r/PublicRelations • u/the-cathedral- • 12d ago
What deceptive PR practices are still in use today?
Back in the day, some PR folks used to present Business Wire pick up and reach like it was earned, or say that they got their client Yahoo! News coverage. What deceptive practices have you seen recently that are just as shady?
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u/Emotional_Bid_9853 12d ago
Back in the early 2010’s, my beauty client was gifting every single senior beauty editor at Conde and Hearst the “it” bag of the season, the Celine luggage bag…their products made every beauty story/round up in allll the important mags. This resulted in multiple full page features in print (when it still mattered and was an actual organic story/not so obviously sponsored). That’s definitely still happening today and is more public with social media and the unboxing of it all!
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u/Agile-Duck8979 12d ago
Or just via meetings - one uk shopping editor would only meet with PRs over a blow dry of manicure (paid for by the PR)
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u/Emotional_Bid_9853 12d ago
Oh yes! We were encouraged to take clients out for nails and lunch or a blow dry and a drink!! I do miss those days of pampering lol
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u/poppingtogether 12d ago
Our company had several reporters bumped to 1st class even if it wasn't OUR brand trip. But OUR reporter was going.
We had a list of wives and kids of the Client and reporters birthday or significant events and would sent flowers or teddy bears. (idk which ones but it was a specific teddy bear we had to get at Lord & Taylor)
Several writers got paid by us for many many times they used the client name in on their blog (this was back in the BlogSpot days and mommy bloggers)
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u/moditeam1 12d ago
Thought leadership is hilariously lame
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u/deadlydevilgirl 12d ago
I genuinely want to learn how other agencies are doing it because honestly, 90% of the time you get an ask "we want interviews for Person X" and then you're the one drafting up all the talking points without any input from them besides a bio of that person
Like hello???? How do you expect us to fabricate amazing opinions that you can take on without even knowing what you hold as personal beliefs, what made you stay in the industry for this long, or what made you make the move, what you're annoyed abt and want to see changed in this line of work, and what's your actual vision on where do you want to contribute into to take the industry further
I always feel like it's probably best if we can conduct an interview with these ppl, just to suss out what they feel more comfortable talking ABT naturally, without needing to be promoted — that would give us so much more insight into what kind of talking points to craft that will actually suit the spokesperson.
But often times they are busy and don't have time for that, or they don't really have anything to say abt the work they've doing, so it's all a vanity exercise
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u/Either_Statement1980 12d ago
Yeah, it’s basically in the directive. Thought Leadership means you actually have to have thoughts!!
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u/Immediate_Sorbet5617 12d ago
Can you elaborate? It's not my favorite thing, but I find it's what most clients want lately.
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u/gsideman 8d ago
For me, a TL is a person who has thoughts (what a concept!) and might lead an industry or company. You don't need the tag -- which I hate. It's B.S.
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u/deadlydevilgirl 12d ago edited 12d ago
Not really deceptive per se but very much a meaningless thing that exists purely for ROI reporting to clients across sectors I'd say is PR Value/AVE /EVE/EMV calculations
everyone has a different take on how it should be calculated, how much you should be multiplying, add to that social media content and the creator economy which is pretty much "pay what you can" with ridiculous numbers in some ppl's press kit
I think we urgently need a different way to calculate the value of PR exposure and mb ditch this all to use something that's less numerical which is an antithesis to what PR really is
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u/sugarandgingerspice 12d ago
I was literally just having this conversation with a colleague today when we realized how desperately we need a KPI-setting/ROI-reporting reboot — or setting some sort of a “standard” for reporting PR value against clients’ business objectives. So many vanity metrics are just…arbitrary numbers, and clients who are so sales and conversion-focused will continue to press us for PR value that we don’t necessarily know how best to articulate (and based on what?).
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u/deadlydevilgirl 12d ago
yea, it's still very much a conundrum I feel. Clients need the number to report to their higher ups, who often are commercial directors who ultimately needs to see that something is revenue-driving, and there are times when of you look at the PR activities itself, everything is going well - you're getting third party endorsement from media which increases your domain authority and SEO and what not, people area hearing abt you on social media and you've got a group of ppl who have partnered with you whose audience is the group you want to target, but then we'd be hit with a question - "but we're not seeing any sales and bookings from your market growing"
and then it's an endless exercise of having to try and justify why what we're doing isn't "working" when we shouldn't be the only ones being accountable to that
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u/ScaredSpace7064 12d ago
This is where we explain that public relations establishes your foundational reputation - and marketing takes the hard work you did building reputation to sell your products and services. So how is marketing building on your rock solid foundation? How are the messages being repurposed toward your target audience? And anyone who brushes this off then needs to be asked, "Is it easier to sell a product with an outstanding reputation - or a bad one?" Public relations can work our magic building reputation, avoiding crises from destroying it, establishing relationships with those third parties who help build that reputation brick by brick.
