Tag: business

The Business Magazine Cover Photoshoot Meltdown

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I will call this the business magazine cover photoshoot meltdown.

I had worked more than six months to arrange for a business cover story for Azra Yalman, one of the general managers based out of the Los Angeles office of our airline client.

Now, this was a big fucking deal for our agency as I soon discovered as Azra also happened to be close friends with my boss, Lulu Yilmaz.

Azra, who was a Turkish woman in her early forties with black hair and brown eyes, would put on this timid act and pretend that she was so nice. She always acted so apologetic when reaching out to us with some crazy and unreasonable demand. Actually, it was a façade to hide that Azra was a horrible prima donna and narcissist just like Lulu.

When I joined the agency, there was a lot of pressure on me to find a business story for Azra focusing on her impressive rise through the airlines’ executive ranks. For a while, I received no interest until one of my business contacts was intrigued with her story and we set up an interview and photoshoot.

Interesting background on this as well. When I developed the pitch, I had several Millennials, who thankfully left the agency soon after, and Lulu, attack my pitch I had developed about Azra. They thought it was too personal and would never work. They changed it into some boring bullshit, but I sent my original version to the business editor anyway.  Apparently, I wasn’t such a fucking idiot after all.

So much for having supportive and knowledgeable colleagues. What a joke.

Yet an early incident should have shown me what I was in for with Azra.

During my first couple of months at Lulu’s agency, I had to attend a travel trade show in San Diego to support Azra and our airline client.

I had set up several interviews at our client’s booth and Azra seemed pleased overall with my work.

However, during one of the interviews on the second day of the show, I accidentally introduced Azra to a travel writer as “Azra Asaroglu,” which was her married name and was listed on all of her emails. She got divorced apparently and Yalman was her maiden name. In my defense, I was not told that she hated her married name or even that she was divorced (or even married for that matter).

Azra became livid although she didn’t say anything at the time. She just gave me the cold shoulder and acted strangely and standoffish for the rest of the show. I knew something was wrong but I wasn’t sure.

When I got back to the office, Lulu told me that Azra was offended that I had used her married name when introducing her and wondered if she could work with me again.

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I was disgusted and shocked and it was a rude awakening to the kind of nightmare I was in for with Azra and our airline client in general.

However, in the ensuing months, Azra warmed up to me again as I continued to secure media for her and had set up the business interview and photoshoot.

Azra also had a freaky public relations manager named Pam McKibbon, who was a haggard Caucasian woman in her early fifties that appeared a lot older. She was always hostile toward Lulu and our agency and acted as if we were trying to steal her job or something. It was a classic case of the PR person who worked inside the company being threatened by a PR agency. It is something I have experienced more times than I can recount during my long PR career. So, naturally, Pam was also unfriendly to me and was little or no help during the photoshoot disaster. In a later chapter, I will discover just how much of act Pam was putting on while working at the airline, but there was no sign at this time that she was cool or interesting in any way.

The business magazine sent a photographer I had worked with in the past while at another agency named Sherry Jenkins. She was a talented and experienced photographer in her early forties, who had also shot my own headshot. I was relieved to see her when I arrived at the airline’s L.A. office where we had arranged the shoot to take place as I knew she would make things go smoothly and she delivered professional work. Little did she or I realize the nightmare we had in store for us.

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The first sign of trouble is when Azra showed up for the shoot three hours late. This more than concerned Sherry who worried if Azra had forgotten all about it. I assured her that was not the case, but I checked with Pam anyway, however; she wasn’t much help.

“I don’t know where she is,” Pam said.

When Azra finally arrived almost four hours late for her own photoshoot, she acted strange and reluctant to participate. Then she kept calling someone on her phone and speaking Turkish. Later I found out she was calling my boss Lulu to complain about the shoot she was three and almost now four hours late for. This was so fucking rude and embarrassing that I had to apologize to Sherry several times, who was becoming frantic and frustrated.

Finally, after more cajoling from Sherry and myself, Azra began to pose for photos. Unfortunately, she kept resisting Sherry’s suggestions and kept holding up the shoot. After Sherry finally got some shots done, Azra retreated to her office to call Lulu again and to even check her emails.

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Sherry was beside herself.

