S2 E3 Andy Barr & Crisis Comms

Louise Parker:
Hello and welcome to the Digital PR Podcast with me, Louise Parker, and my lovely co-host, Steve Baker. Due to intense popular demand, we are back for a second season and we will be again chatting to some of the digital PR greats, discussing the ins and outs of our industry. This season, we’ll be touching on topics like crisis comms, freelancing, the great office debate, digital PR in America, and we’ll also be getting the perspectives of in-house clients and journalists on what they really think about digital PRs. Excitingly, this season we also have a sponsor! All six episodes are sponsored by our friends at Coveragebook. We all use Coveragebook in the Propellernet team, and so do agencies and brands all over the world. It’s an amazing tool that creates PR reports in minutes, drastically reducing the time that would typically be spent on reporting. Steve, would you like to know a fun fact?

Stephen Baker:
Yes, please.

Louise Parker:
One agency team saved $2,000 of PR budget every month when they switched to using the tool. Pretty good. What we love about it is that it gives you realistic, industry-leading metrics that you don’t need to have a data science degree to understand. It does all the clippings for you, so no more boring copying and pasting, and it just looks super snazzy, so you don’t have to be a designer to showcase your coverage like a pro. You can visit coveragebook.com and sign up for a free trial to see why some of the best digital PR practitioners in the world depend on Coveragebook. All right, on to our episode.

Stephen Baker:
Our guest today is the one and only Andy Barr, CEO of award-winning agency 10 Yetis Digital. Having spent nearly 20 years running the agency and honing his craft, what Andy doesn’t know about digital PR isn’t worth knowing. He’s one of the most engaging speakers around on all things PR, digital and social, is a must-follow on Twitter, or should I say ex, for his spectacular GIF game alone, and has recently been all over the press commenting on various crisis comms situations, which makes him the perfect guest for today’s topic. how to avoid a digital PR crisis.

Andy Barr:
How do I live up to that? Well, absolute nonsense. Thank you very much for having me on. Very flattering. It counts for nothing, but no, I’ve been a massive fan of, uh, of your podcast. So it was very honoured and couldn’t believe it when you asked me to make an appearance.

Stephen Baker:
Oh, no, it’s a, it’s a pleasure to have you on genuinely. We really appreciate you making time. Um, as a starter, and for those that don’t know you, and I can’t think that that’s many in the PR industry, but could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Andy Barr:
Okay, so it’s incredibly boring. I started life, no one will believe this, I started life as a political analyst, worked in lobbying. Boring as fuck. And I worked for a government utility company, essentially helping them with like off-gem inquiries, which is what happens the most when you work for a government utility. Because I basically knew the laws of the electricity industry because I’m that kind of exciting guy, when there was a crisis with the company, they asked if I’d consider going into the PR team. Went into the PR team, first few weeks, the power company, we turned off millions of people by accident during an England football game. My then head of comms quit. and I was left at probably I don’t know early 20s running the comms division temporarily because I was terrible at it, I ended up getting sacked quite rightly um and I ended up running the comms division for this sort of government utility for for a few months I was fucking terrible at it anyway and then I thought yeah I quite like this pr business I’m gonna crack on I’ve got to remember the truth from the lies now so yeah then i went into financial services to do um comms for them I worked for a building society which again I was sacked from but it was a real it was probably the worst career move I ever made I just I just don’t fit that kind of tweet organisation I went to aksa who at that time was the fifth largest company in the world to go and do a variety of comms for them but ended up doing you know the kind of horrible comms like you know if we didn’t pay out someone for a holiday claim you know because they ticked a form wrong it was my job to try and defend it which I couldn’t I had to shut down a division of AXA in Iceland, the country, not the shop, and I was terrible at that as well. I didn’t get sacked from that place though. I then went to go and work for First Group, lovely company, largest passenger transport company in the world. They own obviously GWR, they own Greyhound Bus in America, Yellow School Bus in America, Um, all the various disaster bus companies in the UK. So that was just like real crisis comm day in, day out, you know, getting spat in the face by customers at public forums. That was a real career high. And then I just thought that I’m going to start my own agency and do something a bit more fun. And there we go. 18 years later, it’s, you know, just good fun.

Louise Parker:
Wow. It’s not boring at all. I didn’t expect such a varied history. I don’t think you mentioned the word digital PR once in that phrase but that has become a new-ish word over the last couple of years for the kind of PR which focuses a bit more on the kind of SEO impact and focuses on links do you class yourself as a digital PR now or do you still class yourself as a more generic kind of like comms professional and do you think there is a difference?