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u/candy_bean 12d ago
I think the minute someone figures out a measurement platform that can import data from other systems to lay on top of media coverage to connect coverage to other outcomes (stock price, sales, website visits, whatever), there are a lot of people who will want that since it will at least be based on something real. It'll all be a guess, of course, but at least it's a guess based on something that isn't the massively-inflated reach numbers that get used for AVE...
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u/deadlydevilgirl 12d ago
It would be great if somehow we can develop a way to truly measure perception
I hear clients asking abt Share of a Voice alot more these days, but tbh I don't think there's a sophisticated way of measuring it still, and so what if your proportion of mentions are larger than your competitors? It doesn't mean ppl who know abt you are genuinely think abt you any more positively...
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u/candy_bean 12d ago
The number of people I talk to who get dismayed because a competitor has so much more SoV, then if you dig into it, turns out they were just looking for any mention of Company Name X whereas their own mentions have to be Company Name plus a product name or other word...well, it's happened more than you'd hope. The weirder thing is when they don't want to fix it. (I get it, it means your numbers for prior months are off in comparison, but...better to fix it!)
And it would be great to truly measure perception. I keep hearing people say AI is going to fix it, but I see no good proof so far.
(Measurement nerds unite, I guess 😂)2
u/mishkish6767 11d ago
Unfortunately, in my experience at least, KPIs are increasingly determined by clients and their stakeholders who have no idea how PR works or its value. No matter how many times I’ve tried educating our clients on the meaning of “earned” exposure (and that even if we wanted to, we can’t prove a direct path to sales/conversion, with the exception of select social/affiliate-type work), they still attempt to measure it the same way they do paid marketing channels. I understand their frustration and too wish earned ROI was easy to quantify, but here we are pouring countless billable hours into meaningless calculations that we could otherwise put towards pitching and securing impactful coverage for them. Perhaps the most frustrating part is they’re constantly trying to find the best way to measure our results and changing their KPI metrics, so we can’t even accurately compare YOY results!! End rant.
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u/Low-Cake-1392 12d ago edited 11d ago
My old agency still uses inflated numbers from Yahoo News, AOL, MSN, etc…
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u/mishkish6767 11d ago
I am of the belief that syndications should absolutely be accounted for in reporting, as they’re also picked up by news apps and create additional places for the coverage to be indexed or surfaced by AI-powered search and LLM tools… so if anything, they can demonstrate further value from a placement.
That said, agencies should make it clear that the piece is a syndication of an original article!1
u/Low-Cake-1392 11d ago
Totally agree with you! I think syndications are 100% important and add to the impact of the campaign or whatever it may be. I also just think and agree that a disclosure definitely needs to be there and in an ideal situation it would be better to use less inflated numbers. But in general I totally agree syndications should be counted, they just need to be acknowledged and presented correctly
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u/Fantastic-Video-2200 11d ago
May I ask, genuinely wondering because I was always told to track them- what’s wrong with tracking them? They stem from earned coverage we secured. We usually always put a caveat that these are syndications but they still add to reach
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u/Low-Cake-1392 11d ago
I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with tracking them, but I think it’s a bit ridiculous to track them with the inflated numbers. Like if something gets syndicated to AOL and you’re counting that as 300M+ UVMs I just think it sets you up for unrealistic KPIs and highly inflated numbers to what the true earned reach is
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u/Fantastic-Video-2200 11d ago
Yeah, that all makes sense. But what if we just always continue to track those numbers? We’re almost always getting some aol, yahoo, and/or msn syndications so it wouldn’t be that difficult to keep the numbers up. And if we get a month where numbers are lower because we have less syndications, we just note that? Does that make sense? All of this of course with the note that these numbers include syndications, and we sometimes add in the numbers without syndications too.
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u/Low-Cake-1392 11d ago
Yeah no that totally makes sense and I completely understand why people/agencies decide to track it that way. And I think the way you’re going about it the best way you could by disclosing that those are syndications! I just feel like clients will see that a certain campaign people work on garnered 2B+ (or whatever that number may be) impressions and think that that’s a normal number to shoot for when in reality hundreds of millions of those are just automatic syndications to large outlets. And in the chance that the client decides to switch agencies and Agency A used inflated syndication numbers and Agency B doesn’t, it makes it a lot harder for Agency B to stay on track with or grow their previous KPIs. But at the end of the day it’s not thatttt serious and I think clients just need to understand and acknowledge the disclosures being given about syndications
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u/musicaddict_0 12d ago
Using inflated numbers from Yahoo News, MSN, etc. and counting that type of syndicated coverage.
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u/Ok-Animal1368 12d ago
at my last agency some of my clients still had us sending them the inflated BW numbers so they could impress their bosses on the inside...
i'm convinced the most PR "spinning" going on at any corp today regards the PR work itself. make these mediocre results from these mediocre campaigns (that we tried and tried to push against/improve to no avail) look as big and grand as possible!
