home   |   contact us   |   subscribe to rss

Apple’s PR distortion field distorted

November 19th, 2007 by mhjones

Steve Jobs’ famous Reality Distortion Field apparently struggles to include his lieutenants and PR people, according to this blog post by Fortune.

The post includes a video (below) that offers a telling insight into the way Apple’s PR troops handle the media. Ask the wrong question, and sorry folks, the interview’s over!

Of course, these sorts of situations have been happening for years. My own experience dealing with Apple has nearly always been positive, but it’s no secret that their PR people really live by the company’s “think different” motto. I recall the weeks it took to negotiate a series of exclusive interviews around the launch of Apple’s Xseries server boxes circa 2002 when I was at InfoWorld. In order to get the exclusive, questions had to be submitted in advance, our schedule was tightly controlled, they made their own recordings of what was said, we had to be careful of what we spoke about, and so on.

Here in Australia the PR distortion field includes various rules like “thou shalt not quote an Australian Apple executive” (my paraphrase). The PR folks themselves are good people and typically explain their perspective well, and on rare occasions will even give the media a sound bite from a “spokesperson.” The simple reality is they’re acting under orders from On High – and it’s a question of whether you want to keep your job.

What’s changed now, however, is that these backroom/off-record conversations can now easily be digested by everyone thanks to the wonders of social media like blogs and YouTube. And that, as the PR people are now all too aware, is a game-changer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44w-RYurbN4&rel=1]

(Fortune link, perhaps ironically, is courtesy of PR agency Dateline Media‘s e-newsletter)

Tagged: Apple, Media, New media
Comments: 6 Comments »

6 Responses to “Apple’s PR distortion field distorted”

  1. Mark Aufflick Says:
    November 21st, 2007 at 2:22 pm

    Well Channel 4 won’t be getting an Apple interview again for the forseeable future.

    I have to say that was pretty ham-fisted by the PR people and I’m very disappointed in Phil Schiller – I would have thought he had the chutzpah to successfully sidestep the question. He seemed genuinely caught in the headlights and didn’t quite know where to go. Maybe he was jetlagged?

    FYI the Fortune page has a working video – your embedded video seems to have been (mysteriously) removed.

  2. mhjones Says:
    November 21st, 2007 at 3:12 pm

    Yes, that was mysterious. I’ve fixed up the video.
    Yeah, maybe he hadn’t rehearsed the sidestep strategy.
    btw, I notice that as of today, this video has had more than 65,000 views…

  3. Scott Pettet Says:
    December 5th, 2007 at 11:30 am

    Great video Mark. Real deer in the headlights moment. I’m surprised he didn’t yell HELP!

    Surely by now that sort of question should have a bread and butter answer?

  4. F Brown Says:
    December 5th, 2007 at 8:33 pm

    Yikes – so much for “wouldn’t it be great fun to work at Apple” … those PR people look unwell. Doesn’t quite fit the iTunes brand somehow … fun, youthful, freespirited …

  5. James Hayward Says:
    January 3rd, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    Got so much going on “today” yeah right how to play dodge ball, I think the PR people here just wanted to get back to sipping their tall skinny flat white decaf lattes.
    That was very funny, and would have to agree with F Browns comments, my tune has just changed on what a great brand it would be to work for…

  6. SEO Training Says:
    August 30th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

    It’s becoming more and more evident that Apple is a control freak. They are far worse than Microsoft in stamping out any deviation in the software, hardware or brand image.

    It will be interesting to see what happens with the launch of the Google Android mobile phone platform which is open source and will be run on a multitude of different hardware platforms.

Leave a Comment