Andy Barr:
Let me take a step back there. The downside of having an old person on like me is that I always tell a fucking story. But so crisis comms is what I did day in, day out. I set up the agency cause I wanted to have, do more fun stuff. So my background was in sort of crisis comms and financial services and stuff like that. So we did financial services PR when 10 years first started cause that’s what I knew. Um, and we want a client that was really big in the, um, in the online money-saving space, and we were doing all this financial services PR for them, and the owner, the CEO, said, could you take your approach and try and do it to consumer PR? So what we would call middle of the paper, which is where financial stories used to be. Could we try and move our content to the front of paper? And he sort of sat down and explained why. And at this point, there was no digital PR. There was no online PR. It was just PR, right? And if you’ve got coverage in the front of the paper, it went online and you got follow links. Follow links were the, you know, what happened. I was going to try and use a Latin phrase, but I’m not intelligent enough to remember what it is. But links, you know, links came with it. So we did this consumer PR. It was fucking easy. It was so much easier than financial services PR because it was less scrutiny. You know, you’re just banging any old shite out and it would get pick up. And I say this deliberately now because I like people to come along and go, you’re talking nonsense. I honestly think we invented digital online PR in the UK. We were way ahead of the game. My business partner was an SEO. We really understood the value of links and we were the first to really get it and we spam the shit into it. We, the client that I’m talking about is my voucher coach. You know, we took that from zero start. I think he’s gone on record and saying, you know, he bought, he built the website for 400 quid in, um, you know, some guy overseas and it’s sold for 55 million in the end. And the only marketing he did at the start was PR. And that’s what we did, consumer PR. And I just did it because it was so much easier. And I didn’t call it, I had called it online PR sometimes. When I was winding people up, but, um, but now obviously just the full story of that is people came along, like you guys, JVH rise at seven. And you were just like, actually, we’re going to take it to the next level. And you’ve done it much better than I could have ever, ever taken it to. And that’s kind of what’s happened. Really. People have come along and just overtaken us and took it to the next level. And I, and I salute you guys for doing that as well.

Louise Parker:
Do you think now then, as it’s progressed and more people are doing it, do you think it does sit differently from regular PR, traditional PR, or however you term it? Or do you see it as all part and parcel of one thing, maybe with just different kind of KPIs and goals?

Andy Barr:
I don’t really see a difference between all the different elements of PR. I kind of see that there’s different divisions of PR, the same way that you have different divisions in the marketing mix, like direct mail ads and that kind of thing. But in PR we have, you would obviously have digital PR because they’re the noisiest fuckers out there. And then we’ve got product PR people who. You know doing fantastic things we got consumer PR people that are helping people reputation management and then you got crisis comes as well so you got loads of different areas that it became a really big thing because you had digital PR people sorry you had no bed SEO people going out. I’m just going to people like Charles Arthur that you know the tech editor of the Guardian as well as I’m just saying is it is a crack tech story give me a follow link and he go quietly like well. get lost dickhead. We did a really funny competition once where you could win a t-shirt that said I survived a Charles Arthur pitch. I think he wrote a column called Die PR Die so we had that put on the t-shirt like Frankie says relax. So yeah I don’t really see a difference between digital and normal PR.

Stephen Baker:
I’m with you on it, to be honest. I think there’s different facets of PR and always has been, but personally, I think people like to overcomplicate as we often do in the marketing industry and semantics gets involved and people debate endlessly and it maybe doesn’t need to be. But you did mention something there with the Charles Arthur story. Digital PR is often seen by some people, I guess, as all about links, whereas more traditional PR has had reputation at the heart of it. With that in mind, do you think digital PR has the potential to harm a brand in any way? Have you seen any examples of where it’s not worked? Because maybe that digital PR is thinking just about the link rather than the story they’re getting across, the message, and what they’re saying about the brand.

