Traditional Political PR Is Dead!
By Maxim Behar
An excerpt from my bestseller “The Global PR Revolution.”
While reputational management is ever more important for the PR industry, and the social media revolution has strengthened that trend, in the postrevolutionary world, political PR is dead in a certain sense, namely, in the sense that politicians or candidates for elected office are expected to win over constituents with promises and long speeches. The most recent elections in the US and other countries, such as Donald Trump’s election as US president in November 2016, have proven that everything has been exported online.
During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton vastly outspent Donald Trump, $623.1 million to $334.8 million (not counting the additional hundreds of millions of dollars for each candidate raised by party and joint fund-raising committees and Super PACs, which brought the total to $1.4 billion for Clinton and almost $1 billion for Trump), investing a lot more in TV ads, city visits, and information materials.
The Trump campaign spent $39 million on last-minute TV ads and $29 million on digital advertising and consulting. In the final weeks, the Clinton campaign spent $72 million on TV ads and $16 million on online ads. So, Trump outspent Clinton online in digital advertising. Clinton also spent $12 million on travel, nearly double what Trump spent. The last-minute spending reflected the trends of the presidential campaign: Clinton massively outspent Trump. So what? Clinton still lost. Trump triumphed mainly because everything has already been moved to the internet, to social media in particular, and everything has become truly personal. What Trump has been doing on Twitter
— I wouldn’t call that “political marketing.”
I would call that “Trump on Twitter.”
— an entirely new discipline! (Which, interestingly enough, can also be abbreviated to TT, just like “Total Transparency” . . .)
Whatever it is, it’s not political PR. Not a single expert in political PR and marketing, not even the best expert, not even a genius in PR, can come up with the things that Trump himself writes and posts on Twitter. It’s not that these things are brilliant; they seem to have been working. What’s more, social media gives many more excellent opportunities for understanding whether a certain person is good for the job or good for nothing based on their thoughts and reactions.
Only some PR companies can create truly authentic messages like that.
Sure, in the old days, before the social media revolution, that was possible. Experts in political PR could write a great speech for you, put up nice billboards, or teach you how to use your hands in public speaking. However, nowadays, no PR company can build a social media image for you, a reputation using such a short form of communication as tweets, in which each of the 140 characters must convey your personality. Each character must convey your meaning
— that can’t be the PR company.
This development, generating the conclusion that old-style political PR is dead, is not negative for the PR industry. This means that the PR industry now has entirely different dimensions and tasks from a professional point of view. These tasks mostly boil down to working with the truth itself.
Because that is the paramount idea of PR!
If you have to manage a reputational crisis, you can do it only with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Nothing more, nothing less. Going back to the Weinstein scandal — that man never denied. Technically, there aren’t precise pieces of hard evidence about the things he was accused of. Nobody took photos or video footage, nobody was in those hotel rooms, nobody saw him, nobody tested bodily fluids, etc. Yet this man didn’t even try to deny the accusations against him; not even for a second did he try to say that any of those claims were untrue.
He didn’t argue that his alleged victims went to his room, got undressed, and voluntarily lay on the bed. Why didn’t he? First, nobody is going to believe him. Second, there is no point in denying when somebody blunders.
When you’ve blundered, you shut your mouth.
Of course, you must at least apologize, and that’s it. However, if you haven’t done anything wrong and are the target of a malicious, evil attack, you voice the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s why I began this book with that definition of PR, and I keep thinking more than ever that it is the most accurate one: telling the truth in a way so that people would understand it.
“Truth” is the keyword in PR.
Because of the dreadfully large amount of media out there and the confusion caused by all of those billions of words and sentences that we are bombarded with every day if PR tells the truth, it will be unbeatable — its competition won’t stand a chance. This is one reason why old-style political PR or political marketing is dead: with all our experience, we know that many of the messages the politicians send out are lies.
And the PR business cannot work with lies!
The book is available on Amazon.com and BeharBooks.com.
