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The Persistent End of Business as Usual Jack O'Dwyer, one of the Good Guys of PR, called this morning to declare himself in radical agreement with what we say about his profession in Chapter Six of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and is featuring the book at the top of O'Dwyer's PR Daily. He also has a nice summary of Buzz2000, where press and PR folks took turns beating the crap out of the Buzz Business. Scoll down to the last line to see how my call for deep-sixing the press release went over with a crowd forced to write them for a living. On a semi-related matter, Jack also said that advertising was buying PR -- literally. PR agencies are selling out to advertising agencies all over the place. They certainly have the money, since advertising appears to be the widest sluice for the several dozen billion dollars being spent by VCs this year on start-ups in desperate need of instant branding. But here's the weird twist: These agencies actually hate PR, Jack says, because PR people actually talk to the enemy -- reporters -- and can't control "the message." Some ad agencies are so paranoid that they fantasize out loud about "stomping out" discussion groups. Again, the Message problem. This is interesting shit, if it's true (and I'm sure it is, at least in some very large cases). If anybody has more info about all this, send it to me. By the way, Chapter Six was excerpted earlier this year in The Industry Standard; but some of what we said about PR didn't make the cut. However, the same thing got said, more or less, in a piece I wrote many years ago for Upside. While that one is too old for that magazine's archive, a similar version is published at Reality 2.0.
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