Andy Barr:
I think there’s two elements to that again coming back to an old person on the podcast I think you need to look at look at all of it so if we think about digital PR and online PR or whatever you want to call it it fell out of really big affiliates who are you know in in the online industry you have the the pioneers of who drives industries forward, it’s porn. Porn is the thing that brings brought through, got rid of buffering and online movies and VR and things like that. And then I would say the second level from that is probably affiliate marketing. They are the masters of online marketing because of the way that they go about trying to get links and everything like that. So affiliates really drove digital PR. If you think about the big brands like Confused.com, GoCompare, MyBatchCodes, BatchCloud, You know, they were the ones that were hunting for hundreds of links every month, but then affiliates had its own reputation problems. So obviously famously the ASOS, um, CEO set described affiliates as grubby little people in their back bedroom, which obviously people like confused.com would disagree with that. And that’s where this kind of reputation, I think digital reputation issue has come from. And that’s now followed through. Now, don’t get me wrong. If you’re doing a really crap, I give it a really good example. What are they called? MOE, LVMH, Louis Vuitton, Hennessey. They go to all of us. They probably came to you as well. They go to like 20 digital agencies at one time and they said, you know, we really want to get some links into this page, right? And I was just like, Jesus Christ, your brand PR team would shit it if they knew the kind of stuff that we’re going to do, you know, or we would suggest. So there is always going to be that. reputational issue. Now, no other examples really come to mind. I’m sure if you said something, Oh, actually, let’s fucking put the boot into Interflora. I was part of that. What happened to them? Because at that time I had an infographic website where you gave us an infographic, we would upload it and we’d give you a follow link. If you didn’t mind how long it took for it to go up, two weeks, you know, it was free. If you wanted it quickly, you had to pay 25 quid and it’d be up within a day. Cha-ching.

Andy Barr:
Now obviously Interflora, I’m not going to name the agency, I don’t think they’re about now actually so it doesn’t really matter, but the agency came to us and they said yeah we want this infographic for Interflora put in up, we put it up and as I’m sure loads of other places put it up and I guess essentially it was a paid for link. Three days later, not because of us but because everyone knows the backstory of Matt Cutts getting in touch with Interflora and saying look you’ve got to sort this out and they ignored it and didn’t and whatever. But they got nuked out of the search for their aggressive paid link strategy. So we then got a call on the Monday saying, can you take it down? Well, it’s 100 quid to take it down, I’m afraid. So, you know, let’s be honest. Interflora is a prime example of that. They had all this spammy link building going on in the background by, you know, agencies that probably didn’t really understand the nuance of not traditional PR, but mainstream PR. And it caused them that reputational problem. They got done for buying links and got nuked.

Louise Parker:
I feel like it’s not a kind of SEO podcast without a mention of Interflora, so thank you for ticking that box because it’s a great case study.

Andy Barr:
Sorry, I should have said allegedly somewhere, but I don’t know. But it’s the best example, isn’t it?

Louise Parker:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a lesson to be learned. I guess on a similar kind of note, and I feel like I probably can anticipate your answer to this, but if your agency is going about link building by talking to publishers, sending them stories, getting links off the back of that in kind of, you know, tit-for-tat kind of way, but you’re not calling yourself a PR, but you are acting on behalf of a brand, maybe you’re calling yourself just content marketing or anything like that, do you feel like actually know what you are doing is PR? I ask because this is something that I like always find a bit weird, because I’m like, if you’re acting on behalf of a brand with a story that, like you’ve kind of said, can influence their reputation, then what you’re doing is PR, but I would be intrigued to get your thoughts.

Andy Barr:
I mean, are these these knobheads that call themselves outreach ninjas and stuff like that? That kind of thing. It is PR, isn’t it? I think over the last two years, maybe there is a slight nuance in that those of us who are doing quite a lot in the affiliate space, we’re now talking to the commercial teams rather than the actual journalists. So we’re saying, so for example, you know, we’ve got a client that does, um, I went into a big home, lots of furniture basically and it’s quite high value and it’s quite high end. And so we’ll go, you know, there’s only so many ways you can go to a journalist and say, I’ve got this really sexy story about a sofa, for example, right? It’s just not, it’s not brilliant, is it? Do you know what I mean? So in fact, we go to the commercial teams and we say, oh, actually, do you know that they pay 10% commission on a win, affiliate window, sorry, whatever you want to call it. And then the commercial team make editorial out of it, or they go to editorial team and say, all right, can you do a top 20 features on wipe downable sofas, that kind of thing. For kids, not for perfect. You know, and they know that they’re going to push this brand because it’s got a higher commission rate on AWIN. So yeah, the nuance is changing. But no, those people that are just asking for a link, they are PR people because they’re talking to journalists. I mean, what’s wrong with saying you’re a PR person? We’re cool as fuck.

