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Our survey says . . . well, nothing, really
Sunday, November 30, 2008 By Catherine O’Mahony
There’s a slow creep in popularity of a particular brand of corporate public relations these days – the kind that pretends to be research but which is really an advertisement. Here’s the sort of thing I mean: ‘‘Survey Finds Seven out of Ten CEOs Need More Widgets’’.

You scroll down the e-mail to find more statistics, some jargon, a sobering quote warning of the dire consequences of ‘‘widget deficit’’ from the managing director of a company that makes – you guessed it – widgets, followed by a glaring absence of anything approaching evidence that a comprehensive survey has actually been undertaken.

This isn’t just a PR problem. The humbling reality is that it is actually worth producing these releases because the media – the tabloid press is particularly culpable in this regard – will often pick it up. So, as much as I hate to admit it, if I worked in PR, I’d probably send out surveys-that-aren’t-really-surveys too.

Still, hardly anyone comes out of this scenario with head held high. Not the journalist, who ends up feeling cynical because he or she is writing up an item of ‘news’ that is anything but. Not the PR people, who know in their heart of hearts that it’s all a bit of a con.

For the client, the plus is obviously the ego boost of a few valuable column inches but – given the superficiality of the content – can it really be worth it? I suspect the whole thing leaves everyone feeling ever-so-slightly queasy – the public included.

In his book Flat Earth News, reporter Nick Davies talks about ‘‘pseudo-evidence’’ that is ‘‘usually released on a Sunday to fill the news vacuum on Monday morning’’.

On one single Monday in November 2005, he writes, the Guardian ran nine different survey stories on its news pages. One survey – about the number of mobile phones being abandoned in London taxis – was based on interviewing 131 cab drivers. This ‘‘found’’ that 63,000 mobile phones had been lost in London cabs in the past six months. The real figure was 779. None of this should imply that PR people can’t have a role in driving news agendas.

The best PR people are better than some journalists at coming up with decent story ideas, that double as vehicles to get their clients publicity. Proper surveys, I should add, can provide good media material and when companies invest in assessing something that they are sort of connected with – but don’t actually sell – it can reflect extremely well on them.

There’s nothing wrong with getting your brand associated with credible copy. Banks – before they became the pariahs in PR terms that they are today – used to be pretty good for this sort of thing, issuing research about consumer spending or saving behaviour that actually had some real value.

But my guess is that, in the current economic climate, nobody has money to spend on a survey, but they still want to do ‘a survey’, so out goes the release anyway.

I wish the offenders would go and buy a nice big newspaper ad and have done with it.

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