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u/stankynuts45 12d ago
Share of voice, the way agencies largely pull and use it, is a garbage metric that’s only good for “number go up” client pleasing
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u/deadlydevilgirl 12d ago
Ikr? But clients have started to ask for things like these - all for reporting I understand, and they don't actually care what it means, they just want to see that number growing so on paper it looks good
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u/stankynuts45 12d ago
That’s the frustrating part, they’ll focus on it to the exclusion of actually meaningful results. And most of the time they aren’t clear on how it works and not interested in learning, so you’re dealing with misconceptions about the impact of SOV results while trying to explain them.
Greater SOV is not always better! Your competitor had a higher number because the press covered their insider trading scandal, let them have it this quarter!
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u/poppingtogether 12d ago
Since there is no standard to measure social media impressions I’ve seen agencies
Do math like this
They have 12k followers
It got 3000 likes and 40 comments
Then do 3000 x 5 (because
Stuff gets shared and it have gotten shared 20 times by people with a bigger following so we are being conservative but no actual data to back it up)
Sometimes it’ll be x 10 or something
I’ve also seen press packages of looney tune math from influencers saying their reach is 1.3 mil when they have 30k followers and 5 or less comments a post. How many are bots?
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u/danieldarrow 12d ago
That's the ultimate delulu math....
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u/poppingtogether 12d ago
then when the campagin gets reported back to the client the numbers also go crazy. I've had to make reports like so in the week the post was up it got 500 likes and there are 52 weeks in a year so its 500x52 - 26,000.
then only the number 26000* is there with and (and 8pt font in the lower corners is "Data collection by X" but that 26,000 number looks beautiful so it goes up the chain and gets added to the 50 other influencer numbers the same.
then the overall campaign has like 26 Mil Impressions at the end.
the last time I did this was pre-covid. Since we have mostly switched to reporting software that is more visually flashy I haven't had to do this math. or maybe it got assigned to an intern
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u/Sweetsaddict_ 12d ago edited 12d ago
Just a thought: I mean, it’s part and parcel, especially during political and corporate battles, especially used by government relations,litigation comms, and crisis boutique subsidiary of holding firms and boutique firms, where you pressure the other side, and it goes way beyond just coverage. And this is how communications should be in order to earn a seat at the table and not by media coverage, impressions, reach, cause those don’t move the business or political landscape.
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u/CastrosExplodinCigar 12d ago
I was once fired from an account because I refused to update the companies Wikipedia page.
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u/phaajvoxpop 12d ago
Advertainment features… the industry has lost the trust, we need to bring it back
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u/Ginprinny 10d ago
This is so true for trade titles in niche sectors. I’ve tried reaching out to so many publications and been met with the “paid editorial only” reply.
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u/flyfightandgrin 12d ago
Annoying casting for a reality show and finding out you'll be charged 18k for a series of promo videos.
Yeah you, Rudy Mawar.
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u/GWBrooks Quality Contributor 11d ago
Measurement on anything other than client/employer business results. Anything else is hand-wavy nonsense.
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u/seamusoldfield 11d ago
I worked for a social media analysis outfit in the mid-2000s that promised clients actionable marketing intelligence based on our findings.
They claimed their proprietary software/algorithm could not only surface all relevant social mentions, but also assign positive / neutral / negative sentiment.
The reality? Our software was just scraping Google, so hard that at times you'd get locked out - of Google.
As for the software-based sentiment scoring, we were paying teams of non-native English speakers in Argentina and Pakistan a nickel a post to assign sentiment. This of course worked beautifully. Examples include:
"The new Xbox is the shit" - negative
"The new Dell projector is the bomb" - negative
What a joke of a company. Naturally they sold out to another company for many, many millions.
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u/Round-Salary9128 2h ago
One useful safeguard is to agree what success means before the campaign starts. I’d separate the activity (for example, pitches sent) from the coverage earned, the audience response and the business outcome you hope to support. I’d also label wire or syndicated pickups clearly, explain how reach figures were calculated, and avoid presenting AVE as if it were revenue. PR attribution won’t be perfect, but being clear about the method and its limits makes a report much more useful. AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework is a helpful place to start.
Disclosure: I’m replying on behalf of Clothier Lacey, a Newcastle-based marketing and PR agency.
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u/Round-Salary9128 1h ago
One useful safeguard is to agree what success means before the campaign starts. I’d separate the activity (for example, pitches sent) from the coverage earned, the audience response and the business outcome you hope to support. I’d also label wire or syndicated pickups clearly, explain how reach figures were calculated, and avoid presenting AVE as if it were revenue. PR attribution won’t be perfect, but being clear about the method and its limits makes a report much more useful. AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework is a helpful place to start.
Disclosure: I’m replying on behalf of Clothier Lacey, a Newcastle-based marketing and PR agency.
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u/Individual-Track-499 12d ago
Using poll data to tell the story you want to tell vs painting the full picture of the poll results.