Louise Parker:
Thank you for answering in the way that I wanted you to. I’d agree.

Stephen Baker:
I don’t know. I don’t know what the issue is, but yeah, it definitely, there’s definitely something where people don’t want to call themselves PR. It’s like, I’m a link builder and that kind of thing.

Louise Parker:
Content marketing or something. Yeah.

Stephen Baker:
It’s just the overcomplication of it again. Where do you think people go wrong when it comes to making a PR misstep with their story? I mean, we can probably, between the three of us, think of loads of examples. But are there common things that you see or have seen which make you cringe a bit, either the way they’re preparing a story, the kind of stories they’re going out with, how they’re pitching it? Eager to hear your thoughts on the common mistakes. I don’t know where to start.

Andy Barr:
I think it is, it is cringe, isn’t it? You see some stories where people maybe have been so desperate to get something out there to react to it, but they don’t really understand maybe that it’s in a bit poor taste, which is ironic for me to say that given some of the stuff that we’ve done. But I’d always say that we’ve tried to go down the humorous route rather than the offensive route, and some stuff’s offensive. I think it’s no secret that I have a dabble in the affiliate space myself. I have three or four publisher platforms in my own right. Obviously, we get some of the people at the agency to work on it, so I’m on a couple of news databases around the niches that we run them in i fuck me some of the press releases that we get I mean I could write a book on how not to do it but one of the things I really hate and I really feel bad for journalists for now is this these automated tools for outreach so i don’t know what company is i imagine it’s. I mean I love BuzzSumo but I imagine it’s something to do with BuzzSumo or someone like that. You know where the press release goes out and then it’s like a sales filter basically. Two days later they’ll say they know you’ve read it because they’ve got some creepy tracking in there which again is fine. And so then you get another automated email and then three days later you get someone else from the team automated email. I noticed that you read Sophie’s email, Sophie’s a terrible term, Steve’s email, do you know what I mean, from three days ago about this story. Just wanted to circle back to it and I just think if I was a journalist I would block that and I would block that at domain level because that kind of automated process of PR is crap and it annoys journalists. I talk to loads of journalists just from being old and it’s the number one thing that people talk about, that journalists talk about, is this sort of automated approach to PR, which is just painful. I’m amazed that more and more agencies aren’t blocked at domain level for that.

Louise Parker:
Yeah, it’s interesting because I think I literally just saw a tweet from Iona, who’s a freelancer. She literally said something like the thought of sending a mass email to an automated list of journalists gives me the ick. a lot of people were agreeing with it. But on the flip side, I have seen LinkedIn posts from people doing digital PR saying, my media list was 6,000 journalists long and there’s no way that media list has been manually done. That has to be automation behind that or just clicking some boxes and getting a big list of media contacts from it. So it’s definitely being recommended. I don’t know if it’s always happened or like you said, it is happening more it probably sounds like it’s just happening more maybe because the power is there to do it so people are taking advantage of it.

Stephen Baker:
You still get I still like someone on Twitter you know you either like an ad or a sponsor thing or something that just popped up in my feed and there are people wherever they, I can’t remember where this guy was based, but he was sort of pitching for like a, give me your business, because I know it’s a numbers game. So the more pitches you send out, the more kind of joy you’re going to get, which essentially is selling yourself on a scattergun approach, which obviously journalists are going to hate. But I question, and it’d be really good to hear your thoughts, because when I first started in PR, so this is like pre-propellant, It feels like it hasn’t changed that much, it’s just the method has changed. So I was literally, my first job was being given a press release. I had no input into the writing of it or the creation of a media list. It was like, there’s a press release, there’s a list of phone numbers, here’s a phone, call up everyone on that list. and sell them the story. And I was trying to sell health stories on my first week to, I think her name’s Sarah Bosley, the health editor of The Guardian, and just getting absolutely ripped apart. But they saw it as a numbers game, that first company. It’s like, the more people you call, the more success you’re going to get. And it’s just, I never saw it as true. But do you ever have to do anything like that? How do you navigate it? Is it all targeted?

