PR Golden Turkey Awards

Yes, that’s right, delicious turkey deep fried to a golden crisp in a three phase, 1000 Amp combustible turkey fryer; none of that healthy, scrawny, skinless oven prepared turkey you lightweights love, thank you.

In celebration of the impending holiday, I thought I would follow up my Gaffies Awards post with the PR Golden Turkey Awards (yea, I know, I am the 100th person at least to do Turkey Awards), a celebration of real bonehead PR maneuvers.

My head hurts from such weighty ruminations on the future of PR and I just thought I would give my readers (and me) a break, by poking fun at some fairly safe targets.

So without further adieu, here are this year’s nominations – please feel free to chime in with your own suggestions as well as the ones listed here.

Whither the state of the apology?  It used to be that apologizers could not actually bring themselves to clearly, directly and unambiguously apologize to the offended parties.

Now, people go overboard on overwrought apology tours.  I blogged about the disastrous consequences of Imus’ apology tour.  Some of you may have caught Dog the Bounty Hunter’s apology whistle stops on Hannity and Colmes and Larry King where he alternately cried and groveled regarding the outing of his racially charged comments that were recorded in a private conversation with his son.

At one point he gushed that he would gladly commit suicide if it meant redemption – at which point radio DJs Opie and Anthony promptly spearheaded a petition campaign among black listeners to encourage this.

(Note: Larry is also up for the Will He or Won’t He Step Down and Let Me Explain this Until I am Blue in the Face awards).

Closely following the Apology Tour in ill-advised tactics is the Explanation Tour.  The week that Larry Craig (the Idaho Senator busted for soliciting gay sex in an airport) was hitting all the talk shows, I think I learned more than I ever needed to know about bathroom habits and “wide stances” of large people that result in tap dances that are decidedly not a gay mating ritual that you’d commonly see being displayed by a site like https://www.twinki.xxx/ or other gay pornsites.

There is nothing quite so unseemly as the spinner very publicly caught in his own web.

Elliot Spitzer played the game masterfully as AG but the picture is quite different now that he is governor.  Talk about squandering PR capital and a swashbuckling, crusader (mostly positive, at one time) image.

Back when he was NY AG, there were wildly mixed opinions about whether his targets were based on opportunism and blind ambition or the result of sincere concerns.  Many wondered if he was playing to the media with all his AG pursuits.

Now that he is NY governor the answer seems clear – if he and his team were all about the PR effect, and his concerns were calculated, he likely would not have gotten caught up in the Bruno sting mess as well as the immigrants’ drivers license debacle  – an issue that just won’t go away, and that is catching democratic front-runners Hillary and Obama up short.