PRWeek (my old employer) is having a tournament of PR blogs, and the PR blogosphere hasn't been this excited since some shit happened with Apple's PR department about some gadget one time, probably! Thanks to his campaign of vote-trolling spam, Kerr's spitballed blog about license plates and delis defeated PR tech nerd/ Edelman blogger god Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion, and Kerr is taking the opportunity to tell Edelman—the Wal-Mart-flacking superfirm that surely makes Kerr's annual income in about an hour—that they suck the big one:

Hi everybody:

I just wanted to give you all a very sincere thank you for taking the time and clicking through to vote for my blog at PR Week's blog competition last week.

Amazingly enough, my PR Rock and Roll blog beat Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion blog by a vote of 65% to his 35%. Just to put this in perspective — Rubel is Edelman Worldwide's Internet guru with 2,200 Twitter followers, a long running blog, a periodic column in Ad Age and an invitee to many conferences.

I have to PAY to get into my conferences, 30 people follow me on Twitter, my blog has been around for two months and the only column I have is the one holding up the side of my house! :)

Believe when I tell you that I was waiting for an avalanche of votes to come in for Rubel and turn the tables on me, but it shockingly never came. I think the fact that Edelman's other competing blog got crushed may be an indication of what people think about that company?

So I thank all of you so much for taking to the time to vote.

I am on to Round Two beginning Wednesday, and we're up against something called Communication Overtones. I'll be asking for your vote again (or votes, if you have access to more than one computer), as we stumble on to victory through the social media underworld!

THANKS.

Drew

Ha, you just gonna sit back and take that, Edelman? Let's hope this starts all sorts of undercover sniping to us that we can write about.

[In fairness, Drew Kerr's blog is probably more entertaining than Steve Rubel's for the average reader.]

1. Liz Rosenberg: Lied about a poor African child, of all things. If she turns out to have lied about the divorce as well, she will only solidify her top spot here.

2. Stephen Huvane: Kirsten Dunst's rep assured everyone that Dunst was "fine," shortly before the actress checked into rehab. Then assured everyone that Dunst "is not being treated for cocaine or any drug." Yea.

3. Rob Shuter: A serial manipulator who invented a relationship between client Jessica Simpson and crooner John Mayer, which then blew up in his face. Now edits OK! magazine, appropriately.

4. Rachna Shah: The Interview magazine flack scolded us for printing a scurrilous rumor that editor Ingrid Sischy would be leaving the magazine. A rumor that turned out to be true. A conscious lie, or just internal miscommunication? Either way, we were right.

5. Edelman: An anonymous media trainer at the mega-firm was outed by a tipster for telling clients, "Sometimes you just have to stand up there and lie." This brought an angry response from CEO Richard Edelman, who has himself lied on behalf of Wal-Mart.

6. Scott McClellan: Rotund former Bush lap doggie who wrote a book being sad about all the lying he did. Not that the PR industry cares or anything.

7. Danielle Perissi: Time Warner's fibbingest flack. Not a good person to call with questions about Time Warner, oddly enough. Now she's gone.

Shrill condemnations and embarrassing leaked documents are giving way to acknowledgments of progress — and, in the case of Wal-Mart Watch, free advice.

"It's fair to say we have been less in-your-face," said David Nassar, the executive director of Wal-Mart Watch, which had hammered the company in stinging newspaper advertisements and provocative reports with titles like "Shameless: How Wal-Mart Bullies Its Way Into Communities Across America."

The mellowing of the anti-Wal-Mart movement is an unexpected development for the retailer, whose public image and share price were bruised by the well-financed union campaigns. On Friday, when the chain holds its shareholder meeting in Arkansas, investors are likely to applaud Wal-Mart for fending off these detractors.

What we need now is an activist group that condemns Wal-Mart just for homogenizing the American landscape. The company can have no defense for that.

Until then, Wake Up Wal-Mart is still making propaganda videos like this, which will have to suffice:

[pic via Blizzmax]

Statement from Dove about The New Yorker Article

Dove's mission is to make more women feel beautiful every day by widening the definition of beauty and inspiring them to take great care of themselves. Dove strives to portray women by accurately depicting their shape, size, skin color and age.

The "real women" ad referenced in recent media coverage was created and produced entirely by Ogilvy, the Dove brand's advertising agency, from start to finish and the women's bodies were not digitally altered.

