Is to get PR people to stop doing stupid stuff. After being ridiculed for days, Sony finally took down its fake playstation blog. But why does it take irate bloggers to get PR people to do the right thing? Bill Sledzik made a great point in his comment. If these PR people had any ethics, they'd just say no when clients ask them to do this stuff. Why is it so hard for them to do the right thing and walk away when a client asks them to lie? Are we all such people pleasers that we forget our ethical principles when a big client waves an account in our face.
My hero of the day is GSD&M President Roy Spence who walked away from the Walmart business -- at least someone has learned something from all this nonsense!


Sony’s fake blog was designed by Zipatoni, a marketing firm, not a PR firm. I’m not so sure Sony asked them to create a fake PSP blog. Sony is a hip company, but one with conservative and largely Japanese management, and I am having a hard time envisioning the meeting in which a Sony executive proposed this stupid idea. My guess is that this idea came from Zipatoni. I also suspect that Edleman suggested something similar to Wal-Mart, again, reasoning that Wal-Mart’s management is unlikely to have come up with anything as dumb as this.
Posted by: joel | December 21, 2006 at 12:00 AM