Mark Twain wrote: "Everybody lies—every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning." Bearing that in mind, you have to wonder about the sense, or lack of, behind some PR campaigns.
An academic blogging for The Guardian in the UK recently laid bare an agency’s use of silly research to gain its client some media space.
Online insurance company einsurancegroup.co.uk paid for an online poll to ask people how often they lied.
Its PR company used the results to tell the world that the Welsh were the UK’s biggest liars, averaging 47 fibs a month.
You can imagine the brainstorm that came up with that gem – and how many policies the company’s now selling in Wales.
Besides the fact that what a fib is to one person is an abominable lie to another, there's the possibility that the answers respondents gave were in fact lies.
A cursory Google search shows 3600+ online stories about the campaign, most of which use the terms “dodgy science” and “cynical bid for publicity”.
That puts a “lie” to the myth that all publicity is good publicity. Any PR company worth its salt would have told the client as much and warned them about trashing their own brand.
Anyway, everyone knows the UK’s (and world’s) biggest bullshitters come from Cumbria in north-west England.
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