It was great to see "The Office," one of my favorite shows, take on PR last week.
Sure, they were more concerned with creating a funny episode than a true-to-life portrayal, or educating about PR. But cops, lawyers, doctors and mobsters like to weigh in on the accuracy of TV portrayals. So I just thought I would offer my observations, as a PR professional in good standing (i.e., the last time I checked).
It’s a good exercise in exploring popular misconceptions, and the treatment of PR in pop culture.
Briefly, the premise was that the Scranton office of fictional paper company Dunder Mifflin had a crisis on their hands when a renegade plant worker placed an obscene watermark (two Disney Characters "doing it") on a production run of stationery, which Quality Control failed to catch. The offending paper quickly found its way into customers’ hands, leading to said crisis.
Regional Manager Michael Scott quickly (and correctly) decided to be proactive in the face of a crisis, but it was all downhill from there.
The game plan was to host a press conference, spearheaded by chief flunky (or Assistant to the Regional Manager) Dwight Schrute, who intoned: "You are now entering the No Spin Zone."
Schrute has no experience in PR. He started out the press conference by pointing out that the animals shown in the watermark were consenting, of legal age, and none got hurt in the process. Pretty funny.
Of course, PR is all about and just about spin, press releases and press conferences (Myth #1).
There was no PR professional – either internal staff, or from an agency – on hand, and no apparent help from headquarters.
You don’t hear about PR agencies much in the TV world, and when you do it is generally about publicists – i.e. entertainment PR (PoweR Girls, the short lived reality series about Lizzie Grubman’s agency) or political (K Street, the short lived HBO series about DC lobbyists and PR).
When things came crashing down, Scott astutely observed that the fiasco was likely to find its way to YouTube.
I won’t ruin the ending, for those who have TiVO’d it. Suffice to say that it was a funny episode, even thought they did not get everything exactly right.
