February 2019 – Life in Public Relations Hell

Not A Turkish Delight

turkey crazy

Working for a perfectionist is a special kind of hell.

I have worked for my share of micromanaging perfectionists in my long public relations career, but someone I worked for a while ago, Lulu Yilmaz, was by far the worst.

Lulu was a short blonde Turkish woman in her late thirties who ran her own firm, the Yilmaz Agency, with offices in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.

She was headstrong, pushy, very opinionated, and hated when anyone on her staff challenged her.

Lulu also fancied herself an artist and had her lame artworks featured on the walls through her offices. It was truly pedestrian impressionist art to me and I don’t know shit about art. This artistic side of her proved a pain in the ass later when she would be very critical of our PowerPoint proposals as not being beautiful enough. I hate PowerPoint, but more on that later.

Lulu had experience in public relations, more than 15 years, but she knew next to nothing about media relations and couldn’t write worth a shit.

Even worse, nothing we did was ever good enough for her.

nobody-is-perfect-688366_1920-1024x1024

You could have one of the agency’s clients on the Today Show or in the Wall Street Journal and it would never matter. You could never build up trust with her.

It felt like have a bank account flush with money one day, and empty the next.

Or it was like trying to build a house on a foundation of quicksand.

Lulu was also extremely blunt in her criticism, and many times, it felt as if you could do nothing right when working for her.

“Now, Jake,” she would say in a condescending tone of disapproval and disdain. “Our client is not happy.” Then she would follow with a litany of criticisms that many times were unfounded or unfair.

However, since she expected perfection, you could never hope to match the delusions in her crazy mind. It was demoralizing, to say the least.

Lulu used berate our teams in horrible conference calls that I called “media relations beatdowns.”

horrible boss

Lulu would try to shame us and tell us we were keeping her up at night by not delivering results for her clients. Sometimes she would do this on Friday, and then demand we pitch the media, even though everyone knows in PR that this is the worst day to pitch and is usually when companies dump bad news. Far too many times, Lulu was strategically clueless.

As I have also discovered unfortunately in this business at other agencies, our clients were always right in Lulu’s eyes (because they paid us) even when they were so obviously wrong. She was tough on her employees, but rarely, if ever, stood up to clients and defended our work. It was always our fault. However, this ignored our role as PR consultants, which is to educate clients about the PR process and advise them the best strategy to benefit their business. Clients don’t hire us to be a “yes-man” or “yes-woman” agreeing with everything they propose. They hire us for our expertise, which is something Lulu would conveniently forget whenever we were criticized by clients.

Lulu had two coveted clients, an airline and a housewares brand (her first client), that she built her firm around. These clients abused us in so many ways but Lulu never took our side.

Also, we were always expected to drop everything to make sure these two clients were happy. It was beyond a nightmare.

At the end of my first year, Lulu declared that this is “the best team we’ve ever had at the Yilmaz Agency…”

I took pride in that initially until over the next year I sadly watched nearly everyone one of our staff leave our agency because of Lulu’s ongoing craziness and unreasonable demands. I then realized that this statement by Lulu was a lie and part of her con to try and keep us there.

crazy to work here

Even worse, she said the same thing at the end of my second and third year as well, but by then I had already seen through her manipulative bullshit.

Not surprisingly, the turnaround at the Yilmaz Agency was atrocious. When I joined the firm, there were around 35 employees spread out over the three offices.

In the following three years I worked for Lulu, more than 55 employees, (honestly, I lost count after a while), left the agency.

After someone left her agency, they were always in the wrong in Lulu’s eyes. “I heard bad things about them from clients…” was Lulu’s usual refrain.

As you could imagine, Millennials didn’t last long working for Lulu, and the ones that did became bitter and angry and difficult to work with.

God knows how tough I am on Millennials and their horrible work habits and attitudes, but they had a point with Lulu.

Lulu would work our younger staff late into the night on time-consuming proposals and projects, and on weekends and holidays, too.

crazy pr

She once dumped a 57-page PowerPoint proposal project on me and the Chicago office on a Friday afternoon. We spent all weekend on the proposal, and we later got the client, but they fired us after a month because of a fuck up from one of the junior staff that worked in the Chicago office (that unbelievably went on to work for one of the largest PR firms in the world). More on that incident later.

