Posted on Seasoned Posts

A u-turn from the fork in the road. Jim Macnamara on practitioner research-phobia…

Is it enough for us to simply ‘accept’ that practitioners do not get involved in formative and evaluative research (a sort of ‘research-phobia’) because of lack of time and its prohibitive costs? For researches and academics, these are only outright excuses as low and even no-cost evaluation methods are widely available. Instead they cite practitioner lack of interest, commitment and knowledge, as the real underlying reason….

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Varnish: this is what Sir Martin Sorrell thinks of Public Relations. Great news..really great news..

At WPP, we have never seen responsible corporate behaviour as a coat of public relations varnish… From Sir Martin Sorrell’s opening letter of the 2005 WPP Corporate Social Responsibility Report So, the CEO of world’s largest communication conglomerate, which incorporates ‘la crème de la crème’ of public relations consultancies around the world, describes his opinion of our profession: varnish. No words…. Maybe it would be useful if the CEO’s of the many H&K’s and B-M’s...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Italy’s search for legitimacy in Lebanon a pr stunt? Why not…

The other day, Italian Premier Romano Prodi, in saluting his young compatriots sailing off to Lebanon to form the larger part of the UN military peacekeeping force, unabashedly called this ‘an historic event’. For the first time in many years, under strong pressure from the Italian government and with a grudgingly active support from Jacques Chirac, the EU gained its first explicit leadership of a major peacekeeping effort. Many critical observers, in Italy and elsewhere,...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

On Jack Odwyer’s call for a new definition following Der Spiegel’s recent attack on pr

In every country, the public relations profession is being constantly and increasingly criticized by mainstream media and social critics for its buffering mode of action. Most recently it was Der Spiegel in Germany, but all one needs to do is keep a close eye on http://www.prwatch.org and most of the arguments used by our critics can be easily traced. Personally, I do not believe that a new definition, as Jack O’Dwyer seems to imply in...