Who would you not represent?
Tobacco, adultery and gun-toting dentists are some of the things PR agencies are regularly asked to represent. Miranda Ward asked several agencies how they deal with potentially questionable clients, and how that might impact upon their agency brand.
At the end of last month full-service crisis and issue management specialist J Austins & Associates took on American dentist Walter Palmer, the man who killed Cecil the lion, as a client, ending the relationship 24 hours later stating they had only been asked by another firm to help distribute the dentist’s statement to the global media.
Walter Palmer is a pretty spicy brief for an agency to take on, but what happens when a PR agency is wary of taking on a client?
Gain
These issues should be based on the comparability of your company’s values and those of the client. If they match you are on solid ground to take on the client.
I went across to Vietnam as few years ago as part of a teaching group from Swimburne Tech (Melbourne). I was doing a Publicity/PR course over a few days. It was the toughest presentation time I’ve ever had having 20 year olds just starting out in hospitality/management, hotel managers and no less than 6 heavyweight tobacco industry publicity folk It was a no-win situation A class of 20 and no comfortable place on any day with such a diverse range of people. Maybe I did a crap job but they all took me out to a karaoke bar and we all got wasted!
Interesting article and great to see the different views put forward. For myself, I have spent a long time getting clarity around our WHY and the sort of clients we want to work with. This has then carried through our branding which has been designed to clearly define our values so that we attract aligned clients and team members. It’s early days for us but it seems to be a formula that works well. Hopefully that will eliminate much of the need to give staff the final say because they’ve bought into the organisation values right from the start.
I can recall commentary on here when Ashley Madison was being represented by Frontier Media. Frontier also represented Scientology at the time, so at least they were happy to hold a portfolio of ‘those’ clients that many other agencies would probably not touch.
Having said that, Leo Burnett, Todd Sampson being the CEO in Oz and the so called pioneer of all things environmental (anyone remember earth hour?). Leo’s look after (or certainly did); Philip Morris.
If an agency wants to dabble with the darker elements, then set out your stall. Hypocrisy is what gnaws away at me and make many companies, their cultures and their position, totally contradicting. It’s like seeing employees of a large corporate posting photo’s on Linkedin shouting how they spent the day picking up rubbish on a beach, with hastags #goodcause #charity #doinggood when the company they work for is funding the Adani coal mine. Far out! Either be nice or be nasty, don’t be a little bit nice’, to try to disguise your nastiness.
Edelman – seriously! You can’t run away from it. Quote from http://www.tobaccotactics.org/index.php/Edelman “… has a long history of working with the tobacco industry. Its association goes back to the 1970s, when Edelman (then known as Daniel J Edelman) proposed an “aggressive” public relations campaign to help RJ Reynolds attack and undermine perceptions of the health hazards of smoking”