When I joined the firm, the young staff was already in rebellion and complained bitterly about her horrible and unappreciative management style. I had many times wondered what I had got into as I had left of the worst PR jobs as I ever had as a PR specialist at an e-commerce company. Working at Lulu’s agency proved worse. I felt embarrassed that I had described Lulu’s agency as a dream job when I left my previous position at the e-commerce company on good terms. I had no idea how much of a haunting joke that would be.

Lulu used to play of sort of bad cop, good cop routine with her vice president Miriam Letti, who I later called the VP of Panic. Miriam, who was an obnoxious dark haired Jewish woman in her late thirties, would come off as the reasonable and nice one, but it was all a lie. She was hardly nice as Miriam would panic when Lulu attacked the staff for not living up to her crazy standards. However, Miriam proved twisted in her own timid way as she would text me on Saturday nights and weekends with ridiculous demands that I knew from were coming from Lulu. I also remember once Miriam giving me shit about asking for the day after Christmas off?!!

Miriam was also a horrible micromanager who would finish her work at the Chicago office, and after eating dinner at home and putting her kids to bed, would send me a series of panicky reminder emails about client work. This is where the time difference really proved a nightmare. After finishing my work and wanting to go home around 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. PST, I would have to field all of these constant reminders and criticisms from Miriam which would keep me at the office even later. I will write more about her dumb ass in a future blog.

micromanager

Lulu’s husband Lorne was also a piece of work. I secretly called him Cage Boy as he used to be a UFC fighter years before. It was also a reference to his in-your-face management style as well, even though he knew nothing about public relations. Fortunately, he didn’t work with the firm in my first couple of years there, as he started a TV UFC company/league. Through years of public relations help and advice from Lulu, before I joined the firm, (not to mention free PR help from the agency staff), his company was bought by a large corporation for hundreds of millions of dollars. So now Cage Boy was rich, and he bought a huge home for him and Lulu in a gated community. No doubt the money made him even a bigger asshole. Not surprisingly, he was forced out shortly after the corporation bought his company. Then he started hanging out around our agency, pretending to be a cool entrepreneur. But I’ll return to Lorne’s story in a later blog.

Honestly, I couldn’t stand working for Lulu’s crazy ass. I am still not sure how I lasted more than three years working for this demented freak.

quitting

The one time that I finally stood up to her and basically told her what I thought of her lousy firm, crazy management style, and cheap ways and quit, Lulu wouldn’t accept my resignation. It was a strange reaction as she admitted to me that no one who worked for had ever spoken as bluntly to her as I had. So Lulu gave me a raise to try and appease me and everything was OK for a short while but then things went to back to the normal craziness a few months later.

Sometimes I think I was a masochist for having stayed as long I did working for Lulu.

It nearly ruined my career.

Feel like a Public Relations Version of Crash Davis from the film BULL DURHAM

Many work days I feel just like Crash Davis from the brilliant baseball film BULL DURHAM.

For those who haven’t seen the 1988 film, Crash Davis, played by Kevin Costner, is a veteran minor league baseball catcher who is sent down to the single-A Durham Bulls to educate and train hotshot rookie pitcher Ebby Calvin LaLoosh, played by Tim Robbins. Crash’s main purpose is to help Ebby become a major-league talent through controlling Ebby’s wild and erratic pitching. The big league club no longer has plans for Crash’s future beyond his training young talent, which becomes apparent to him by the end of the film.

I feel more often than not that I am here at our agency to train young people to take over my department. Our boss constantly says how indispensable I am to our agency, but it is beginning to sound hollow. And this is not only because my low salary doesn’t come anywhere near being commensurate with the experience and talent I bring to the position.

Honestly, it feels like no matter how many media placements I secure or successful PR campaigns that I run that it is only an afterthought to others, particularly the Millennials who work for me, and in our agency.

They don’t care what I do and my advice seems to be falling on deaf ears. I know they think I am old and stuck in the past, but I think experience and strategy matters a lot more than clever, slick, clueless talent.

