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PR Fuel: Purely ProvincialNew York is typically considered one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world. After living here for a decade, I think it's just as provincial as every other place on the planet.My friend Mike grew up in Brooklyn not far from where I live. He served two tours in Vietnam and from the bedroom of his house you can see the Empire State Building. Last week he asked me how to get to City Hall in Manhattan, which is at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. "I never go to the city," he told me. Provincialism can work against PR efforts because it shines a light on attitudes and ideas that may be foreign to others or that play into stereotypes. A story in Tuesday's edition of The Wall Street Journal provides an example. The article is about a fake advertisement for retailer JCPenney that popped up on YouTube. The spot won a Bronze Award at the 2008 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival last week. Unfortunately, the spot was not legitimate and it appears that someone at a third-party production company that had worked on JCPenney's ad campaign did the spot on the sly and submitted it to the festival. The ad is a play on JCPenney's "Today's the day to ..." tagline and shows two teenagers practicing getting hurriedly dressed in an effort to prepare for sneaking off to the girl's basement to have sex while her mother sits upstairs unaware. It probably would have been a "cute" scene if it was in "Juno," but I can't imagine any retailer wanting the public to believe that it promotes teen sex. Alan Siegel, chief executive of New York strategic-branding company Siegel + Gale, was asked for comment on the spot. "It's not going to reflect well on the brand in Middle America, but the ad is nicely done and the people in it are attractive; young people in New York and L.A. will get a kick out of it," Siegel told The Wall Street Journal. Quotes such as that are a dime a dozen in the media and play into the stereotype of Middle America. These quotes, I believe, are generated from a provincial mindset, because I know plenty of Americans from all walks of life who would think such an ad does not reflect well on a company and just as many "Middle Americans" who, to quote Siegel, would find it "sassy, fun and irreverent." Provincialism comes in many forms, some of them subtle. My accent worked against me on television last year when I was talking about the banking company Wachovia, which is pronounced "wah-KO-vee-yah." I pronounced the company's name "wah-chove-vee-yah," which is a symptom of having lived in Maryland when the company began expanding into the Washington, D.C. area. No one knew how to pronounce Wachovia, and Baltimorese speakers like me bastardized the pronunciation. Everyone at my company thought it was hilarious, and even a few clients emailed to chide me jokingly for my poor pronunciation. Last week while listening to the radio I heard a guest on a financial news show talking about Schlumberger, the world's largest oilfield services company. The correct pronunciation is "shlum-behr-ZHAY" and the company is named after its French founders. The guest pronounced the company's name as "slum-ber-ger." I know the guy so I dropped him a joking note about it. "I know, I know," he wrote me. "Everyone is telling me I pronounced Schlumberger wrong. But that's how we said it down in Houston." Provincialism in PR takes many forms, not all of them bad. Properly targeting local media sometimes means having to take a provincial approach. If you aim too wide, the local media won't see how the story affects its audience. The local media wants a provincial point of view because, even with the wide reach of the Internet, they understand who butters their bread. When I speak to a reporter in Indianapolis about a local company, I concentrate on what matters locally. In effect, I take off my "New York hat" and put on a local hat and try to tie my comments into what readers in Indianapolis are most likely to identify with. I do the same thing when I talk to a reporter in Los Angeles, and when I speak to reporters overseas, I try to gear my mindset to that of someone outside of the country. When you speak to the media it's important that you understand who the audience is and how that audience is most likely to interpret what you're saying. Unless you're trying to do so, you don't want to come off as a country bumpkin or a city slicker, just someone who knows what he or she is talking about.
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