Pascal Dangin worked with photographer Annie Leibovitz (Ogilvy has never employed Mr. Dangin on the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty), who did the photography for the launch of the Dove ProAge campaign, a new campaign within the Campaign for Real Beauty. There was an understanding between Dove and Ms. Leibovitz that the photos would not be retouched - the only actions taken were the removal of dust from the film and minor color correction.

"Let's be perfectly clear - Pascal does all kinds of work - but he is primarily a printer - and only does retouching when asked to. The idea for Dove was very clear at the beginning. There was to be NO retouching and there was not," confirmed Annie Leibovitz, commenting on the ProAge campaign.

Mr. Dangin responded, "The recent article published by The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the Dove "real women" ad. I only worked on the Dove ProAge campaign taken by Annie Leibovitz and was directed only to remove dust and do color correction - both the integrity of the photographs and the women's natural beauty were maintained."

###

The rules make it an offense to blog, use brand ambassadors or seed viral ads while "falsely representing oneself as a consumer." They also apply to bloggers who fail to disclose they have accepted money to write about a product.

This is not of course, happening in the US. But maybe bloggers should rethink their opinions about accepting free shit in return for positive reviews. Word of mouth marketing online is big business here, but most companies and their marketing agencies are smart enough to realize already that disclosure can save them a world of scandal and bad PR.

So far the exact penalties haven't been spelled out, and it will likely take a test case, reported to the Office of Fair Trading and prosecuted, to make clear the size of the penalty and whether jail time is really likely.

Flogging?

Also, here we gratuitously bring up once again Edelman's famous fake Wal-Mart blog. If only it had happened after May 26, and in the UK.

[Ad Age]

On behalf of Richard Edelman, President & CEO, Edelman:

April 21, 2008

Dear [OPINION LEADER],

I would like to invite you to a private dinner at my home in New York City on May 1st. This dinner will serve as a forum for an open discussion about an often unspoken and unrecognized health care crisis affecting millions of American men - prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer has become an epidemic even more prevalent than breast cancer. However, men do not have diagnostic tools for prostate cancer, comparable to life-saving mammograms for women. Without accurate diagnostics to guide biopsies and treatment, patient care is blind and the impact is grave. Due to false alarms caused by the PSA test, more than one million men are being subjected to traumatic biopsies that are unnecessary. I know, because I am one of those men.

Troubled by my own experience, I started working with the AdMeTech Foundation*, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of advanced diagnostic tools for prostate cancer. Since then I've learned that blind biopsies may miss prostate cancer entirely or fail to estimate its severity. Unnecessary and failed treatments are widespread and cause frequent life-altering complications. The striking absence of straight conversations about the critical role of diagnostic tools in patient care ensures that prostate cancer remains a socioeconomic crisis, compromises the quality of life and survival of today's men and adds billions of dollars to health care costs.

I hope you will join me, Dr. Faina Shtern of AdMeTech Foundation, and key opinion leaders from health care, research, advocacy and the media in a robust discussion that leads to change for millions of men.

Where: [Richard Edelman's fancy UWS address]

New York, NY 10023

When: Thursday, May 1, 2008

7 p.m. - Cocktails / 8 p.m. - Dinner

Please RSVP by April 24th to Anthony Edwards at [redacted]. Given our space limitations, I have asked Anthony to contact your office to follow up on this invitation.

Hoping you can join us on May 1st.

Sincerely,

Richard Edelman

President and CEO

Edelman has already given $2,300 to Obama for his campaign. He was a fundraiser and adviser to Ned Lamont, who ran as a liberal alternative to Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut in 2006. He's done the same for other Democratic candidates.

Putting aside your own personal beliefs in order to assemble the best possible team of political operatives from disgraceful Republican administrations who can sell their slithery expertise to the highest corporate bidder: What it takes to be a successful PR executive.

PR that involves a faceless corporate entity reaching out in a formal way to a disgruntled reporter will only make that reporter laugh, and redouble his efforts to screw that company into oblivion. But most people find it very hard to act like coldhearted bastards on a face-to-face personal level. It's easy to tell somebody to fuck off on a blog, or (phrased more respectfully) in a feature story. If that person has taken you out to lunch, though, it suddenly becomes almost impossible. Because now, that flack is not just some jerk bothering you on behalf of somebody you don't like to do something you don't want to do; that flack is the guy who you sat down with and talked about the Yankees and what neighborhood you live in and where you went to school and how stupid so and so is. He's an actual person.

