If you’ve spent any time at all in any PR agency - you’ve probably been encouraged by your corporate overlords to sell a media training session to your clients. Inevitably it’s when the client / agency relationship is still young and innocent that the suggestion comes up. Say you’ve got your new client’s CEO an interview in Sludge and Pumps Monthly. On the weekly status call, you or your boss will chime in with a casual “say, is Mr. Big media trained?”
Media trained?
Then the six hour session is scheduled, and the book is prepared. The book with the “CEO with microphones stuck in his face” stock photo.
The price tag? Maybe several thousand dollars. The cost? A client even more bewildered than before only now she’s trained to spit out canned responses.
Media training, as practiced by most media trainers, is not about conversations. It’s about the myth of control - that a properly ‘media trained’ exec can spin an interview to her advantage and through some Jedi mind trick, make the reporter write the story the exec wants, not the story the reporter was assigned.
If you’ve been paying attention up to this point, you know this is complete nonsense. If not, let’s all say it together… “Markets are conversations.”
There, isn’t that better?
John Wagner recounts sitting in the audience at a conference and knowing exactly who among the speakers had been media trained. Or as his colleague put it, “maybe too media trained.”
John says:
We need to think less about controlling messages and more about whether our company’s messages are being understood and believed.
It’s the last part that strikes a chord with me. The part about being believed. Because if you were to sit in on most corporate media training sessions, the subject of truth rarely comes up.
Message and control, sure. But truth? Nope.
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