Category: press releases

“Being A Publicist Is Truly A Thankless Job…”: New Indie Novel, “Life In Public Relations Hell,” Explores The Dark Side Of The Public Relations Industry, Available on Amazon

“Being a publicist is truly a thankless job…”

So begins my latest controversial indie novel, LIFE IN PUBLIC RELATIONS HELL, a frank and satirical look into the dark side of the public relations industry available on Amazon as a digital book and in paperback and hardcover editions.

My novel’s protagonist, Jake Wilson, reflects on his foibles, frustrations, and heartbreaks as a long-time publicist in a searing diary where he holds nothing back.

Along the way, readers will meet a strange cast of characters, including Lulu Yilmaz, the CEO of the Yilmaz Agency, and a perfectionist and micromanager from hell, Lulu’s micromanaging accomplice, Miriam Letti, the agency’s vice president of panic, Lulu’s overbearing husband, Lorne Whitney, aka “Cage Boy,” and clueless manager, Bob Hampton, aka the “Tommy Boy of PR,” among many others.

Troubled by a late-career crisis, Jake struggles to navigate a modern work landscape fraught with whiny, lazy millennials, big agency fools, paper pushers, TV hacks, media liars, client and manager tantrums, media relations beatdowns, brainstorms to nowhere, trade show debacles, unsupportive employers and bosses, ungrateful clients, and backstabbing and undermining co-workers.

My novel also explores other intriguing topics such as the lack of diversity in the public relations industry, why the Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas sucks for publicists, the agony of work birthdays, early morning video calls, and PowerPoint design hell.

Yet through all of his trials and tribulations, Jake still holds out fading hope he’ll find his dream job someday.

My novel is everything I’ve ever wanted to say about the public relations industry as a publicist with a career spanning more than 25 years, a former journalist, and a Los Angeles-based author. Finally sharing my frank views on the dark side of public relations and just how nightmarish and heartbreaking it can be to work as a publicist or public relations executive has been a liberating experience for me. I wanted to give readers an honest, inside look at how difficult life as a publicist can be dealing with unappreciative bosses, ungrateful clients, and unsupportive and backstabbing colleagues.

In early 2019, I started my blog, “Life in Public Relations Hell,” to cope with my growing dissatisfaction with my public relations career. My blog inspired me to expand my work tales into a novel.

My blog and novel had been a lifeline for me, helping me cope with my ongoing job frustration. I was having a late-career career crisis at the time. You can say it was a cry for help in a way. Exploring my experiences in the PR industry has given me a new perspective on my career, public relations, and my life overall. The response to my blog has been positive as well.

Although my novel is fiction, I have strived to stay true to my real-life experiences working in public relations.

My novel has the same sardonic humor as my earlier novels, MONOGAMY SUCKS and RELATIONSHIPS SUCK. I didn’t want to hold anything back.

The first draft of my novel was an epic 700 pages, which I later split into two books. I was hoping to have my novel out sooner, but a combination of financial difficulties and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic delayed my novel’s launch.

With recent developments and trends in the job market, including the Great Resignation, this year is the perfect time to share my novel. I feel it’s a book everyone, who toils at jobs with little appreciation or pay, and yet still manages overcome challenges and hostile working environments, could relate to.

No amount of spin will prepare you for my hilarious, scathing novel from the hellish workplace trenches.

This is the first volume in a series of novels I plan to write about my public relations career. I have also completed most of the first draft of volume two in my Life in Public Relations Hell series, which I look to bring out in a year or two.

LIFE IN PUBLIC RELATIONS HELL is my ninth novel and the sixteenth book overall. My other works include the novels MONOGAMY SUCKS, RELATIONSHIPS SUCK, ROBOT TROUBLES, JAKE’S WAR: JULY 4, 2076, DEAR HEF, YOUNG, HORNY & MORMON, SWINGING WITH THE SUPERNATURAL, and LETTERS FROM CYBERSPACE, short story collection CAR DODGING AND OTHER STORIES, poetry collections TRAVELING AT THE SPEED OF HEARTBREAK, THE TRUMP YEARS, BACKYARD POETRY, THE HOLLYWOOD HOMELESS, MIMI’S DILEMMA, and BODY PARTS.

You can also find out more about my provocative novels, short story, and poetry collections on my Amazon⁠ ⁠authors page and on my Goodreads profile, which features past book reviews.

Please visit my blog for more posts about my PR hell books, media coverage, etc.

And as always, look for many more of my indie books to come.

GP

The Millennial Who Asked for a Reference After Quitting With No Notice

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Every once in a while, Lulu would be contacted by her Turkish friends and acquaintances, who would inquire about our agency hiring their sons or daughters as interns. That is how Marissa Aslan joined our agency. It was the same for Don Caylak, an annoying and snotty Turkish-American millennial, who had recently graduated from a local university studying photojournalism.