“What are we going to do, Jake?” Sherry said. “I’ve been here more than five hours and only have a few shots done.”

Then I got a call from Lulu.

“Jake…what’s going on over there?” Lulu said harshly. “I keep getting calls from Azra that she is unhappy with the shoot and photographer.”

Unfortunately, Sherry overheard Lulu’s comment (another embarrassment), so I quickly walked outside the office and assured Lulu everything was all right.

“I hope so, Jake. I am counting on you to manage the shoot. We could lose the client if this continues.”

“No worries, Lulu,” I said. “I am taking of it.”

We could lose the client?!

It was bad enough I had to deal with our prima donna, crazy client, but Lulu’s scare tactics only made things worse.

It took a lot more coaxing from me to get Azra to resume the shoot, but unfortunately, she continued to resist the photographer’s direction.

Then the whole photoshoot went south in a horrible way that still haunts me when I think about it.

Sherry tried to get some lifestyle shots of Azra interacting with her fellow employees. She suggested that Azra pose for a photo with one of her younger employees, a dark-haired man in his early twenties, and Azra went ballistic.

“No!… I will not take a picture with him! I hate him!,” Azra shouted and then she stormed back into her office and called Lulu again.

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Then of course came the inevitable call from Lulu who berated me again and repeated her warning that “we were going to lose the client!”

Pam came up to me and told me that Azra had canceled the photoshoot, but after I apologized to Azra profusely she reluctantly decided to finish it.

But she repeated several times that “I won’t take a picture with him! I hate him!”

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The even more shocking thing was Azra was general manager of the office and west coast region for the airline and she still melted down this way in front a member of the media. Even more baffling is I thought Azra was the boss and the person she hated worked for her! Yet she came across as a powerless, petulant, and immature child.

Sherry naturally was mortified and kept asking me if Azra was OK.

How were either of us to know that we would offend Azra simply by asking her to pose with one of her employees?

Finally, after Sherry did some quick and simple set up shots with Azra posing with airline props and standing in front of the airlines’ logo, the nightmare photoshoot was over 10 hours after it was supposed to start.

Azra apologized to Sherry profusely and thanked her. Sherry said it was no problem but she still appeared shook up as she quickly packed up her photography equipment and made a quick exit.

I was beyond embarrassed and didn’t know what to say except to thank Sherry for her patience.

Azra thanked me too, but she didn’t apologize. She then went back to her office and called Lulu again, but this time apparently everything was OK.

Lulu called me as I was leaving and thanked me for managing the photoshoot and she shared that Azra was happy that I was there and excited to see how photos came out.

WTF?!! Azra basically loses her shit and puts me and the photographer through hell and she can’t wait to see the photos!??

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As drove down the 405 Freeway toward our office after my call with Lulu, I seriously pondered quitting. It was beyond a demoralizing experience and made me question what I was doing with my career but also my life.

After the business cover finally came out four months later, Azra was ecstatic and praised Sherry for her photos and was very pleased with me for setting it up.

Yet when Azra tried to book Sherry for another photoshoot, she refused.

Sherry told me later that she was disturbed by Azra’s unprofessional behavior.

“She really seemed angry and disturbed during the photoshoot. I am uncomfortable going through something like that again,” Sherry said. “I have done thousands of photoshoots with top CEOs and business executives and I have never experienced a meltdown like that.”

Azra tried to smooth over things with me by sending me flowers and chocolates at our office, which I threw out in a dumpster after I left work.

There was no way I was going to be bought off like that.

A few months later, Azra even sent me a roundtrip airline ticket to Turkey, which I didn’t use to my regret — I was too busy, overworked and broke to actually take a vacation — but in retrospect maybe it was for the best.

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No amount of gifts could take away the ugliness of the way she treated me during her meltdown.  Nothing could make up for me having to deal with her crazy ass.

My job was hard enough, but this was a craziness I could do without.

I had heard of horror stories from celebrity PR people having to deal with meltdowns like this on a daily basis, (another reason I avoid entertainment PR), but until you actually go through it, you have no idea how horrible such a client tantrum can be.

 

Not A Turkish Delight

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

 

 

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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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?

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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

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

More on that in my next blog.