Andy Barr:
I’m very similar to you when, you know, I call it having a proper job and I worked in house. Um, I remember calling Charles Ray from his son. I think he was on the business or finance desk trying to flog some mortgage story to him. And he just was like, who’s this? Is it Andy Barr from X, Y, Z brand? And he said, fuck off Andy Barr, put the phone down on me. I mean, no, it doesn’t work, does it? And now I think there’s two elements to this. Obviously I’m not going to shy away from it when we started out. We definitely spam stuff because that’s you know there was that’s just the way it was there was thousands more journalists and there are now I’m so your media list could build to be that kind of number that you felt were targeted but i always feel like. Some element of research went into it you know we didn’t go to the motor impressive finance story that kind of thing. Now, as time has gone on, obviously it’s all moved to this hyper low, hyper focused, you know, building a really targeted mailing list. And obviously that does work, but you get to a Wednesday afternoon and you’ve done your focused list and you’ve got fuck all for it. The temptation is always there to be like, Ooh, you know what? I’m just going to send it to this media list I built last year. That’s a hundred long about a different campaign. Cause I think that might fit. And that’s where you kind of get into that. You fall into that trap and getting criticized on social media, through desperation. And we’ve all been there. We’ve all had a Wednesday afternoon, you know, bollocking off a client because we’ve not had pick up. Yeah. And we’ve got a report to do on Friday. So I can see where that desperation comes from. But it is, you know, in a dwindling media land where, you know, let’s face it, the press is dominated by freelance writers now instead of you know, paid for, employed journalists, direct by the media. People are desperate and that’s how that happens, I think. I’m not right, ever, but that’s what I think.

Stephen Baker:
No, I’d agree. I think we would always advise as well, like, and you’ve just, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Often it comes from, like, panic or not really just stopping and thinking. So, like, if something’s not going as well as you think it should be, or you’re getting that bollock in from the client, it’s like, just slow down. don’t sort of speed things up and just pitch to more people. Let’s consider the story again, like who have we sent it to? Rehash it. Yeah, rehash it, that kind of thing. It’s way like, I definitely went down the panic route early on in my career. It’s like, I’ll just phone more people. That’ll be fine. That’ll fix it or email more people. But now it’s like, just slow down, relax. It’s like, it’s not the end of the world. That’s for me, one of the best bits of PR. It’s never really the end of the world.

Andy Barr:
Yeah. And you kind of end up feeling a bit sorry for journalists. I mean, I write a column for an industry mag and I get sent so much scandal every week. I always say that one of my biggest nightmares is not my browsing history, it’s someone seeing my DMs on the amount of stuff I get sent, gossip and stuff like that. But I don’t really get involved in all of those journal PR spats anymore because I do feel sorry for the journalists and sometimes you’re going to snap, you’re going to have a bad day and you’re going to call someone a twat, you know, or why are you sending me this? And then obviously all of us, all of us poor PRs come out. Oh, what, what about me? What, you know, be nice to me. Well, Fucking bring it on yourself. Do you know what I mean? Just do a bit of due diligence. I mean, I get it. It’s horrible to get a shitty email, but you know what? I’ve had so many shitty emails and I’ve never really felt the need to go on social media and tell people, unless I find it funny, if someone really goes two-footed in on me and sends me a fantastically abusive message, I will talk about that because, you know, it’s good to talk about all the fails that you have as well as the successes, isn’t it? So I’m not part of that brigade that’s like, let’s out everyone that’s mean. I’m not saying it’s a good thing. It’s not, but fucking get on with it.

Louise Parker:
On the subject of things being on Twitter and not going well, because obviously you do talk a lot about crisis comms, maybe in your DMs you have some people being like, oh god, Andy, I completely fucked up, this has happened, what on earth should I do? Or if you don’t, if someone did DM you that, what would be your kind of advice to someone? And I guess that could be a journalist has tweeted my pitch and said it was terrible, or it could be the story is already out there and readers are hating it and think that it’s offensive or think that it’s just terrible, like any sort of thing like that. What do you do? What’s your kind of first step and what’s your advice?