When I first met Don, I actually thought he was still in high school. He said he was 24, but he didn’t look a day over 18. Don was thin with black hair and brown eyes and greeted any of my work requests with an obnoxious smirk. In fact, this was his constant expression. I guess you could say Don had a bad case of resting smirk face. So, he fit in well with the rest of the lame millennial crew at the Yilmaz Agency. Don only lost his smug, snotty expression when he had to deal with one of Lulu’s unreasonable demands.

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Don actually had no public relations experience and had taken no PR classes at school, but I didn’t hold that against him. I also had no PR education before I joined my first PR agency. It was his journalism experience that intrigued me. Don had worked at the school newspaper as I had while I was in college in Long Beach.

Unfortunately, our similarities ended there.

Don was not easy to manage, as he always thought he knew better, and didn’t seem much interested in learning anything from me. He displayed this snotty, smug attitude despite having weak writing skills and little desire to overcome his ignorance of basic public relations practices. Don honestly showed no enthusiasm in learning the public relations business at all. Don was only there because he was pressured by his parents to get experience in business following his graduation.

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So, there was only so much Don could help me with. Don could work on media lists and help me with some media pitching, but I had to drastically revise everything he attempted to write. His writing was fucking awful, and I wondered at times if I should have bothered to assign Don writing assignments and just done the work myself. I couldn’t help but lament again the quality of writing classes in college these days. Don had no grasp of the basics of writing, let alone public relations writing. Don didn’t seem to care, though, as he ignored my edits and continued to write poorly.

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Lulu also had Don work on research projects for her and it was no surprise she was unhappy with his shoddy work. However, Lulu didn’t do anything about Don’s incompetence, as she had basically forced the idiot on me. I didn’t have a chance to interview him for our intern position. Lulu just handed me his resume and said he would be helping me with no consideration of whether Don would be a good fit for our agency.

Don also would spend a lot of time during the workday texting his colleagues in the Chicago office or talking to them on the phone, including one noxious millennial named Pattie Kelleher. He had met Pattie when Don and I had made our first and only trip together to the Chicago office for Don’s training shortly after he joined our firm. He befriended Pattie and others, and later I can only assume Don started backstabbing me through texts during the workday. I had noticed that Pattie and others at the Chicago office had become more hostile toward me after Don came back from our Chicago trip.

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Also, during our Chicago trip, our creepy colleagues at the Yilmaz Agency didn’t even make an effort to entertain Don and me, and at least take us out to dinner or show us the town. We weren’t treated like valued colleagues, but like visiting idiots. I was offended by their unfriendly behavior, and it showed me just how diseased and crazy Lulu’s agency was. Maybe it was the general lack of manners I have seen with so many young people I have worked with in recent years. Or maybe they already hated us because the previous L.A. office managers before me hadn’t been popular with the Chicago office. At least, that is was Lulu told me. Who knows if it was true?

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So, I was stuck with having to entertain Don the night we were in Chicago, which was an awkward experience. After a long walk, we finally found an excellent Italian restaurant. Typically, our colleagues were no help, as no one in the Chicago office recommended a local place for us to eat. We were truly on our own.

During dinner, Don and I really didn’t have much to talk about except for how lame we thought our agency colleagues were. I now realize Don probably told our colleagues my displeasure with their lack of social manners and their lousy work performance.

Don also would mock things I would say or do right to my face. It was crazy. He would, in particular, accuse me of having a phobia about my iPhone running out of power, as I kept a charger with me to make sure I could keep my phone powered up. I had one of the older iPhones at the time with the earlier batteries that didn’t hold a charge for too long. I needed to keep my phone charged at all times for business, and also, I was in a strange city and knew no one there. I needed to be cautious and vigilant. In our modern times, a phone has become an important lifeline for us. Strangely, Don couldn’t understand that even though he spent most of his time at work, texting.

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I couldn’t wait to get back to my hotel room to be alone with my thoughts and lament how I could have taken such a shitty PR job that only seemed to get worse with each passing day. I also picked up some wine and a bag of chips to try to relieve my work sorrows. I felt better for a short time, but the next day I had to deal with our colleagues’ hostility, not to mention Lulu’s and Miriam’s demands, and endless meetings with the team before flying back home to California with the idiotic Don. I also remember overhearing Marissa talking with Don and her asking what we did the previous night. She wondered why we went to that particular Italian place, which was not one of the cooler places in the city. Marissa did this with a straight face while ignoring the fact that she and the rest of the team treated us like lepers and didn’t offer any dining suggestions, let alone consider joining us. Idiot.

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I was glad our stay at the Chicago office was short, only one day and night, for Don’s training, as I always felt depressed following a visit with my Chicago colleagues. It only reminded me that I needed to get a new job soon. In L.A., I had to deal with the Chicago office’s dysfunction from afar through email and the phone. Seeing it up close was far worse.

This time on the flight back I tried to ignore Don as much as possible. I just put on some earbuds and listened to music and he did the same.

Also, because of our idiotic HR person, Maurice Lemons, we didn’t have Wi-Fi on our flight, but this I didn’t mind as I had a brief respite from Lulu’s and Miriam’s constant demands and craziness.