 

The Brazilian Incident

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I will call this “The Brazilian Incident.”

It sparked one of the worst and troubling periods of my public relations career and nearly led to me finally, once and for all, leaving this heartbreaking profession for good.

The Brazilian Incident all started rather innocently.

Our agency, as had written in my previous posts, brought in a lot of interns from the local colleges and for a while, this included a lot of foreign exchange students.

Two Brazilian interns in their early twenties — Emmanuella and Tristessa — joined our team for several months.

Like Millennials in general, they had no courtesy or manners and were strangely standoffish and smug but didn’t know anything.  I had known a number of Brazilian women in work and in my personal life through the years. Unfortunately, Emmanuella and Tristessa possessed none of the warmth, kindness, and passion of the Brazilian women I had known and worked with.

Emmanuella had a strange low voice and laughed at dumb shit on the internet.  If you tried to say hello to Tristessa, she would give you a strange suspicious look like you were trying to pick her up or something. She even gave me a weird look after my boss introduced us after her first interview.  Later, I found out she as a public relations major, but she never once tried to learn anything from me, someone with a lot of experience in the business. Not surprising, though.

Frankly, neither one of them were as cool or as hot as they thought they were. But their attractiveness or coolness is hardly important, as it is their attitudes that proved more than troubling.

The problem all started during a long work car trip to Silicon Valley for a new business presentation to a large Chinese tech company. Rather than fly some of the team up there and do the rest via Skype or phone, my boss cheaped out and rented a van to take the whole team up to the meeting.  It was a long and grueling drive for nothing. We never did get the client, but that is another story.

On the tedious and tiring drive back from Silicon Valley, Emmanuella, who was sitting next to me in the middle seat of the van with Tristessa, fell asleep on my arm for a short while. I thought about waking her up, but I didn’ t want to disturb her. This proved a costly mistake that I would regret over the next few months.

When Emmanuella woke up, she was startled, said excuse me, and abruptly moved away from me. She didn’t initially act strangely — like I was trying to molest her or something — until later. I swear I never touched her, or had any intentions of touching her, but that didn’t matter in her eyes. She slept on my arm. What the fuck?

In fact, I had a similar experience while on a plane a few years ago. A woman — who was closer to my age — fell asleep against my arm for a brief while as she sat next to me during the flight. When she woke up, she was very apologetic and nothing ugly ever came from it. She didn’t think I was trying to molest her or something. Crazy.

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So, after we stopped at a gas station to fuel up and go to Starbucks, Emanuella moved to the very back of the van and avoided me like I had the plague.  When we finally arrived back to the office that night to go home, Emanuella ignored me as did her friend Tristessa.

The next day at the office, Emanuella avoided me like I was some kind of old sexual predator. Her friend Tristessa did the same.

Then it got even worse. For weeks after the van incident, I was shunned from their so-called team lunches they had with other creepy Millennials and others around our office — namely Lydia, Code Boy, and their creepy social media manager friend (who I will write about in an upcoming post). They would invite everyone right in front of me like I was invisible.  They also did this when they invited the entire office — except for me — to an after-work party for Halloween.

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Still, I wondered if I was imagining all of this…

Sadly, I wasn’t. However, I didn’t realize how bad things really were until Emmanuella and Tristessa rudely warned one of their friends against me – right in front of me!!!

One of their friends, an attractive, tall woman with long black hair, visited our office and greeted me in a friendly manner. I actually saw Tristessa and Emmanuella immediately get up from their desks and pull their friend away and take her out of the office like I was some kind of a sexual predator to be avoided.

The horrible looks of hatred and fear on the faces of Emmanuella and Tristessa when they warned their friend about me haunted me for weeks.  I was beyond insulted and hurt. I was furious. I debated about telling my boss about it, which I didn’t.

Now, I have been treated horribly at PR firms through the years, but never quite as rudely as that. I had to leave the office for a while I was so shaken up.

Who were these fucking creepy interns to feel they could treat me like this? In a work environment, no less.

I never spoke to them again after that.

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When the Brazilian freaks finally left our agency after their internship was over I was so elated.