Andy Barr:
Again, a couple of things in that. One, I feel like I am super approachable. I want people to come to me. I’m one of those annoying personality types where I want to help people. I think we were talking about this before when I was absolutely fucking smashed at that awards deal and I was chatting at you two until you sort of edged away. But I’m always amazed that when I go to things like that, I don’t… I don’t really connect with people from my industry and I find that really weird because I do feel I’m quite approachable and if anyone came to me with anything I would try and help them. And I think about all the fuck ups I’ve made from Ben Goldacre calling me at midnight to tell me he was about to announce he was out of me for doing something. shady, that he considered to be shady in the science world, to having tweets read out in parliament of something that I’ve said, as an example, you know, Rory Challen-Jones called me the Gerald Ratner of PR. There’s nothing you can fuck up on to a certain degree, do you know what I mean, that I haven’t done. So I feel like I’ve got a wealth of experience of fuck-ups to share with people. But the first thing is, it’s like, when you’re in the eye of the storm, you are going to panic. There’s no way around that. but it passes very quickly, especially nowadays where, you know, you look at, um, I can’t remember the agency and I’m not going to say them because I feel it’d be a bit crappy, but there was an agency that had all that drama with the Taylor Swift, you know, eco flight story, whatever. And I saw all that going on. I just dropped a couple of them a message and was like, do you know what? Don’t worry about it. Do you know what I mean? This too shall pass. I can’t remember who said it, probably Mel Gibson. But, um, you know, Just don’t worry about it. In the moment it’s going to be carnage, but it will all calm down and it will all see fine. Sweatygate went on my first, this is a really good example, I went on my first lunch after having twins with my then wife and PR Week rang me for a quote about an agency that had been outed for using one of their staff as a case study for some sort of sweat deodorant. And I said, I’m happy to talk this through now. I said at the time, yeah, but it goes on. Do you know what I mean? And it does, because when I worked in financial services, we’d get a call from Sunday Times, Daily Mail, we need a case study of someone on a two year fixed rate mortgage and we need to go and get a picture. And shock horror, it’d be one of the members of staff from our bank that was the case study. So that’s always gone on since. you know, since forever. But yeah, get in touch. I’m more than happy to help. You know, I’m easy to find. So yeah, that’s, that’s no worries.

Louise Parker:
Do you think a lot of the kind of advice then is more like reassurance, rather than, you know, like, there’s not like a textbook, okay, number one, you do this, and then you do this, and then everything’s gonna be fine. It’s more just like, like, as you said, this will pass. It’s a bit shit right now. But

Andy Barr:
As a person, personally, yeah, there’s no textbook approach. I think corporate. So, you know, from my crisis comms point of view now, ultimately I’ve done that all my career. I really enjoy it. I enjoy it far more than fucking link building. Crisis comms is brilliant, worked with some of the biggest brands around the world on it. And that is a bit more formulaic, you know, apologize if you can. You know, if you’re not going to trigger any legal consequence, announce an investigation, you know, all the normal stuff that every crisis person talks about is a bit more formulaic, but when it’s personal and it’s you in the firing line, no, you just got to panic for the first day and then see what happens. But I am a living example of, you know, surviving disasters that I’ve caused myself.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, it does. I mean, it all passes, as you say. That’s one of the reasons why I kind of gravitated towards PR, because a lot of my friends were going into quite serious jobs, like becoming surgeons and things, where if you’re hung over and you sort of slip or something, you’re going to actually cause some damage. Whereas with PR, it’s like, nothing I can do is that. is that bad, but you on the crisis comm side, how would you deal with things with the client if you’ve really mucked up in some way? I can’t think of a specific example, but if you’ve, I don’t know, offered a bit of comment off the record or chatted or revealed something you shouldn’t have and it’s got out to a journalist, because that’s when things can get a bit hairy, can’t it? And share prices can drop and investigations start and things.

Andy Barr:
Well, we’ve had two situations in our history that have made me sort of shudder or immediately sweat through my t-shirt. One is a junior member of our team a long, long time ago changed a word to regulated in a healthcare release because they felt that it gave more gravitas to the story, which it did, but they weren’t regulated. the sort of medical press picked up on it and we were on a bit of a sticky wicket. So the press release had been approved and, and that person, you know, just unfortunately made the decision to just add the word regulated and it caused us loads of hassle, but you know, we, we, we got through it and it’s all we, and I always say this in, um, in any crisis con situation, it’s about trying to be transparent, isn’t it? And I think you just have to go to the client and say, do you know what? We, we fucked up. Now obviously there’s varying degrees of fucked up and that’s one way you probably end up losing the client unless, you know, unless nothing comes out, which in this case there was no, you know, there was no story that came out because we were just honest and said, look, that says we paused up on the press release. And then one really innocent one, we got a sock image. from a website uh no no we bought a stock image that’s right we were all legit above board and we used it in a um we used it in a press release an editorial stock image which obviously you pay a bit more for and the person that bought it didn’t sort of twig but it was actually a minor celebrities kid and it had been put on there by someone like splash images or somebody like back in the day when they used to do that And we got a takedown notice served on us on our website, like within hours of that going out. And I couldn’t work out why, I can’t say who the celeb is, but they were American, big music celeb. And they were outraged, I guess quite rightly. But we brought the picture legitimately, we were able to show that to the hosting company, it all calmed down in the end. But those are the times that I really thought, oh Christ, you know, that’s a tricky thing to manage.

