Not All Publicity Is Good Publicity

The old adage of all publicity is good publicity doesn’t always ring true. Unless you spent yesterday in a soundproof book, avoiding all press, television and radio news you will know what I’m talking about - Heather Mills and her embarrassing public outburst against the press.

It was an interesting move, especially from our professional point of view, which caused her PR agent of four years to step down. Phil Hall, who has worked for Ms Mills for over four years, was quoted in the Metro as saying: “She said she wanted to do a TV campaign attacking newspapers. I can’t have a good relationship with a newspaper editor while my client is attacking them. It would be destroying years of contacts.” Even Max Clifford said: “she had made a bad situation even worse.”
We, at Gemini, have to agree.

The clue is in the name of our industry ‘public relations’. Probably the most important part of my job and indeed for all PR practitioners is to develop and maintain good working relationships with the media. Without these contacts we would struggle to get any level of publicity for our clients. Heather Mills has used the press in the past to gain coverage for her landmine charity, but the likely chance of her getting any coverage now is probably somewhere between zero and nothing…I’m sure Adopt-a-minefield, Cosmesis, Peta and Viva! are thrilled with her public performance yesterday.

Our advice to her would be to keep a low profile and apologise to Mr Hall in the hope that he may be able to salvage some damage control from this – if he wanted too.

Ruth