Lydia’s final message to Emmanuella and Tristessa on their last day was to “stay beautiful.”  Of course, they (and Lydia for that matter) were anything but beautiful, as I believe beauty is truly skin deep, but not in their case with their ugly, unfriendly, and immature attitudes.

In the end, I, unfortunately, discovered through this crazy Brazilian Incident…that the rudeness and cluelessness of Millennials truly cross borders, and sadly, is an age and generational thing.

 

 

 

TEAM LUNCH?

 

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Sometimes I wonder how I ended up here…working late in my career at an agency that has a staff made up of mostly interns attending college or recent graduates.

So naturally, you can imagine I work in Millennial hell. (I will write more about my disdain for Millennial attitudes and work habits in later posts, but I will only make a passing comment on it for this post).

Being a veteran of the business and much older than these interns, you can imagine that I didn’t have a lot in common with them, to begin with.

However, I am a firm believer that you shouldn’t use the word TEAMWORK if you truly don’t have an understanding of its meaning in a workplace environment. Cliquish, high school behavior should be avoided and is anathema to building a supportive team culture. Unfortunately, many of the Millennials I have worked with have no concept of this and exhibit rude, standoffish behavior like they are still in high school or in a college fraternity.

And yes…sadly ageism is alive and well in the public relations industry, too. But more on that later.

This blog post will focus on an idiotic co-worker I will call Lydia. She is a 24-year-old recent graduate from a local southern California college.  Lydia started out as an intern but was later hired by the agency as a graphic artist. My boss, who actually is pretty cool as far PR bosses go, but that is not saying much, thinks Lydia walks on water. However, I constantly find errors in her work for websites and campaign pages. She hates when I point it out.

I think real reason my boss likes Lydia is that he can get her cheap as she is just out of college rather than having to pay more for an experienced person, who is more professional. My boss is cheap, which I won’t dwell on too much in this blog, but even he is not the cheapest person I have worked for in public relations. I’ll explore that more in future blogs about how hard it truly is to make money in the public relations business.

Lydia is a short, chubby Latina woman with a strange, round face, bad teeth, stringy red hair, who thinks she is the shit. She is not. She also speaks very quickly (uses definitely a lot) and even mispronounces words in client meetings. It can get embarrassing at times.

Lydia also is shallow and constantly laughs (more of a high-pitched cackle to be honest) at jokes and videos on the internet and comments from her colleagues Norman and Alireza, who are not funny at all.

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Norman is the bosses’ son, who I call Code Boy, as he creates websites for our agency. He is in his thirties, tall with short hair, a goatee, and an odd, arrogant and unfriendly demeanor. He wears pilot shades while in the office and thinks he is so cool. He is not. However, his own father warned me during a trade show trip that Norman could be a cold person and not to take it personally.  Actually, I think he is two-faced and creepy, and I remember when I joined the agency, Code Boy didn’t talk to me for several weeks.

Even worse, Code Boy actually thinks he knows more about public relations than I do and he critiques my emails to clients at times, and even my press releases, although he knows nothing about PR.  One time when I went to a Dodger game, soon after I joined the firm, he tried to get an inappropriate media pitch for a military client pushed through my department without my approval. I stopped that immediately and spoke with his father and he never tried that bullshit again.  Now, during our conversations, usually, after everyone has gone home, I notice Norman looking for every little mistake or sign of weakness I show to share with Lydia and the rest of team to mock me behind my back. So I am much more careful what I say around Code Boy now.

Lydia’s other compadre is Alireza, a scrawny creep with a beard who joined the agency as a graphic artist a few months ago. I have never exchanged more than a few words with this fool, but he has always been unfriendly toward me.

How can you hate someone you don’t even know?

I can only think it is because of what I call Lydia’s “poison.”  Her hatred of me has always been there since I joined the agency and didn’t want to engage in dumb small talk with her. But two other factors, a dumb social media millennial fool who used to work at our agency who also despised me, and something I will call THE BRAZILIAN INCIDENT, also turned Lydia against me. I will explore these subjects in later blogs.

So, at the end of each week, Lydia will walk around and invite all the Millennial workers in the office to what she calls a “team lunch.” (Norman is the only one invited that is not a young Millennial out of school, but he is the boss’ son after all).

