Reengineering words into PR speak
Today’s award for best press release headline and intro goes to Edelman for this gem:
Social Purpose Gets Personal As People Discover the “Me” in “We”
Global Study Reveals Personal Need Trumps Common Good for Aussies
Consumer Participation in Societal Issues Soars Globally, However
Um what?
I’m lost…
This from a PR company? Bloody hell! Perhaps it was deliberate, knowing it would get a run from Dr Mumbo.
I see a promising career in management consulting!
OK, here’s a PR firm PR’ing its own work, using long words when short ones would work better, not defining key terms at the start and a shopping list of other negatives.
Intros like this are normally a sign that whatever follows won’t be worth reading, so I stop there and delete on the expectation that the rest of the release will be equally uninformative, so I’m astounded to hear that the study is “relatively interesting”.
In defence of Edelman, I have seen far, far worse than this from most PR agencies. Still that doesn’t excuse them from Capitalising Words that are Common Nouns – another sign that I’ve been sent a useless media release. I’d love someone from PR land to explain why you insist on doing that. Is it really that you were all collectively away from school on the one day this key grammatical rule was taught?
So a Sydney company is talking about a global `goodpurpose®` study.
What the heck does ‘®’ mean in this context ? I checked the registration of ‘goodpurpose’ (single word to) see…
* Check with Australian trademarks: ‘goodpurpose’ is not a registered trademark
* Check with US trademarks: ‘goodpurpose’ is not a registered trademark
(You can confirm this with a quick check of ‘TESS’ on the USPTO.gov site)
Are they incompetent? Have they forgotten to register the ‘goodpurpose’ mark – and figure they’ll just tell everyone they registered it ?
Or am I just incompetent when it comes to searching? (That is quite possible – sometimes the google-fu gods work against us all)
Mac