I Will Honour The Embargo

The story behind that video.

I was bored one Friday afternoon in February 2010, and after seeing yet another journalist vent their frustration with the PR industry on Twitter, I set about producing a short satirical video that poked fun at the love hate relationship between hacks and PR flacks.

Unbeknown to me, however, the resulting one minute and forty two seconds of animated cartoon characters would quite possibly do more to earn the respect of my journalist peers than anything I’d ever write.

It went viral.

The video recreated a typical conversation between a PR professional and a journalist who is being asked to accept a press release under embargo.

Embargoes are when a publication agrees to refrain from publishing a news story before a certain time as specified by the company or organisation making the announcement.

However, many journalists hate embargoes. Not least because they’re routinely asked to agree to one for news that they would never cover anyway. But also because an embargo implies that rival publications have been briefed on the story, too, and there is no guarantee that they won’t, accidentally or purposely, publish first, therefore breaking the embargo.

(As a result, in late 2008, Mike Arrington famously declared war on the embargo, stating that TechCrunch would never honour one again. We did.)

I, on the other hand, don’t always mind embargoes. If I can’t get the story exclusively (and more often I do) I’d still rather hear the news in advance. That way I can be better researched and find my own angle, rather than simply joining a race to the bottom.

But that didn’t alter the stance of my YouTube video, which played to its target audience with almost perfect precision via the curse-laden catchphrase “Yes, I’ll honour the fucking embargo”.

A quarter of a million views later, it had been picked up by journalists at Reuters, Forbes, BoingBoing, Times, Engadget, CBS and others. Best of all, Arrington included the video in a post on TechCrunch without knowing that I was the person behind it.

PR professionals loved the video, too. Even though it was highly critical of the way that many of them practiced, they all saw themselves as the good PRs; the video’s criticism couldn’t possibly apply to them.

Writing on his personal blog, my colleague at TechCrunch U.S., MG Siegler, captured the moment best: “If you’re a blogger, the following is perhaps the greatest piece of Internet video ever produced.”

It wasn’t, of course, but who was I to argue.