In the week and a half since Gawker got into a little tiff with the Wal-Mart touting PR firm Edelman, my invitations to lunch (well, after-work drinks, but same principle) have gone WAY up. Many people decided they would like to be on Gawker's good side. The invitations are mostly from PR people that I knew before I got here, and most of those PR people are among the few (I can count on my fingers) that I actually like on a personal level. Why do I like them? Because I had lunch with them before, and they're nice guys.

It's inescapable. Lunch works. To go out to lunch with somebody, laugh and talk, and then go back to work and write an article that plunges a knife in their back is an exceedingly hard thing to do. It can be done; sometimes, it must be done; but it takes a lot of the fun out of it. Most good PR people are, by nature, personable and friendly. And while some of them are transparent assholes who want nothing more than to shill and shill some more, others come off like regular people who have a job to do, but would rather talk shit and joke around like a normal human being. I guarantee that if you could construct a chart of positive vs. negative news coverage, the positives would jump immediately following lunch meetings with PR people representing the stories' subjects. And stay that way for a long time. The effect is lasting. It's scary.

It does make it even sweeter, however, on those occasions when you have lunch with a flack and come back with your previous suspicions of them being an asshole confirmed. Then you can just fire away at will in good conscience.

Luckily, there's an easy way out of this conundrum, so we don't all get stuck just easing off every evil company in the world just because their PR person happens to be a halfway decent human being. The real test of a good flack is one who can accept criticism and carry on without hating you. Those people are much rarer than the broad class of those who can act nice at lunch. So reporters, bloggers, and commenters everywhere: Don't be afraid to say Wal-Mart sucks, just because one of their mouthpieces lives in Brooklyn just like you and also likes your favorite band. If he's really cool, he already knows his client sucks, and he won't hold it against you; if not, he was never that cool in the first place.

We really have no reason to, first of all. We got a tip from an actual marketing executive, and we put it up. I would make an educated guess that it's true, but people can judge for themselves, as they have access to all the information about where it came from and what it said. That's Gawker for you. Always servicey. (Even though we know you and your people have had plenty of issues with sites like Valleywag and Consumerist, as well).

Furthermore, you and your agency aren't really the paragons of honesty and decency in communications that you present yourselves to be. You guys have run a political-style, multimillion-dollar campaign for years on behalf of Wal-Mart, one of the most objectionable companies in the world. In my opinion! Edelman also had the whole fake, undisclosed pro- Wal-Mart blog scandal, when it turned out that you arranged and paid for a guy to go around writing positive things about the company in a folksy, supposedly independent blog. Yea, you apologized for that one. But then there was that big article in the New Yorker about your work with Wal-Mart, where you lied and said that the 100% company-controlled Astroturf group "Working Families for Wal-Mart" was "A real group of people, as far as I know." I made the case that that was a blatant lie when I was at PRWeek, and I still believe it.

I know that you disagree with that, because I had to have two separate sit-down meetings with you and your subordinate over that little blog post. Thank you again for breakfast at the Harvard Club. You do seem like a nice guy. The problem is that you take anything negative said about your agency, which consists of thousands of employees, as a personal insult to you. And honestly, we hear a fair amount of shitty things about your agency. How in the world could you possibly know that the story about telling executives to lie during media training is false? It's perfectly plausible that some dumb, shady people work for you. It's very likely, in fact. But it sounds bad for Edelman, and you take it personally.

Like I said, you're a nice guy. So are many other people at Edelman (nice women as well, whatever the case may be). But much of your work— Wal-Mart being the best example— is just objectionable on philosophical grounds, like a lot of things in the PR industry. If every multinational PR firm crumbled to pieces tomorrow, the world would be a slightly better place. Just my opinion! If you wanna help the ethical state of the industry, that's great. But when PR people who happen to work for your agency do bad things and the word gets out, people are gonna write about it. Lighten up!

If you resign that Wal-Mart account, though, we will buy you breakfast. You pick the place.

I'm a high-level advertising and marketing executive who's hired - and used- some of the top PR firms in the nation.

As part of their "media training" they commonly tell you lying is fine.

From a direct quote within an Edelman (the nation's largest independent PR firm) session, training our entire senior management team:

"Sometimes, you just have to stand up there and lie. Make the audience or the reporter believe that everything is ok. How many times have you heard a CEO stand up and say "No, I'm not leaving the company" and then - days later - he's gone. Reporters understand that you "had" to do it and they won't hold it against you in your next job when you deal with them again."