As I had mentioned, things only got worse after that between Don and me. He began to blatantly fuck up on the easiest of assignments, and he truly didn’t seem to care. I knew I soon would have to talk with Lulu about replacing him and I wasn’t sure how she would take it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to.

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A month or so after we got back from our Chicago trip, Don asked me to give him a ride to the airport to pick up his parents at LAX. His parents were an odd couple, to say the least. His father, who was in his early sixties, dressed as an older Bohemian surfer with sandals. Don’s mother was in her late fifties with dark hair and a nervous look on her face. She kept worrying we were going to get into an accident, as I tried to navigate my way out of LAX traffic after another long and horrible workday at the Yilmaz Agency.

However, Don’s parents, unlike their son, actually had manners and thanked me profusely for giving their son an opportunity to work at our agency.

I told them it was nothing, and it was our pleasure. In fact, only the first part of my response was correct. Don’s deteriorating performance did absolutely nothing to help our agency.

I recall Don telling me that his father was waiting for a big lawsuit case award for a disability back payment he was owed in Turkey. He really didn’t go into the details, but for some reason, Don’s father couldn’t work. I only mention this, as about a month later, Don showed up at our L.A. office one morning declaring that he had to quit his internship to take a job at Home Depot because his father had lost his case and someone in the family had to make an income. I was sympathetic, but Don left that morning without giving us any notice. It really fucked things up, as me and the Chicago office were relying on Don to handle certain media monitoring tasks for our clients, in addition, to pitching the media.

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I was furious, but I wished Don luck. I told Lulu what had happened and she said she would be talking to his parents about Don’s abrupt departure.

I told Lulu that going forward I wanted to interview anyone first before they joined our agency and that I preferred people that had an interest in working in public relations to avoid another debacle as we had with Don. Lulu agreed and she put out an ad for a new intern instead of relying on her Turkish friends.

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Now that should have been the end of the story.

A couple of weeks later, I got a call from someone at Home Depot, asking for a job reference for Don. The lame fucker had the gall to ask for a reference even after leaving without giving us an appropriate notice, or really any notice at all. It was unprofessional behavior, and naturally, we didn’t give Don a reference beyond that he worked as an intern at our agency. It was a standard response when someone was fired or quit on bad terms. The job reference call was indicative of Don’s cluelessness when it came to business or probably anything else in life.

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Maybe things are changing and giving businesses a two-week notice is no longer considered necessary by younger workers, but I still feel it is a show of respect to your former employer. There was no faster way to burn a bridge in the business world than to quit without leaving notice, as Don discovered that day. It was something I had to learn the hard way in my own career, and I suspect many other millennials like Don will be learning this hard lesson in the years to come.

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Lulu’s Public Relations Awards

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During my years at the Yilmaz Agency, Lulu would occasionally — and inexplicably!! — receive praise and recognition from her public relations industry peers for her agency’s work. A couple of times, she was even named public relations professional of the year by a top publication that covers the PR industry.

Lulu’s industry accolades were perpetuating a lie that our agency was a normal, quality PR firm, and not a twisted, ugly, grind shop managed by a megalomaniac with a horrible track record of employee turnaround

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When the awards were announced, Lulu acted modestly about the recognition to her employees and praised “her team” as the reason for the award. Everyone knew at our agency that the award only validated her huge ego, as we would have to write a lengthy release about her awards and pitch it to the media extensively as if we were pitching news of one of our clients. In fitting with her true personality, Lulu wasn’t modest about her expectations that her awards receive a lot of media coverage. Despite our team’s diligence, not many in the media cared, except a few publications that covered public relations agency news.

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And yes, Lulu was right about one thing. She only got the awards and recognition because of the hard work and dedication of her employees. We succeeded despite frustrating, uninspiring, stressful working conditions, unappreciative clients, and Lulu’s ugly and oppressive management style and overall lack of support. Lulu down deep knew this and even admitted it in her rare modest moments, but it never seemed all that sincere to me.

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Lulu’s horrible management behavior only became worse – if that was possible – following her awards. I also can’t remember how many times people at our agency were asked to update her resume and the website with her awards recognition, and we were vilified by her if new awards details were left out of our agency’s new business proposals.

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Honestly, if there was a Razzie Award for the worst small agency in the public relations industry selected anonymously by her PR employees, Lulu would have won it every year. She probably would have won a PR Razzie the same year she was praised by others in the industry. I can imagine some of the PR Razzie awards Lulu would have been awarded would have included: Worst Small Agency Public Relations CEO, Worst Micromanager, and Worst Small Agency Employee Retention.

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One coveted public relations list that Lulu’s agency never made was the “Best Places to Work” list by the Holmes Report, which was compiled from anonymous responses from agency employees. I have no doubt that if the Holmes Report had launched the worst agency to work for list, Lulu’s agency would have topped the list every year. In fact, when Lulu’s agency started receiving numerous anonymous negative reviews from former and current employees on an online job review site, Lulu nearly lost it. It was a real and honest peek into the agency’s dysfunction for the public to see. So, she had some of us write fake glowing reviews of her agency. Only one problem. The positive reviews looked fake when compared to the honest and searing takes detailing Lulu’s and Miriam’s horrible antics.

