Over the past couple of days I have been struck by the use of words in two items I read which made me wonder if PRs have a different language to everyone else.
The first was in an, albeit old, copy of PR Week where on the front page they had a story which declared that its own research showed that a certain coffee chain was “being deserted by a significant minority of consumers”. What is a ‘significant minority
? The phrase tells us nothing. A ‘significant minority’ could be 49 per cent or a mere 10 per cent. (Further into the article you found it was actually 16 per cent of 62 per cent of the 1567 respondees – 155 to you and me.) It is a meaningless phrase of the sort PRs often fall into using trying to get something catchy out of non-news.
The second was the email tagline for a release from Sunderland Council which stated that ”Sunderland Council use digital safes to tackle crime”. My immediate thought was that most people would use a policeman or security officers to do the job. I had visions of safes running around Sunderland saying, “stop or I’ll trap you inside.”
I know how difficult it is to find the right tagline and how often we are clutching at straws to make it interesting but I think PRs need to look at what they are saying and think how others would read it.


1. Dress is important. Avoid checks, stripes and small patterns as these are distorted by television pictures and stick to simple, clean cut, dark suits. Don’t let your attire distract the viewers attention away from what you are saying.
These high-profile data-gathering systems, facebook included, are a cause of mounting concern amongst net users. Following the recent PR disaster connected to the ‘Phorm’ advertising system, which was decreed to gather user information in a way that was genuinely illegal, you’d think that Yahoo would manage its PR extremely carefully regarding their ‘experiment’ with the Google advertising system. But with all eyes on the share price, Yahoo are, I suspect, keen to play down this partnership. Perhaps it’s time these companies threw open the doors to show, if only to a regulatory body, exactly how their market-information software works.
I think it’s fair to say that neither programme will find its way on to CBeebies any time soon but what was The Simpsons’ crime? Apparently portraying “messages that go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents”. On that basis, I can only imagine what they must make of South Park.
Venezuelan TV is an odd beast - one of the most popular programmes is a talk show hosted by the country’s president, Hugo Chavez. In a bumper episode last year he gave a speech which reportedly lasted eight hours. And we thought the Queen’s speech was a bit dull!
Is there a strange group of people out there that this advert appeals to? OK so perhaps I don’t “get it” because, being a 28 year old female (shhh, my birthday isn’t until the weekend), neither the car nor the advert is aimed at me. It seems I’m not alone though. Even the car enthusiasts don’t buy into the car adds if this fellow blogger is any kind of example:
I admit I’m biased. I’m not a fan of advertising in general. Being a “PR Girl” it’s always more difficult to prove the value of what we do as we don’t get that guaranteed result, but (in my opinion) we do offer better value. The main reason is that we don’t mess about trying to be cool and expect our audience to dig through 100 layers of nonsense to work out what kind of message we’re trying to deliver. We tend to stick to a (hopefully subtle) point – “Our client does X. It’s useful/appealing to you because Y”.