Louise Parker:
On that occasion with the car one, where the client had, you know, you’d come up with a story, you’d got their sign off, and then obviously it didn’t go down so well with certain people. Who do you kind of see as to blame? As in, like, is it equal blame to the client and to the agency? Because the agency came up with it, but also the client signed it off? Or in those kind of scenarios, is it always that the kind of agency has to fall on their sword and say, like, oh, it was all our fault. Sorry.

Andy Barr:
Well, I think in this occasion, we all celebrated because it got an absolute ton of coverage. Basically, the story was the company that was the most traded in car in America on We Buy Any Car, we said was the least popular car. And with hindsight, you know, we’ve let the story get in the way of the truth. And, you know, we could have worded it better. But it got a load of coverage. The client was fairly relaxed because they weren’t getting threatened by the car company. We work as we put the press release out and some, some snitch of a journal sent it to the press office of the car. So, um, you know, you just take it on the chin, don’t you? And wait for the legal letters to roll in. And then, um, and then you deal with them as, and when, you know, with, uh, another money saving client, they got themselves wrapped up in an ASA investigation, nothing to do with us, luckily. know, and you just deal with it as and when it happens. But I think the good thing about working with people that have worked in a crisis before, you know what the next steps usually are. So I know that the main driver behind that ASA complaint was that it was the last case that the ASA were going to handle under those particular laws. So they wanted to make a big sort of hullabaloo out of it. And we made sure that, you know, we communicated that in all of our responses. So I think it’s about understanding where the driving force is coming from, from the negativity that you’re getting.

Stephen Baker:
That’s fair. And what’s the, I know we talked a little bit about panicking but in those kind of scenarios like you talk really eloquently and like reassuringly I think to a lot of listeners about how you know things will pass and it’s not the end of the world and you know just to sort of remain calm, what do you think are the worst things you could do if a story’s going badly? Is it just the basics? Don’t get aggressive on social media and start defending it to the hilt. What would you advise not to do?

Andy Barr:
I think there’s so many, there’s so many things, you know, essentially it comes down to don’t lie to try and get out of it. And that is a temptation, obviously sort of early on in agency land, having worked in house for some really, you know, for some really big companies that did some really bad things deliberately. It’s always an accident when, when crisis happens, no one thinks, right, I’m going to fucking drop a bomb here. Do you know what I mean? It’s always an accident. So I think it’s about. not lying to try and cover things up. And I think the Coots example is a really good example of that. Basically, they didn’t agree with Farage’s views, whether that’s right or wrong, that’s for more intelligent people than me to debate. And instead of just saying that, they made up that nonsense about him not ticking the financial wealth box. And that was essentially a fib to try and cover up the origins of the story. So that is a really good recent example. So don’t fib. That’s the best way if you can be transparent, you have to be there. The area that always causes issues is where you’ve got the legal ramifications. I can’t remember the name of the company, so I’ll say it’s generic, but there was a holiday company where a couple of kids sadly passed away from carbon monoxide poisoning. The holiday company, they didn’t say sorry, and they couldn’t. Realistically, we beat them up. I did a column about how It’s just inhumane to not say sorry. But realistically, they’d have had the legal team in the rear saying, do not apologize, never say sorry, because that’s admitting liability. And that’s, you know, that will be let on by the prosecution lawyers when it goes to court. So that’s the difficulties when, you know, everything, every comms person or every CEO that’s put out to front up something like this. they want to say sorry because you do if you’ve caused someone hurt or distress and I think that’s that’s the difficulty you know and not getting that mixed up with that being a lie that’s not a lie that’s just you’ve got a legal person in your ear telling you not to do it.

Louise Parker:
That is a consideration that’s very, very important and especially when it’s in a more serious story. With the digital PR hat on and thinking about things that you shouldn’t do, let’s say you’ve done a campaign, you’ve got a campaign page on your website. and everyone hates your story and is ripping it to absolute shreds. Is it right or wrong to just delete the story? Do you go to the journalist and say, look, you covered it, can you just take it down because this is causing me a lot of heat? Are those possibilities or is that a no-no?