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Lulu would also have me try to push her entrepreneur story to the media after these bad reviews so that I could try to get her positive press to counter the real details of her pathetic management performance. This only worked for a while until a new fresh set of horrible reviews of Lulu’s agency appeared on the job reviews site, freaking her out all over again.

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Thinking about Lulu’s awards years later, it was her dedicated employees that earned the true accolades and deserved an award for surviving her unrelenting bullshit and stress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 10th Anniversary Debacle

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In her typical fashion, Lulu made a big deal about her agency’s 10th anniversary and drove everyone crazy about it. She put on an expensive party at a local hotel and invited a lot of people from the Chicago area, including our clients.

Our PR team had to treat Lulu’s anniversary as if it was a huge deal, too. She had us write a press release and pitch it aggressively to the local Chicago media, but also nationally. Not many of our media contacts cared, and Lulu, of course, was disappointed in the media’s overall indifference. However, we did secure some coverage in the local Chicago business media and in the Chicago Tribune, but Lulu was unimpressed. The prima donna was unappreciative as usual. We were taking valuable time away from other clients to pitch her fucking story.  It also meant I had to work with that idiot Agnes, who I mentioned in a previous blog, pushed all of the creation of the pitch to me last second. Lulu and Agnes completely revised my pitch into tepid garbage and overhyped bullshit about Lulu. The lame 10th-anniversary press release they had created was also not news to anyone but Lulu.

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I couldn’t help but wonder how Lulu’s agency lasted one year, let alone ten with her awful management style and constant stressful working environment. Maybe that was the real achievement, I guess. Lulu’s agency lasting in spite of her relentless ugliness and lack of support.

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Lulu praised and toasted us at the party, and said her agency wouldn’t have grown without our efforts but she didn’t seem all that sincere to me. We succeeded in our jobs despite Lulu’s lack of trust and encouragement, and I know this was the same before I arrived at her agency, as a lot of former employees had gone to work for larger agencies and corporations after they left her nightmare company. You could think of Lulu’s agency as a kind of boot camp for PR people — a miserable experience that made us tougher for our future career endeavors.

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The real problem for me at the anniversary started at the party when Lulu offered an open bar, but only finger food. We weren’t served a meal — I only had a slice of pizza earlier in the day — and foolishly, I drank too much champagne and wine at the anniversary party. I always make it a rule not to drink around work colleagues, especially freaks like the ones that worked at Lulu’s place. You can say something or do something that later will be used against you at work. It is best not to go there.

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Unfortunately, I did.

A group of my millennial colleagues arranged to keep the party going after the anniversary celebration at a nearby bar. I naturally wasn’t invited by these fools, including Agnes and Marissa. Palmer invited me along anyway much to the chagrin of Agnes and Marissa who were surprised to see me. I have no doubt that I was going to be a subject of mockery and derision along with Lulu and Miriam, but now they had to drink with me. Things seemed to go OK at first, but I continued to drink without any food foundation, as I like to call it. Drinking without having eaten was always folly for me and it was on this night as well. I don’t remember much about our agency night at the bar, but I do recall thinking at one point that Agnes, Marissa, and my other co-workers — except for Palmer — weren’t even cool and fun when they drank. In fact, their snotty, unfriendly and smug attitudes became even worse.

The next day I lamented partying with my younger co-workers as struggled through a horrible hangover at work. It was a nightmare.

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At some point, during a meeting about one of our healthcare clients, Agnes actually joked that “I couldn’t hang” in reference to my hangover. I laughed along with everyone else, but I was furious, as Agnes’ comment made me feel old and pathetic.

When I left agency later that day to return to Los Angeles, I knew something had actually changed for the worse because of my night at the bar, and my reputation and situation was already horrible at the agency. I felt old as I left for the airport.

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As I returned from the trip on the flight back to Southern California, I wondered how I was going to work the next ten days, let alone ten months or ten years, with such unsupportive colleagues at an idiotic agency run by a crazy fool, Lulu, and her sycophant, Miriam.

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It was a sobering and depressing thought, to say the least.

Cage Boy

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Lulu’s husband Lorne Whitney was also a piece of work. I privately 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 I had the misfortunate to experience my last couple of years at Lulu’s firm. The worst thing of all is that Lorne was another obnoxious fool who knew nothing about public relations but he would still try to manage me on campaigns even though he wasn’t my boss.

Lorne was a tall, bald Caucasian man in his early forties with a muscular physique that he had maintained since his fighting days. He still looked the part of a fighter. Lorne seemed strangely distant when I first met him. I remember Lulu telling me that he hated to socialize, and not to take his cold attitude personally.

My first troubling encounter with Lorne occurred shortly after I joined the Yilmaz Agency. My small business magazine contact was looking for a cover story of their Orange County edition and asked me if I had any candidates. This was the same publication that featured our airline client in a cover story I detailed in my earlier blog about her photoshoot meltdown.

