an absolutely bizarre finish to Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. The Mets are not only alive: They are well. And they will play the Red Sox in Game 7 tomorrow.”

--Announcer Vin Scully

April Fool’s Day is here. That means the young baseball season is firmly in the honeymoon phase, that glorious time of the year when fan bases of good teams and bad teams alike think their team will win it all, their spring-is-in-the-air hallucinations defying the unfortunate logic that for most will not be apparent for weeks to come.

Forty years ago, the only fan bases whose spring dreams turned into fall reality turned out to be those of the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox. Their respective journeys led them all to the emotional precipice of Game 6 of the World Series. What followed was a rally for the ages, with the Mets forcing a Game 7 after being down by two runs, with two outs and no one on base, in the bottom of the 10th inning. The next game, they won again, the dogpile of white and blue and orange on the Shea Stadium mound immortalizing the delirious end forevermore.

The Red Sox? They were left to ponder how a team that could come that close to being showered with the champagne that had been placed in their locker room before being quickly removed could somehow find a way to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.

Rock/PR/hard place

You think the Mets were counted out after the second out? Try the public relations industry.

The PR biz is kind of like Matt Damon in “Goodwill Hunting.” No matter how many times Robin Williams says “it’s not your fault,” it takes awhile for it to break down in tears. But in reality, when people say “PR is dead,” it really isn’t PR’s fault. PR’s stock in trade is generating (hopefully positive) media coverage on behalf of its clients and/or its clients’ products or services. The result is so-called “earned” media, the singular effectiveness of which is the credibility of the third-party endorsement that a positive article or segment provides.

The problem is that the pool of journalists is shrinking – in large part because there are fewer places for them to work. More than 3,200 newspapers have shut down in the U.S. alone since 2005. Local news has perhaps suffered the most: Enough local media outlets have shut down that the term “media desert” has sprung up to describe the dearth of local news available, depending upon where one lives. This is all a problem for democracy. It is also a problem if you’re a PR person.

Not your fault? Cry it out. But where’s my ROI? The bottom line is still the bottom line.

And Mets fans thought they had a big rally

A funny thing though is happening on the way to the professional outhouse: PR is making a comeback.

And who would have thought that the impetus for the rally would be none other than the culprit that put the industry a few runs behind in the first place: technology. Little did anyone know what would happen when the Internet became ubiquitous: that traditional media outlets would get marginalized because people would no longer have to wait to get their news from them. Not to mention what would happen when social media would take over our lives: that everyone would, essentially, become a journalist. Thus rendering traditional journalists less meaningful, particularly when things got to the point where we could no longer tell the difference between the real news stories and the fake ones.

Technology? As with everything else, it seems, I am talking about AI. Turns out its search models love nothing more than earned media. The very same earned media that PR exists to create. Why? Because earned media is the most credible. According to a recent Muck Rack study, more than 95% of the links cited in AI responses come from non-paid sources, and 85% of those are from earned media. SEO? It likes keywords and backlinks. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization? In an age of authenticity, it prefers corroborated content. Meaning, in English, traditional media coverage.

PR is a lot harder than it looks. I will forever remember my last day as a journalist. My colleagues took me to lunch, where they proceeded to roast me for my pending move to what they perceived to be the easier side of the street. And I largely believed them. What I would soon find out, however, is that it is hard work to be constantly caught between what the clients want – consistent media coverage, all of which is positive – and what journalists want – media coverage that comes on their terms, whether it is positive or not.

Earned media is exactly that: earned media. It wasn’t bought or posted. It was earned. By thinking up the pitch in the first place. By getting it approved internally. By knowing what journalist(s) to take it to. By talking them into writing or talking about it. By doing all one can to secure that what comes out is as positive as possible.

Technology: That which taketh away, giveth.

Alive and well, indeed.

Dreaming big dreams, too.

See you all in the World Series.

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