Lydia does this right in front of me, knowing I can hear her do it. It is a form of shunning me, but I have come to believe it is much worse.  Lydia calls her lunch backstabbing sessions “team lunches” but since she doesn’t invite everyone on the team, it can’t be a team lunch.  Lydia has no idea how high school and dumb that is.

I used to think nothing about it and figured they were all young and wanted to talk about school and other trivial matters Millennials love.

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However, I soon came to believe Lydia’s “team lunches” had a much more sinister purpose toward me and were doing serious damage to collaboration and so-called teamwork in our agency.  She used these lunches to bash me and my PR work at our agency yet she also knows nothing about public relations.  I began to notice this when Lydia started inviting interns that worked on my PR team to her lunches. Before they went to lunches with Lydia, the interns that worked for me were supportive and respectful. They were eager to learn. After Lydia’s lunches, they became unfriendly and even disrespectful and unprofessional at times. The female interns’ reactions were even worse. They became wary of me as if I was going to hit on them or to do something inappropriate, which would never be the case.  A future blog about the BRAZILIAN INCIDENT will make this nightmare more clear.

Even Louis, who works for me and I will call MBA boy, (and will write about more in a future post), has also been poisoned by Lydia’s lunches. His attitude used to be much more respectful and supportive but has turned unfriendly and questioning in recent months.

I know I am not imagining things as I was reminded of again recently when we had three new interns join our agency, and they were all friendly toward me until they went to lunch with Lydia. Now the new interns are unfriendly, ignore me and are even borderline hostile toward me. And they don’t even know me. I can only imagine all the horrible things Lydia is saying behind my back. It has been hard to deal with at times as I already hate my job, but I have grown to hate this creepy Millennial agency culture even more.

It has come to the point where I don’t even bother to befriend new people who join our agency as I know they will soon be poisoned by Lydia against me. I have seen it happen so many times over the past year.

And women say they are not vindictive.

It is a sad fact I have to face — I have no allies here except for my boss. I’ve had allies in the past at other agencies, but not here.

I am feeling isolated and left out a lot during most of my work days. There is no real sense of team at our agency. Although everyone here pretends differently.

I just want to work with cool and supportive people and make more money.

Is that too much to ask for?

 

 

 

 

Being a Publicist is a Thankless Job…

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Being a publicist or public relations executive is truly a thankless job.

Publicists get no respect. It is even worse than comedian Rodney Dangerfield could have imagined.  Everyone dumps on us — the media, lame advertising people who don’t understand public relations, and worst of all — clients.

Public relations clients are never satisfied. It is kind of like being in a relationship with a nymphomaniac or sex addict. No matter what we do — securing front page magazine and newspaper articles, intriguing online profiles, top TV coverage, etc. — it is never enough. They always want more, more, and even more…like true media whores.

Your past successes mean little in the public relations industry as far as clients are concerned.  PR clients’ overall attitude and mantra remain constant: “What have you done for me lately?”

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Sadly, most of the clients I have encountered and worked with through the years, have little or no clue about what us publicists actually do for them, the actual difficulty of the job, and the true nature of how the media works. They want everything yesterday even though obtaining media relations always takes much longer than anyone thinks, and is a time-consuming and frustrating process that requires diligence, and patience — the one quality most clients I have known…lack.

I could write a 10 volume encyclopedia about what clients don’t know about public relations and even that wouldn’t cover it.  Each PR campaign launch requires a constant educational effort for clients who expect instant media coverage. Keeping clients’ expectations within realistic and achievable goals is an ongoing job that never stops.

The main problem is too many people don’t really know what public relations actually is and what role PR can play in promoting a company and building brands over time. Too often they confuse it with advertising where you may control and pay for the message, but it doesn’t have the same credibility as public relations, which is simply free earned publicity for of your company, etc.

Yet even trying to explain this difference to friends and family is a daunting and frustrating challenge.  A typical conversation goes like this:

Family member or Friend: “So…you’re in advertising?”

You: “No…public relations.”

Family or friend: “That’s the same as advertising…isn’t it?”

You: “No. Not exactly. In public relations, we don’t control the message of our clients. We provide free publicity. In advertising, they buy the message and essentially ad space or time.  We have to earn public relations coverage by telling stories and promoting the news value of our clients…”

At that point, your family member or friend stares at you blankly in abject confusion.

