Bribe, Anyone?

Stories about the activities of “spin doctors” usually nowadays involve clever pronouncements by politicians that leave out key facts. The speakers obviously evade direct questions while launching the rehearsed speech they want to present to the public. The actors in these mini-dramas usually are coached by public relations practitioners.

Before television and the internet came to dominate the media world, public relations activities used some of the same techniques but were oriented much more to press agentry. Savvy newspaper people understood the game. The better ones took some delight in frustrating the “flacks.”

The only time I was called on the carpet during my days in public relations work for Allis-Chalmers was because I wasn't trying to bribe anybody.

Department Manager Al Leech chastised me.  Each of us could spend up to $200 a month buying drinks, dinners, and event tickets for news media personnel (at the time, dinner for one in a fairly good restaurant ran about $10, so $200 was a decent amount of spending money).  Leech pointed out that I had spent nothing after several months on the staff.  He said I was neglecting an important part of my duties.

Not being a shirker, I cast about for opportunities to use the special expense account.  I found one in our General Products Division.  Allis-Chalmers had bought a company in Appleton, Wisconsin, that manufactured equipment for the papermaking industry.  The plant manager wanted publicity, but he didn't really know about what.  He had contacted the A-C photography section, and they responded by sending out one of their people to shoot scenes inside the plant.  They had a batch of nice color prints, and no idea what to do with them.

The Milwaukee Journal had a young correspondent in Appleton.  I phoned him and said we had some good photos of our Appleton operation, and thought he might be able to do a feature article about the work there for the Journal's business page, using one of more of the shots.  We made a lunch date in Appleton to talk about it.

I took the photographer along in case different scenes were requested.  We got to the restaurant early.  To my surprise, a veteran reporter who worked at the business desk in the Journal office in Milwaukee walked in just minutes after we did.  Apparently, the neophyte correspondent thought he needed big-time help dealing with a high-powered PR man.

We had a couple of drinks while waiting for the correspondent.  When he appeared, we had another round.  We ate, and I showed our photos and suggested several story ideas.  The Journal men made no commitments.

When the waiter showed up to see if it was time for the check the young guy said it was going to be Dutch treat.  I said, "Oh no, I'm taking care of it."

The correspondent turned to his more experienced colleague.  "He can't do that!" he said.

"Oh yes he can," the veteran newsman replied.

I did, but to their credit, the Journal guys never pursued a story.  Their newspaper had a reputation as one of the best in the country, and part of that was based on strict adherence to journalism ethics.  You could have treated Journal reporters and editors to a full-scale Roman orgy, and I doubt it would have influenced their news decisions one iota.

Nevertheless, I learned that several of my colleagues routinely took Journal people and their wives (and their own wives) out to dinner at fancy Milwaukee restaurants and charged the outings to the company.  Did that benefit Allis-Chalmers?  It may have had the opposite effect.

About a month after my failed bribery attempt in Appleton, Leech stormed out of his office and barked, "I've got the biggest PR staff in the State of Wisconsin, and we can't get a paragraph in the Milwaukee Journal."

When I moved on to Job Corps public relations work as an RCA employee, I was authorized to use expense money to buy meals for reporters.  Many came to the center.  When lunchtimes rolled around, I told every one of them that they were welcome to eat with me in a dining hall operated by Corpsmen training for food service jobs.  They would have to pay for their own meal, just as I and every other staff member who ate there did.

The media people seemed to respect that approach. None ever turned the dining hall suggestion down.  I never spent a dime of RCA money wooing a reporter.  A lot of them wrote favorable stories about activities at our center.

Revising Identities

The latest change at our best-known big-box store seems to have elicited a rising tide of apathy. Wal-Mart removed the hyphen (or the star that occupied the same space in many places) several weeks ago. I still am straining to hear the cheers for Walmart.

In these tough times, however, it might be worth taking a moment to ponder the costs of changes like this. Think of the signs, letterheads, labels, painted truck panels, and numerous other items that will have to be altered. Walmart is so big that costs in the millions are easy to visualize, and customers will pay them as the hyphen-less and star-less merchandiser subtly includes them in price increases.

Although in this case the alterations easily could be phased in to hold costs down, keep an eye on our leading discounter and see if its intrepid execs don’t start to champ at the bit and order quicker revisions than necessary to “get the project completed.” They recently were running an expensive advertising campaign just to tell us about it. And who cares? The company’s own home page showed the name all three ways just a few days ago. The star in the middle was replaced with something at the end best described as an orange doodad, making the revised name into a logo that fails to signify much of anything. One would think corporate leaders could find more important things to meddle with.

In the case of Walmart, Wal-Mart, or Wal¶Mart, it’s hard to think of a reason for the changes. The company has been making money hand over fist, and is expected to make even more as people look for places to buy cheap stuff to help cope with economic distress.

Sometimes, more than a hyphen or star is involved and there may be fairly good reasons to upgrade a corporate identity. About a year before I went to work at Allis-Chalmers in the public relations department the corporate wizards there decided they needed to create a more modern image by renaming the company and following that with the introduction of a new logo. Most of us thought they were right. The old moniker—Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company—was not inspiring. They fixed that by just knocking off the last two words, and it was a good fix.

The A-C logo was a stodgy affair that did not lend itself to a quick fix. So the image makers scrapped it and commissioned a high-priced advertising agency to develop a completely new symbol. Veteran PR men told me numerous new designs were proposed and rejected over many months before a logo finally was approved by the CEO. Although no one knew the exact costs of developing and changing to the new symbol, my associates estimated very conservatively that the total was about $250,000. In the mid-1960s, a quarter of a million was considered more than just walking around money, even in a big company.

The name change was nice, but it did little to reverse the downward spiral of the Allis-Chalmers corporate fortunes. The logo change became an embarrassment. Just a short time after the sleek new symbol had been plastered, painted, and printed all over the place, someone encountered an Associated Grocers logo, an emblem which had been around for years. It was nearly identical in color and form to the “unique” Allis-Chalmers creation that cost so much to design and adopt.