I ran the editor’s request past Lulu and she suggested Lorne would be a good candidate for the article. I arranged for Lorne to be interviewed for the story, and when the cover story came out Cage Boy was blown away. He sent me several emails praising me and he eventually had the article framed at his office and home.

“He’s never had anything like that,” Lulu said. “He wants to do something for you.”

I told her that it wasn’t necessary as I was just doing my job and trying to help her and him out. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but Lorne did.

I soon discovered the dark side of Lorne after he invited me as his guest to watch a UFC fight event that his company was putting on a Saturday night. I thanked him but I told him I already had plans and couldn’t attend. I actually didn’t have plans, but there was no way I was going to spend Saturday night with Lorne and Lulu after another horrible and stressful week at her agency. Fuck that. And on top of that, I am not a UFC fan.

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Lulu assured me that I didn’t have to go and it was OK if I had other plans, but I guess it was important to Lorne that I was there. He apparently was insulted that I had refused his invitation. After he sent me a short email saying that he understood and it was no problem, I never heard from him again for a couple of years. I didn’t care as dealing with his wife was bad enough.

As I soon discovered, no good deed went unpunished when it came to Lulu and even her family.

Fortunately, Cage Boy didn’t work with Lulu’s agency in my first couple of years there, as he had started a TV UFC company. 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 UFC company was acquired 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.

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Lulu told me she wanted Lorne to help us out to find clients and he started to join me and Lulu on new business meetings. Lorne would try to leverage his UFC business success to our potential new clients, who seemed impressed at first. Several clients that we secured from Cage Boy’s business leads soon realized he was clueless and it was all a front.

Lulu, unfortunately, started including Lorne in our agency’s client work. Lorne would say that “he knew nothing and that we were the experts” and then he would proceed to tell us how to do our jobs, specifically how to write pitch letters and press releases and new business proposals. He would put on the act that he was knowledgeable in business and PR but it was all an aggressive lie.

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Lorne was right – he knew next to nothing when it came to public relations writing, media and client relations — and he should have listened to our expertise. I wondered what he was doing there as he was only making a horrible situation worse.

The trouble began when Cage Boy edited and drastically revised our press release and pitch letter for a VPN client he helped us land. Cage Boy turned our creative but solidly written copy into slick bullshit writing full of hyperbole and claims. It resembled bombastic advertising copy, and he even included exclamation points, which I hate as you know from my previous blog.

He would tell me that my original version was great and that we were the experts of PR writing and then he would foist his lousy, hyped up copy on us. I didn’t know what to do as Lulu seemed to think it was OK.

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Then things got even more stressful when Cage Boy demanded we write five different pitch letters for our VPN client which was just fucking overkill. My team members in the Chicago office flipped out and I had to reassure them it would be OK, but I had to wonder.

Two days into the campaign, things took a turn for the worse when Cage Boy started pressuring us about securing media results.

“We got get them results right away or we could lose the client,” Lorne said in a panicked phone call.

“Lorne, we just launched the campaign. We have some promising responses, but securing media results takes time.”

“I know…but we have to be three steps ahead of the client,” Lorne responded. “You guys have to be more aggressive. I want a report every day on how we are making progress.”

“OK. The team is following up with the media and doing our diligence to uncover opportunities,” I said, thinking this guy was a fucking idiot. “We’ll keep you posted.”

I mean, come on. Cage Boy fucked up our PR materials and now he’s hounding us for instant results.  It doesn’t work that way. Media relations and PR were not like fighting in a fucking cage. You can’t finesse the media with a takedown move.

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Two weeks into their media campaign, our VPN client became unreasonable expecting instant coverage from top media such as the New York Times, L.A. Times, etc. They did this even though we had already received interest and coverage from several top tech publications including Mashable and TechCrunch.

Lorne didn’t defend our team’s work to our client and doubled down on his aggressive efforts to pressure us into securing media coverage. And, of course, Lulu didn’t support us either.

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Soon after, we lost the client over an email pitch fuck up by Chicago account executive Marissa Aslan (that I will describe in a later blog) and was relieved as I thought I wouldn’t have to work with Lorne again.

Unfortunately, one of Lorne’s business leads was the online video company that I mentioned previously had hired us to launch a PR campaign. Lulu wanted Lorne to take a hands-on role on the account, which led to more of his noxious micromanagement and pressure tactics. At times, working with Cage Boy felt like I was trapped in some horrible chokehold move. It was a deflating and suffocating experience as my long-time PR expertise was ignored and my creativity was stifled.

Then Lorne took it a step further as he tried to tell me how to speak to our online video client about a Wall Street Journal interview I secured for them.

I told our client that it took some convincing from me to get the reporter to sit down with an unknown startup company in a crowded tech space – online video – that was dominated by YouTube. I felt our client needed to know the work that went into securing a meeting for them with a writer at one of the top financial publications in the world. Our client’s CEO grimaced when I told them the writer was busy and almost canceled the meeting, but I persuaded her to sit down with them anyway at the paper’s New York offices. It was no surprise that our client was typical of many startups I have worked with where they think they have the greatest product or service ever invented and the media should just fall over themselves to cover them. Such delusional business attitudes run rampant in the tech world as I have discovered during the years. I’ve come to believe it is part of the DNA of those entrepreneurs that launch tech startups.  Apparently, this understanding eluded Cage Boy.