They just don’t seem to realize how hard it is to achieve these kinds of results

It is depressing at times I must admit.

Louis aka MBA boy is like so many other Millennials that have worked for me. He has become increasingly hostile and believes he knows better than I do about how to achieve PR results and keep clients happy, but this is only his first real PR agency job.

He’s like too many arrogant Millennials I’ve met fresh out of school that feel they can learn everything they need to know in a book. He even once cluelessly suggested we “rat fuck” a troubling and hostile client by anonymously posting negative comments to our client’s website and social media. I didn’t know what to say except that we are in the PR business to support and help our clients, not destroy them.

The thing is when he joined our agency, MBA Boy couldn’t write a decent press release. His first drafts would be full of opinion, grammar errors, and he had no knowledge of AP style or how to structure a release like a news article. His pitch letters were even worse. His writing has improved over time, but he still makes the same grammar and content errors. It can be frustrating.

In fact, the skill set of young people who have worked for me in past few years has been shockingly bad. For the most part, they can’t write, let alone write a press release or compelling pitch. I wonder just what are they teaching their students in the public relations departments at these so-called universities of higher learning.

At the end of BULL DURHAM, Crash hits his last homer for the minor league home run record, (which goes unnoticed by everyone including the media), and hangs it up his cleats and ponders becoming a manager.

Maybe that is my fate for now on as a manager teaching ungrateful and snobby Millennials who ignore my wisdom from years in the PR trenches.

Seems like hardly an inviting and rewarding future.

Cause of the American Civil War? More Millennial Ignorance…at Work

It was another classic example of Millennial work ignorance, but one that still haunts me, and makes me wonder what all this technology is for if not educate us or at least enlighten us in some way.

Not too long ago while at work, I overheard our former social media manager Lark and the Indian tech geek Arushi talking about the cause of the American Civil War. They were unsure if the war was fought over slavery, an ugly and shameful economic system built on the stolen labor and the denial of basic human freedoms too many of us take for granted today.

This was around the time of Charlottesville tragedy and people in our country were finally calling for the removal of public statues of traitor and slaver Robert E. Lee. You can look up Lee’s history if you doubt where I stand on this. This an excellent article that destroys the myths of Lee and reveals his true history and views on slavery and racial matters.

Johnathan, a graphic artist, who grew up in the south, wondered why people wanted to take down the Lee statues. Another clueless Millennial.

They have access to more information than any generation in history via the internet and remain ignorant of history and key facts about our country and the world.

It is no wonder that all I ever hear Lark, Arushi, and the other Millennial fools around our office talk about is trivial bullshit. They rarely if ever talk about books, ideas, great music, films or TV. Their lives revolve around their phones and social media.

Pathetic and shallow.

Just as annoying is Lark and Arushi constantly talking about online videos.

“Did you see that video?” is a constant refrain from Arushi.

It is typically some trivial pet video or some other shallow clip.

Yet when it comes to an important subject like the American Civil War they remain clueless and yet the answers remain in the palm of their hand.

How did I get stranded in this ignorant Millennial work nightmare?

The Social Media Criminal

I thought Lark was the worst social media manager I ever worked with, but his replacement, Danny Medina, was so much worse in ways our agency could have never imagined.

This two-faced freak proved to be a very savvy social media criminal.

It proved a costly hire for my boss — quite literally.

Danny was a short Latino man in early thirties with dark hair he styled in a strange pompadour. He wore denim jackets and pretended to be cool always smiling giving a thumbs up to everyone and he would call people “brother.”

It seemed so phony to me like he was trying too hard.

He also pretended to be a church-going, religious person and even said he sang in a traveling choir. I think that was a strategy to endear him to my boss who is deeply religious.

Something about Danny, his odd, overfriendly behavior as if he was sizing us up, gave me the creeps from the start.

However, he even had me fooled initially, as he pretended to be a capable social media manager although he had little or no experience. Yet could pull off just enough to keep our boss fooled with lame posts.

Soon after, he wasn’t communicating with me and he also had no knowledge or idea how to leverage my PR and media results in our client’s social media pages just as with his predecessor Lark.