“Oh, OK,” they say and quickly move on to another subject.

So once again we get no respect as no one, including our clients, truly understand what we do and the true value of what a strategic public relations campaign can overall bring to enhancing a company’s reputation.

Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t just stay in journalism. I might be hated but people would at least understand what I do.

The funny thing is I thought public relations would be a cushy, high-paying job. Boy, was I ever wrong.  You couldn’t blame me, though.  I was an underpaid, overworked high school and college sports editor for a Southern California daily newspaper. I actually loved the work and writing but hated the late hours, constant deadline pressure, and ridiculously low pay.  At one point, I worked 45 straight days without a day off. I worked almost every holiday and most Friday and Saturday nights. I even worked Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve one year. It was hell on my social life, to say the least.

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Even if I wasn’t at the office, I could be called into work on a moment’s notice or would have to work on articles at home. I was stressed out and couldn’t ever seem to relax and get away.   I see now that it was my first introduction to work burnout. I figured public relations couldn’t be that bad, but PR had its own downsides I didn’t foresee.  As a reporter, if a reader doesn’t like one of your stories, they can write a letter to the editor, call the editor to complain or post nasty online comments under the story. However, generally, you don’t lose your job over reader complaints. There still exists a US vs. Them mentality in journalism even today.

In public relations, if a client complains to your boss about your performance–  you could be gone. As with many other industries, there isn’t a lot of employer loyalty in PR especially when it comes to public relations clients and the business they bring into an agency or firm.  The client is always right even if they are so completely wrong. They pay the bills as advertisers, and to a lesser extent, subscribers, do for news organizations.

Also, you can remind your clients a million times that you have no control over the media and you need to approach the media with modesty, finesse, and creativity, and all they want to know is why you couldn’t get their lame product or story covered in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Even at times when you land a huge placement for your clients,  they will still complain and ask why the media didn’t just print their comments from the press release or their favored message points. They essentially want to turn the media into their own publicity outlet with no regards to the news value of their product or story or the media’s own needs to tell an interesting story to their readers.

You can painstakingly explain this media dynamic to clients like they are a 3-year-old and many of them still won’t get it.

Recently, I was reminded of this media dynamic at the CES show in Vegas. I had one client that became the hit of the show and received an avalanche of coverage. They get the role of PR in launching their business and support our efforts and the planning that went into it. They treat us more as a partner in their business than a vendor.

The other client we had at CES began complaining and demanding instant coverage even just 12 hours after launching their press release at the show. Their product was hardly anything new or truly groundbreaking at a show that specializes in just that.  Still, eventually, our team rallied to get our client interest from a major business publication and an interview with another high profile publication at their booth.

The bullshit never ends.

Even though I have been able to effectively transfer my journalism skills to the PR world, I have long since lost patience with the bullshit side of the PR business. This why my career has been a revolving door, and an endless and ongoing search for the perfect public relations job and agency that I am beginning to realize may not exist. Still, I hold out hope…but can’t help thinking that I am deluding myself.

So…welcome to my life in public relations hell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Introduction of sorts…about a frank look into public relations hell…

 

I wanted to start this blog to share my experiences, funny stories, crazy anecdotes, hard lessons as a public relations executive. I am hoping to shed more light on the dark side of the public relations world.

I believe public relations is one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated careers. Everyone thinks they can do it, but many (especially clients) don’t have a clue. More on that later.

As a current public relations executive, I need to write this blog under a fictitious name, but let me assure you that the stories that will make up this blog are honest and truthful.  However, the names of the people and companies have been changed or left out to protect the not so innocent and clueless.

This is not a chronological diary or narrative blog as I will jump around to different times in my career to share a bizarre story or make a point. As I have found, even with the passage of time, human nature, the dark side of it I speak of here, has remained eerily similar through the years bearing out that old adage that the more things change, the more they remain (sadly in this case) the same.

I will eventually adapt these posts into a series of fictional books in the coming years.

However, please remember this blog is fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, any events or locales is purely coincidental. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

In the meantime, enjoy this always frank look into life in public relations hell. 

Look for more posts soon.