Pure theatre from Howard and Costello

Prime Minister John Howard performed the "best" PR stunt of the election last night by appearing with Treasurer Peter Costello on Today Tonight. It was almost as good as his donation of $500,000 to save the orangutan (complete with YouTube video and sick child).

Suddenly voters are supposed to believe all is well in the House of Liberal between these two, after two years or so of tension about the leadership. Sure.

It was a cosy setting. More interesting was that it was on Today Tonight, a pretty "low-brow" infotainment program (it long ago ceased to be about current affairs or news). I imagine it's the Liberals' attempt to reach the "masses", seeing as though Howard isn't disposed to using the fm stations to push his messages.

This morning there was another interesting "sideshow. The Liberals' used a garbage truck, featuring a poster of Howard and Costello and some other politician. I couldn't make out who, as I was driving back from the beach, and I usually don't look at garbage trucks.

Not to be outdone, my son then got a text/voice/viedo message on his mobile from Kevin. This was actually an excellent use of the medium. You could also enter several areas of policy and read the details. The only drawback was that it is unsolicited. But then again, so have been the pamphlets appearing in our letterbox over the past two weeks.

TV media polls way off the mark

Channel Nine's A Current Affair, a national program, tonight promoted yet another of those ridiculous polls. This time, who would you vote for in the federal election: John Howard or Kevin Rudd?

These type of polls, where viewers simply dial a number to register a vote, are a scandal. The results are meangingless, as anyone can ring in multiple times. In other words, the result is probably biased.

The Liberal Part is renowned for marshalling its members to ring talk radio shows and vote in these pointless pseudo polls.

Unfortunately, as I previously mentioned, most of the country gets its information from television. So does a loaded result have the power to persuade voters? If the result is biased in favour of the government, will this cause people to rethink their support one way or the other?

Meantime, the broadcast goes unpunished. Idiots. My advice: read more newspapers.

Howard calls election at last

It took him long enough. After months of fake campaigning and pork-barrelling, John Howard has called the federal election for November 24.

Now we'll really start to see and hear some spin ... though it's more likely to be seen, as elections these days are fought on our television screens.

The media maniuplation will be (hopefully) interesting to watch/see/hear. Every day a new photo opportunity and plethora of sound grabs. The same methods will be employed by Labor.

However, I detect that voters are wise to the tactics and have already cast their ballots. Certainly the polls have been consistently predicting a Labor victory for months.

As they say: "watch this space" (and lots of others).

Media complicity

Here in WA there are two Australian Football teams - the Eagles and the Dockers (the Dockers are actually down the river from Perth in Fremantle).

Media coverage of these teams border on fanatical (and at times, farcical). They get saturation coverage, and that’s in the off-season.

The presence of so many young, over-paid, ego-inflated sportspeople creates many problems for these teams at regular occasions throughout the year/s. The Eagles always seem to have someone in trouble (crashing cars while drunk, swimming across rivers to avoid a police breath test, drugs, indecent behaviour, psychological problems, more booze, assaults, association with bikie gangs and other criminals).

Sadly, one of the Eagles former players, Chris Mainwaring, 41, died on 1 October. Media reports suggest there were a cocktail of drugs and alcohol involved, plus marital and financial problems. Mainwaring had a history of being a “party animal” to the point of probably being an alcoholic.

The Eagles management, however, has not been able to change players’ behaviour. This is a worrying sign for a supposedly professional outfit. Chairman “Delta” Gooding just seems to smile every time he’s fronted by the media, with an attitude of “well, what more could we expect?”

More worrying is the media’s role in not exposing more of the antics these guys get up to. When I asked a senior club official how they managed to keep things out of the media, he replied they just ring the journos and ask them to “go easy”. The journalists know that if they break any negative stories they won’t get any future information. To put it in sports journalism’s language of talking in clichés: they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them.

The biggest story in many years about Eagles captain Ben Cousins abandoning his car and swimming the Swan River to avoid a police breath test late one night was broken by ABC talkback announcer, Liam Bartlett, now with 60 Minutes. Bartlett had nothing to lose by naming and shaming Cousins, who has recently finished a drug rehab program in the US, and was also one of the last people to see Mainwaring alive.

I’d say the Eagles’ media/PR department is not strong in presenting a case to management on how the club should be focusing on its corporate reputation. That’s blindingly obvious, following the ANZ Bank’s departure as a sponsor. They seem to operate with a narrow, media-only focus, without knowing much of the other areas involved in modern communication.

Meantime, Channel 7 will telecast Mainwaring’s funeral, once again elevating a football player to demigod-like status. The more these people are put on pedestals, without exposing their insidious antics, the more we can expect the youth who follow them to accept this behaviour as normal and something to aspire to.

The local media have much to answer for.

Podcasts and PR

Podcasts. Whether you like or loathe them, somewhere on the Internet you’ll be exposed to them.

Among PR practitioners, particularly in the US, they’re all the rage. It is another option for companies to “get in touch” with their customers.

Well, I’ve got news for all you. Not yet (at least in Australia).

PR today is about reaching those specialist audiences – the Long Tail. And podcasting is one way of doing that. However, the audiences (in Australia) are so small that they render the podcast ineffectual. Audiences today are so fragmented. Look in any newsagent and see the range of magazines. How many channel are there on Foxtel?

I asked students in three university PR tutorials I took during 2006 whether they listened to podcasts. None of them did. This year I asked again, with only three of 95 students listening in. The common reasons for not doing so were: "it takes too long", and simply, "why would I bother?" So who’s listening?

A podcast has to be specifically pitched to my/your personal and professional tastes for it to register. The time I spend searching for something useful could be used doing something useful: like, having a surf.

Until Telstra can provide all Australians (and I'm including regional areas) with decent internet access, then we can forget about podcasts. About the the only use at present is for sound grabs in online media rooms.

Anyone for a surf?

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