Some of our clients began bitterly complaining about Danny’s work, but he would quickly blame the clients. Now, this is a difficult thing for me to say, but in this case, our clients were right about Danny’s lame work.

Another odd thing I noticed, is that each work day Danny wandered far from our office wearing earbuds and talking on his phone sometimes for hours at a time. I would see him walking when I went to a nearby Starbucks for coffee. Yet he never stayed late to make up for his lost time. He always left around 5 p.m. like the other Millennials around our office.

We are both NBA fanatics and Danny tried to befriend me that way, too. He even invited me to a Lakers game which I refused. Even then something told me that no way was I hanging out with this freak.

My boss began to complain about Danny checking out on his job. Danny told him he was heartbroken about his girlfriend that had recently left him and went back to Chicago where he was also from. His mind not being on his social media job was apparently was all a ruse, too.

In another sickening development, Danny had befriended Code Boy and used to call him brother and they would give each fist bumps and high fives in the office.

Even worse, Code Boy and Lydia used to invite Danny to their fake team lunches. That gave me pause. Think about it. They hated me so much they would rather invite a creepy criminal to their fake lunches than me. It truly showed me the lack of character and true shallowness of Code Boy and Lydia, my unfortunate so-called co-workers.

Talk about a diseased culture.

Pretty crazy.

Danny’s gig was finally up about seven months into his employment.

My boss started to discover social media advertising charges for Facebook and Instagram ads that he hadn’t authorized.

Actually, Danny had started his own NBA fan/news business on Instagram and Facebook using our boss’s credit card business to fund his new operation.

My boss also discovered Danny would use our office and address and even pictures of our office to convince people to sign up for his service and company,

All in all, he eventually stole about $2,000 from our company.

When my boss got suspicious, Danny had already gone home for the night.

Danny didn’t show up the next day at work as he must have realized he had been found out as my boss wanted to meet with him about the mysterious charges.

Danny disappeared and we never saw him again. We figured he had done this at many businesses across the country and we were only his latest victim.

Shortly after he left, we also began receiving mysterious emails from someone pretending to be our boss asking members of our agency to buy gift cards from Best Buy and send them to him. We have no proof it is Danny, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

Even this past week we got an inquiry from a minor league baseball team back east that said we had contracted with them to provide advertising services.

Only one problem. Our agency had no knowledge of it. Danny had created a fake email while at our agency to fraudulently use our company to contract services with this minor league team.

Not too long ago, someone also stole money out of our bosses’ business bank account. We are not sure if it is Danny but you never know.

One night after the whole thing went down, I had a strange conversation with Code Boy, who said it was too bad about Danny. He seemed sadder to me that he lost a fake friend than pissed about a lying criminal who had stolen a lot of money from his father.

Goes to show that you can never tell about people. I’ve had my reservations about social media managers in general, but I never figured anything like this.

Embezzlement?

The sad part is we never found Danny to file charges against him. The authorities are still looking for him as well.

Danny is still out there somewhere trying to steal money from other unsuspecting victims.

Unfortunately, after Danny’s departure, my boss continued his familiar pattern of hiring inexperienced people for our agency’s social media services.

Sophia, a former Latina waitress in her late twenties, who recently graduated from college with little social media experience, was hired as our social media manager. She was actually supposed to be an intern in my PR department but we didn’t have any openings at the time. Unfortunately, Sophia has also proved to be somewhat clueless and uncommunicative and even goes on team lunches with Code Boy and Lydia.

She was somewhat friendly before the lunches, but now she despises me, too. I am not sure why as I have never been mean or harsh toward her at all. Sophia is also wary if I try to speak to her like she is afraid I will hit on her or something even though I have always been very professional and courteous toward her. Must be Lydia’s backstabbing poison again and maybe the lingering BS from the Brazilian Incident.

Sophia is smarter than Lark, although that is not saying much, and she isn’t trying to embezzle funds like Danny.

So I guess you could call that progress.

Social Media Hack

Sadly, I have worked with my share of social media hacks in my public relations career. Most of them have no idea the role of public relations and how it can be leveraged in social media to benefit clients. More on that in future posts.

However, one of the worst social media managers I have worked with in my career was a strange Millennial freak I will call Lark.