“You never tell a client something like that,” Cage Boy snapped when we got the elevator after the meeting.

“Lorne, I believe in being honest with our clients letting them know what the media thinks about their companies. I am not going to lie to them,” I responded.

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Who the fuck was this idiot? I thought bitterly as I struggled to control my anger. How would he know? Had he ever handled public relations at an agency? It was bad enough I have to deal with Lulu’s ignorant bullshit about PR and now I had to endure her husband’s moronic crap, too? I had been working closely with PR clients for decades and I knew what I was doing.

Lulu agreed with Cage Boy.

“You have to be more careful in speaking with clients,” she said.

Because of that incident, I was not allowed to attend any more in-person meetings with this client.

It also explained Dane Flynn’s hostility toward me concerning this client when he joined our agency a few months later. Cage Boy and Lulu no doubt told him about this incident with our client.

After a while, there were rumblings of discontent from my colleagues the Chicago and New York offices about how difficult Lorne was to work with. I also mentioned to Lulu that I felt Cage Boy was in over his head when it came to public relations work and I would prefer not to have to work with him directly.

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Lulu actually listened to us this time, and she decided that Cage Boy wouldn’t be involved in the day to day client work anymore and would only help us in new business meetings and searches.

I was more than a little relieved I wouldn’t have to work with Cage Boy anymore. After Lulu sold her agency the following year, Cage Boy wasn’t part of the deal. Last I heard Cage Boy was trying to put together a union for UFC fighters and he was getting pilloried by the sport’s leaders for being an untrustworthy scumbag who knows nothing about the fight business.

Mmmm…sounds familiar.

Cage Boy even put on a big showy press conference in the L.A. area to announce his lame UFC union.

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Even though I was actually based in L.A., Lorne preferred to work with people in our agency’s Chicago office and I was not involved in helping promote Cage Boy’s press conference. I knew by then Cage Boy was not too happy with my criticism about his work and attitude that I had shared with Lulu.

I didn’t care, though. It was just as well. From what I could tell nothing ever came from Cage Boy’s efforts. No surprise there. Cage Boy was like so many other clueless buffoons I had encountered during my PR career – so full of themselves and lacking in any real talent.

Cage Boy seems a fitting moniker for him in more ways than one.

 

 “I’m Full Greek”

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Of all of the smug and arrogant Millennials I had the misfortunate to work with at the Yilmaz Agency, Agnes Lekkas was in a class by herself.

Agnes, who was in her early twenties barely a year out of college, looked like a plainer, heavier version of the “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” actress Nia Vardalos. Unfortunately, as far I can tell, Agnes didn’t have much of a sense of humor. What wasn’t funny was just how arrogant, condescending and difficult to work with Agnes turned out to be.

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I got my initial sad insight into this pretentious freak’s character during my first visit to the Yilmaz Agency’s Chicago office shortly after joining the agency. I had noticed Agnes had connected with me on LinkedIn and she said she was looking forward to meeting me during my visit. Agnes seemed nice at first. What a fucking joke.

After a horrible first day of my visit to the Yilmaz Agency Chicago office, where I had to experience in person the fools I was talking to daily on the phone with the sinking realization I had made a serious career mistake, I went with the team to a nearby bar. Strangely, most of the young staff, who had finally met me in person, remained standoffish and unfriendly toward me. Actually, they were borderline hostile even though they barely knew me. It felt like they had already judged me as another idiot. I was nice to them and gave them no reason to hate me, but I think they were angry at Lulu and taking it out on me. In fact, all of them, except for Lulu and Miriam, were young and barely out of school. It was like being at a bar with a Millennial clique but this was far worse. I had to work with these arrogant creeps.

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At some point, as I drank a beer (I didn’t order wine as I figured they might think it was a snobby, California thing to do) and wondered what I had got myself into, Agnes struck up a conversation with me. She wondered about my background as I look Greek, but I don’t have a Greek last name. I told her I was half Greek as my father was English and my mother came from Greece.

“I am full Greek,” Agnes remarked smugly.

I smiled at her, but I didn’t know what to exactly say to her strange comment. Congratulations, you arrogant fuck? Agnes’ response actually felt like a putdown, and yet it gave me a keen, early insight into her creepy, condescending nature.

I mean I was only “half Greek?” Was it a euphemism for her thinking I was only “half a person?” or “half a PR executive?” I don’t know. I never asked her, but let’s just say we didn’t have much to talk about after that. Even when she left and said she was looking forward to working with me I knew that was just a lie.

The “working part” with Agnes was even worse than I could have possibly imagined. Naturally, one of her close friends at the agency was the queen of the paper pushers, Molly Paulson. They were as thick as thieves in their mutual incompetence.