Andy Barr:
Did you do the furniture stories? It’s what we’re talking about.

Louise Parker:
We didn’t do the furniture story, no. But I do think that is one of the most recent ones that has been out there, which got absolutely torn to shreds. And I do feel for the person who was behind it.

Andy Barr:
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know the agency. You’d have to tell me offline who it was. But I mean, I’ve never been in that situation where I’ve needed to go and get a story taken down. What I do know is with that furniture company example, being honest, and I don’t think this is new news, The people who run that company won’t give a fuck. They want the links because they know that they want to rank for chief office chair and they won’t care. If we don’t want to talk about that because that’s a bit controversial, let’s talk about Protein World. We were a client of ours for a little bit and the CEO of Protein World has gone on record as saying that that campaign that they did about Beachbody Ready, they got absolutely fucking nailed quite rightly because it was you know really really dodgy campaign you know that added uh two million to their bottom line because the controversy and this comes back to google not being able to understand positive or negative coverage the controversy moved them to the top of the rankings for protein and all Jim Nobeggs care about. It’s hard to believe, but I am one of them. It’s just where to get the cheapest protein. They don’t care about the ethics of the company. I know we all pretend now that we do care about the ethics of where all of our products come from, but they don’t in the protein world. So yeah, they were never going to go and ask for that coverage to be taken down. And I think it’s probably the same with the furniture company. I imagine the PR agency were a bit like, oh fuck, you know what we’ve done especially as a potentially gonna get out of doing it and i had a lot of people send it to me but i didn’t do anything with it. Actually i think i talked about it once and then someone from the agency said actually can you not do this about PR or something like that yeah anyway so no i have never had that but i think That company wouldn’t have cared. They didn’t like the links that come from it. It’s like that guy, the dentist in America who shot the lion. You know, he had the best ranking fucking dental practice in America after that, because you know, all of the world’s media wrote about him and where he worked. So there’s a nuance, isn’t there? You know, Google doesn’t understand positive or negative coverage still.

Stephen Baker:
I don’t know the dentist. Did you say dentist who shot a lion story?

Andy Barr:
Cecil the lion. Absolute prick. Not the lion. The lion was lovely, but yeah. Dentist shot a lion on one of those, you know, manufactured hunting tours they do in South Africa. He was quite a famous lion, you know, probably had his own TV show. I don’t know. And it went everywhere about what a horrible guy this chap was, but it said, and he worked at XYZ dental practice, and the knock-on effect was that his dental practice in, but for God knows anywhere, ranked number one for dentistry in America, because he’d had all this coverage.

Stephen Baker:
I think we’re going to move on to our final question, which we’re going to ask all guests. What do you think the future of digital PR is? You can interpret it how you want, but it can be in the next few months or the next decade. I mean, you’ve been in the game a fair while and it’d be really interesting to hear your views on where you think it’s going next.

Andy Barr:
That’s a question. I imagine everyone’s going to talk about AI, which does play a role, but I’m not overly concerned about it. Until Google finds a fundamental way to rank websites without looking at links, I don’t think there’s going to be a great change, especially in the bit that we’ve talked about quite a lot today in terms of digital PR. I think people are always going to chase follow links, aren’t they? Or What is it that desperate PRs call it? Implied links. I see case study after case study of, oh no, implied links count. And you think, yeah, fuck off. We’ve done test after test that shows that implied links carry nowhere near the weight that a follow link does. So I think until Google has a seismic change in how it assesses websites to take links out of it, I think there’s always going to be that digital PR industry. I think in the world where brands want to be seen to be more compassionate, I think there’s going to be a lot more push on what we would have called consumer PR and basic press office function PR to position brands in a better light. I’d like, you know, I’d like to have some golden nugget, but I’m not intelligent enough to leave that to the brainy folk like Steve Waddington and Sarah Waddington, you know, to come up with the stuff that’s going to happen in the future. I’m very much the blunt instrument knocking on the door.

Stephen Baker:
Well, Andy, as a blunt instrument, you’ve been tremendous and we really, really appreciate you coming on.

Louise Parker:
Thank you, Andy, for joining us. It’s been very enlightening. Loved chatting to you. And thank you for everyone who’s listening. Please follow the Digital PR Podcast to be told when more episodes are out. Bye-bye.