In his mid-twenties, scrawny with short hair, Lark was a strange, awkward and unfriendly freak. Lark used to wear track clothes, shorts, and tennis shoes to our office and would run (yes, run!!) past my office numerous times a day to visit my boss few offices down like a punk kid. It was beyond annoying.

One day during summer, he even wore flip-flops to our office. Sorry, call me old-fashioned but flip-flops don’t belong in a work environment. This is work not fucking vacation. Unfortunately, his attention to his work reflected this attitude.

Lark was hostile toward me from my first day at our agency. Not sure why. Him and Code Boy went to lunch on my first day and didn’t even invite me along. Not exactly welcoming. Kind of like onboarding in hell. It gave me a glimpse right away into the dysfunctional situation I had walked into.

The worst thing about Lark was that he was dumb. He had little or no creativity or intellectual curiosity about his job or anything else. Not exactly a good trait for someone who is supposed to have his pulse on the media and pop culture for promoting our agency’s clients.

Frankly, he was a social media manager only one year out of college who was in over his head. He had some strange notions as well about social media.

Lark was so afraid of posting too many social media items for our clients, he rarely posted at all so our clients’ social presence actually got worse after they hired us.

Lark actually had the gall to say to me once that he took public relations classes in school and knew a lot about PR, but honestly, he was fucking clueless about what I did for our clients.

It was so frustrating to secure numerous high-profile media placements for our clients and for my work not be represented in our clients’ social media pages. Lark never had any communication with me to find out what I working on and honestly, he didn’t care. Lark and I hated each other and there was no hiding it. It wasn’t just our age difference. He had shown no respect for me even though I was experienced and knew what I was doing. I had no respect for his incompetence and inexperience and my success made him look bad.

But the bottom line: our client’s social media suffered from this fool.

When we went to the new business presentation to a Chinese company in Silicon Valley (which I mentioned in my previous blog), which was for social media and not PR, Lark didn’t present to the client. He hardly said anything at all until forced to by our boss.

The boss’ other son Brian, also a Millennial, a former gym trainer who sadly handles our new business outreach with no experience!!!, had to give the presentation, which was questionable as well. But at least he did it.

Is it any wonder we didn’t get the business.

This is when I realized just how much our agency was in trouble with Lark handling our social media.

I once asked my boss why he didn’t replace Lark as he was clearly incompetent. My boss said he didn’t want to bring on a more experienced social media manager because they would demand more money. So instead, he cheaped out, and our agency’s performance suffered because of it.

Strangely, the only time Lark was sociable at all was with his Millennial colleagues.

Lark’s shallow partner in Millennial crime was naturally Lydia. But he also hung out a lot with a strange Millennial freak from India that joined our team to do research and help out with social media. Arushi was very short and wide, long black hair and an odd looking round face. She was very timid and shy, quiet and also only came out of her shell around other Millennials, namely Lark and Lydia. Yet Arushi always had this notion that people were trying to hit on her if anyone got too friendly, too. I saw how she got weird once when Code Boy was friendly toward her.

Arushi hardly said anything to me and was actually hostile because of poisoning from Lydia and Lark. She even rudely bumped against me during a new business meeting with a client. I was so outraged by her rudeness I barely could stay long for the meeting.

Yet Arushi was a fraud, too, of sorts. My boss and Brian praised her research skills, yet I once had her do a competitive analysis for one of our PR clients. It was inadequate, to say the least. The interns I eventually hired to help me in my PR department made her work look terrible. However, she took the cake for me, when before she left our firm, she actually walked into my boss’ office and demanded a $70K salary to stay working there as her internship was coming to a close. She was barely out of school and knew nothing about marketing or social media and was asking for this??? Millennial stupidity and arrogance will never cease to amaze me.

So, after several months there, I finally had it with Lark, and his inept ways and let my boss know of my displeasure with his lame social media performance, and his having no communication with me. It all came to head as my boss and Lark got into a series of arguments about his lame performance and willful ignorance.

This didn’t improve anything between me and Lark, but it did lead to his departure from our firm a couple of months later much to my relief.

However, be careful what you wish for.

Lark’s replacement was actually worse.