Agnes thought she knew a lot about public relations like Molly did but Agnes was mostly clueless when she started working on my team for our sports app client.

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Like many of her colleagues, Agnes was a mediocre writer, who drafted pedestrian press releases and lame, uncreative pitches.

Yet if you challenged her and tried to help, she would get defensive. I edited and marked up a couple of her lame press releases initially and she got offended. Unfortunately, Agnes didn’t listen as she continued to make the same writing mistakes despite my suggestions. So I just began to rewrite all of her writing and she eventually complained to Andrew, who was also on our team and told me she was frustrated with my rewrites, and even to Lulu. However, much to her disappointment, Lulu sided with me and told Agnes to improve her writing and to listen to me. That didn’t go over too well with Agnes, and it was the start of the rift that developed between us. There were other frustrating incidents where she would actually try to lecture me about media relations when I wondered why she wasn’t delivering results and doing basic follow up with the media. I mean I had been securing top media placements for decades. What was this idiot going to tell me about media relations?

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Maybe it was because it was me, and she regarded me with little or no respect, but Agnes always seemed to be talking down to everyone, even Lulu, during meetings and conference calls. Agnes was so fucking full of herself, it was almost laughable.

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Actually, after her dumb remark at the bar, I knew she was another fool that was going to make my job more difficult, but I had held out hope that my first impression could be wrong. It sadly wasn’t.

I began to dread working with her. Fortunately, after we lost the sports app client a few months later, I didn’t have to work directly with her on many clients at the agency.  However, every once in a while, Miriam and Lulu would bring us together on a project and I would be reminded of why I hated working with her.

After another horrible and draining 12-hour day, I finally arrived home to an email request from Miriam. She wanted me to help Agnes with a pitch for the Yilmaz Agency’s upcoming 10th Anniversary Party. I was exhausted, but I reluctantly agreed to help even though I knew it would probably be a nightmare if Agnes was involved. I soon discovered much to my dismay I was right as Agnes basically assigned the pitch to me with little or no supporting information. I had no press release or background to work from to develop the pitch as Agnes said it wasn’t ready yet to share. I asked her for more information, but apparently, she had checked out for the night as it was getting late in Chicago. So I had to cobble together a lame media pitch out of some information on our agency website and Lulu’s bio after midnight when I was too tired to even see straight. Agnes was of no help at all just essentially dumping the pitch assignment on me and bailing. Something she did other times as well. The phrase lazy Millennial came to mind as I furiously worked on the pitch. Even to this day, I would never dump an assignment on a colleague or an intern that worked for me without background information, a bio, and at least details about the event.

After I finished the pitch, I sent a brutal email to Miriam about how Agnes simply dumped the pitch on me with little or no supporting materials and it wasn’t the first time she had done this bullshit. Miriam asked if I had emailed Agnes about my concerns and I told her I asked for more information and received no response. I was not Agnes’ fucking manager. It was up to Miriam to confront her about her lazy behavior. I also knew Agnes would only get more pissed off if it came from me.

The following day Agnes sent an email thanking me for the pitch, but said she had to make a lot of edits. I told that’s OK as I didn’t have a lot of information to go on. I am not sure if Miriam ever brought up my concerns. I kind of doubt it.

A couple of years later, Lulu requested me to take Agnes’ place in managing an early morning satellite media tour for our housewares client. It ended up being a crazy all-nighter for me. I  had to leave work at 7 p.m. and try to get sleep for a few hours before getting up around midnight to head to a studio in downtown L.A. to work until 8 a.m. the following morning.  The day before I had to endure pompous phone conferences about the products with Agnes. In stark contrast with the 10th Anniversary pitch, she bombarded me with too much information. So fucking typical. I could never predict in what way Agnes was going to annoy me. So I had to essentially spend all night babysitting a difficult prima donna celebrity chef that was the company spokesperson on a satellite tour. Now mind you while I doing this, my own clients were being neglected and were complaining. Agnes was hardly appreciative or supportive of this fact, which didn’t surprise me.

The low point of the night came after the celebrity chef had messed up some of the product messaging for the company’s blender product in the first couple of TV segments and our client complained and called Agnes. She called me on my mobile phone and asked me rudely what was going on. I told her I had reviewed the messaging with the celebrity chef and she told she was OK with it.

“Jake, you got to get tough with her,” Agnes said sharply.

“I will. No worries,” I assured her.

“You better,” she said rudely. “The client is not happy. I am depending on you.”

Then she rudely hung up.

WTF?! I am doing Agnes a fucking favor taking time away from my sleep not to mention my clients and she is getting rude with me?! Unfortunately, the chef still didn’t care and stubbornly wouldn’t listen to me. Yet I must have got through to her somehow as the chef performed well to the client’s satisfaction for the rest of the tour.

After the satellite tour was over and everything went well, Agnes called to thank me for handling everything, but she never apologized for her ugly outburst. I was done with this freak after that.

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Sadly, Agnes continued working at our agency and I couldn’t avoid her entirely.

