What Adam and Eve Teach Us About PR
In a burst of curiosity, I did some Googling this morning about “the death of PR.” As a 25-year practitioner of the craft, I’ve started to have thoughts recently about it, so I wanted to see if others are talking about it as well.
And regardless of whether they are or are not (hint: they are), it is clear things are changing. Actually, I’ll fix that: Things have already changed.
My office, which is a small-ish office of a global company, has about 12 of our own clients. (We also work with clients of the company’s other offices.) Of those, I would estimate that none of them — that’s right, none of them — are strictly PR clients. Here are a few examples:
Company A: We manage all communication, including advertising, content development, social media, website strategy and implementation, speaking engagements, message development and, yes, PR.
Company B: We manage content development, copywriting for direct email campaigns, slogan copywriting, social media, message development and, yes, PR.
Company C: We manage advertising — including creative and buying, social media, trade show giveaway concepts (creative and implementation), and, yes, PR.
I could go on and on.
It is commonly accepted that Edward L. Bernays was the father of PR. But I think we all know that’s not true. In the second chapter of Genesis, God tells Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And all is well and good for about 10 verses, at which point the Serpent comes upon the scene. The Serpent is, I would say, the first PR practitioner in recorded history. He’s not someone I would consider to be a positive role model, but he is unmistakably in the business of PR. Take a look. He’s a communicator. And he is savvy enough to know that the best way to influence Adam is not to communicate directly with him regarding the tree. After all, God told Adam directly not to eat from it. Rather, the Serpent identifies an important key audience that can influence Adam more forcefully than the Serpent himself, namely Eve.
The clever Serpent says to Eve (who was not yet around when God instructed Adam not to eat the forbidden fruit), “Guess what? If you eat from that tree, you’ll be wise like God.” That sounds sort of like, “Smoke these cigarettes and you’ll be cool!” or “Drink this beer and you’ll be the life of the party!”
So, you see, PR has been around since at least the third chapter of Genesis. But we never thought of it as PR. We thought of it as a conversation between the Serpent and Eve that eventually convinces Eve to persuade Adam to take a bite.
But it’s all semantics, really. I don’t know if there was a newspaper being published at the time in the Garden of Eden. I wasn’t there. But I’m guessing it was not (even though the Flintstones may beg to differ). And there were no billboards, so we can’t chalk up Adam’s changed mind to advertising. And since he and Eve were the only two people around, direct mail would have been silly. And I won’t even get into digital methods, given that Al Gore hadn’t yet “invented the internet.”
But PR was certainly around. Let’s take a moment to examine the phrase itself. PR means “public relations.” At the end of the day, PR is not a tactic, like advertising, a trade show booth or content development. PR is an umbrella strategy for any entity trying to influence others.
Many Israeli companies call news releases “PRs.” I used to laugh about it, because it seemed to hint at a fairly rudimentary understanding of what PR is. On the other hand, there’s nothing funny about it, because it chops down the significance of PR to documents written to announce pieces of news. But those in the PR profession know that those “PRs” are just a single tool we use to communicate on behalf of whatever company, organization, individual or cause we represent. And we also know that issuing a news release is only the beginning of a communications process about that bit of information.
The process includes contacting reporters to explain the news further, setting up interviews with subject matter experts who can provide smart commentary on the item, and utilizing social media to spread the word about the news.
It includes more than that, but you get the idea.
So PR is not dead. It’s been around since the Serpent utilized Eve’s influence on Adam to change the world. Edward L. Bernays made a career out of it, but I assure you that American companies were utilizing it long before he came around. And yet now, with lines being blurred in how we utilize the media to influence the audiences important to us and our clients, there is a Google-search-certified concern that PR is dead?
That’s ridiculous. PR isn’t dead. You can’t kill PR.
I will say that there is no need to hire an employee or agency whose sole focus is the process of issuing news releases, following up on them with the media and reporting the results of those efforts to the boss or client.
But there never was.
When I was 22, less than a year out of college, my client asked me to dress up like an avocado and give the weather report on the Today Show. That same client would have called my company his “PR firm.” But we did so much more than that. I once slept in a room full of coffee beans so that I could wake up early the next morning and deliver it to radio stations during drive time, hoping they’d mention the coffee company on-air. We call that a radio promotion. That client hired my company as her “PR firm.” But we obviously did more than that.
So let’s be clear on these distinctions:
- There are channels for communication. The Serpent used Eve as the channel to communicate a message to Adam. And today, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, billboards, trade show floors and newspapers are channels for communication.
- There are tactical areas for communication. The Serpent used oral language as a tactic for communication. And today, news releases, advertisement, video and direct email are tactics for communication.
- There are umbrella strategies for communication. The Serpent decided that a well-placed idea (in the ear of Eve) would influence his key audience (Adam) the way he wanted it influenced. And today, PR and marketing are umbrella strategies for communication. You can even argue they are one and the same. I know I do.
I’ve spent 25 years thinking of myself as a PR person. And throughout the years, from time to time, there have been movements to kill PR, saying it doesn’t control a message as well as advertising, or isn’t as measurable as Google AdWords. But you can’t kill PR. We now know that comparing PR to those tactical areas would be like comparing apples to oranges.
And as we know from the story of Adam and Eve, fruit can get us into a lot of trouble.