My last idiotic working encounter with Agnes came late in my stint working with Lulu after her agency had been purchased by a Chicago agency.  Agnes was managing a difficult weight loss client – having Agnes manage anything was already a nightmare proposition – and Lulu added me to the team as a media relations expert. I had experience working with weight loss clinics in the past so that was why Lulu tapped me for this. However, I knew something would inevitably go wrong and I would butt heads with the fool, Agnes.

After our team struggled for weeks to secure a story about our client opening weight loss clinics in San Francisco area grocery stores, I landed a huge story in one of the top newspapers in the area. The story actually ran on the front page of the business section of several the publication’s newspapers. I thought it was a major placement for our client, but Agnes was not happy with it, particularly as there was a factual error, but also our client criticized the “sarcastic tone” of the article. Our client asked us to contact the reporter about fixing the error, but they also wanted us to confront the reporter about changing her sarcastic tone and reposting a new, more positive article.

I refused and told Agnes I will ask the reporter nicely to fix the error in the online editions, but I will not ask her to change her story’s sarcastic slant. We are not in the censorship business?!!

“I know,” Agnes said. “You don’t have to do that, but we won’t tell the client that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her. “We’re just going to lie to our client?”

“It’s not lying. We’ll just tell her we followed up and the reporter refused,” she said.

“OK. I don’t agree with that as we should always be transparent with our clients,” I said.

“I know, but they won’t know anyway,” she said. “Just try to get the factual error fixed.”

I got the error fixed in the online version of the article, the reporter had no problem with that, but I never mentioned to the writer our client’s dismay about her edgy writing style.

I was not going to completely abandon what little PR principles I had left for Lulu and Agnes. That, fortunately, was my last encounter working with Agnes.

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In the end, Agnes was “Full Greek” as she so proudly declared, but to me, she was actually “Full Idiot.”

Exclamation Points In Pitches and Press Releases!

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Another one of my big pet peeves in public relations is when my colleagues have used exclamation points in press releases and media pitches. It seems like overkill to me, and even worse appears cheesy and hokey like marketing, sales, and advertising copy.

Why is it a big deal?

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I can only imagine media people getting a lousy pitch or lame press release full of exclamation points and laughing and mocking the PR practitioner or agency to their colleagues before deleting it. There’s no worse way to ruin your reputation as PR practitioner than with bad writing, but then you add in exclamation points and it can only make you look worse.

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My goal in public relations is trying to write as much as possible like the media in my public relations writing. The media are the main audience of our press materials after all. Do you see news and feature articles from the top publications full of exclamation points? No. The best journalists and their editors know better.

Now I have no problem with fiction authors using exclamation points in their prose where appropriate. I just think it has no place in public relations writing.

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So it is no surprise when I joined the Yilmaz Agency, the team’s pitches and press releases used exclamation points quite liberally. I would take the exclamation points out in my editing and my colleagues – mostly clueless Millennials — would put them back in even after I told them that they were not needed in PR writing. Even Lulu didn’t get it at first. I mean for years she must have had lame press releases and pitches go out with exclamation points all through their copy.

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The worst culprit was the whiny Millennial, Andrew, who worked in the Chicago office. His writing was bad enough as his pitches and even press releases read like lame, slick marketing and sales copy, but it seemed he couldn’t write a sentence without using an exclamation point. It was crazy. And he was also the most resistant to my suggestion to remove them even when I used to edit them out and include a comment in the word document of why I removed them.

When Andrew left our firm a few months after I arrived, he was still stubbornly including exclamation points in his copy, which I frustratingly would have to keep removing. I think it was doing it in defiance after a while. I can only wonder if this fool is somewhere at a company or agency still writing lame copy with exclamation points, oblivious to how he is marring his PR and client’s business reputation through a small, but important punctuation choice.

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Even Lulu finally agreed with me when I told her it would make us look foolish to the media and didn’t object when I removed the offending exclamation points from our agency’s PR copy. If there is one positive thing I did at Lulu’s lame agency, it was influencing her and our team to stop using exclamation points in our copy. A small victory, I know, but at least it was something considering the hell I went through at her agency.

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Now clients through the years have also been a nightmare about using exclamation points in their press releases. Some have balked about me removing them until I explained that it could make them look bad to the media and were better used in marketing or advertising copy. Recently, I had a sports app client send me back editing revisions to his press release and he added in exclamation points to emphasize claims he couldn’t prove. So my challenge was to urge him to not only take out the claims but also the embarrassing exclamation points. After some convincing, the CEO, who was a nightmare that listened to no one, backed off when I told him we not only don’t include unfounded claims in our press release, but we never use exclamation points. He only agreed when I stressed that it could hurt his reputation with the media.

I have had to remove exclamation points along with bad, hyperbolic writing from my client’s press release edits more times than I can recall.

It may seem like a small thing, but everything you do down to a simple choice of a punctuate mark can damage you and your client’s reputation with the media and business community.

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So to avoid looking like a PR fool that the media mocks, don’t use exclamation points in your PR writing!!

There. I used even two exclamation points, but this is a fictional blog after all.