Modern communication is all about utilizing the complex mix of paid, earned, shared and owned media rather than relying solely on one of those elements.
Earned media is still vital and worth its weight in gold but companies and brands are also leaning into social and owned media and boosting it with paid promotion.
In the tech sector particularly, there is a growing trend for enterprises to use their owned media channels to state their reputational case or respond to legal and regulatory issues or crises, and they’re adjusting the tone beyond bland platitudes to adopt a feistier approach than has been seen before.
It started back when former White House press secretary Jay Carney led comms at Amazon and used Medium to publish a series of essays pushing back on what he considered misconceptions about his brand that he didn’t feel were getting a fair shake in mainstream media.
Eight years ago, Carney responded to an investigation into Amazon’s culture by The New York Times with a lengthy rebuttal entitled ‘What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You’. Its headline takeaway really landed and got everyone talking. It was a quote from a worker called Bo Olson that was splashed below the headline and claimed: “Nearly every person I worked with I saw cry at their desk.”
In his Medium post, Carney added some context that didn’t appear in the Times piece, explaining that Olson had a brief tenure at Amazon that ended when he attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records. Carney added that Olson was confronted with evidence from the investigation, admitted it and “resigned immediately.”
Carney, who spent two decades as a reporter himself at Time, pondered why the two reporters who spent six months working on the Times investigation hadn’t uncovered this basic fact and he used the faux pas to undermine the credibility of the whole 5,600-word piece. He also responded to Dean Bacquet, then executive editor of the newspaper, who interestingly also responded on Medium to Carney’s post.
There have been other subsequent deep dives by the media into the culture at Amazon, before and after Carney departed for pastures new, and the general consensus is that there’s no smoke without fire, even though there were clearly some breakdowns in the Times’ reporting and fact-checking in the original article. It’s fair to say Amazon wasn’t the only West Coast tech behemoth with a work culture some would describe as “hard charging” while others deem it “toxic.”
Older heads in the comms space at the time reflected that, while a bold and interesting strategy, it rarely prospers in the long term to take on the media head-to-head, as they can always have the last word and they have long memories.
Carney’s Medium strategy burned brightly for a while and then faded away. Most CCOs would have handled incidents like this behind the scenes, both proactively before any coverage in building senior media relationships and exposing top-tier outlets to the CEO and C-suite on an on- and off-the-record basis. Those relationships, while never shutting off negative coverage, certainly come in handy when a sensitive topic emerges or a deep-dive piece over a series of months is in the works.
But in the last few months tech companies have taken to their owned media channels again in a similarly feisty way to Carney, this time channeling their content toward competitors, regulators, crises and reputational attacks.
Microsoft’s CCO Frank Shaw engaged in public discourse about a media story last month when he weighed in with a LinkedIn post about a Bloomberg article. He felt the piece had been pre-written before anyone contacted his team for a comment and then had their quote dropped in purely as a due diligence exercise rather than a proper fact check of the situation being written about.
The post and subsequent discussion, including contributions by high-profile communicators and reporters is well worth reading, though I still think taking on the media in public forums is a potentially risky approach.
As Shaw himself says in the post: “I’ve learned that having a binary view of what is or is not a ‘good’ story is problematic, and that nearly always our best approach is to engage as deeply as possible, with all the facts we have. This is often true even when a story might be complicated, or difficult, or even negative. The result still might sting, but if it better reflects our thinking, that’s a win for everyone, us, the readers or viewers.”
Also last month, Apple took aim at Spotify in a post from its corporate newsroom following a ruling by the European Commission that the Cupertino behemoth’s App Store was a barrier to competition in the digital music space.
It noted in the piece that Spotify had met with the Commission more than 65 times during the investigation, now has a 56% share of the European music streaming market and “pays Apple nothing for the services that have helped make them one of the most recognizable brands in the world.”
It adds: “We’re proud to play a key role supporting Spotify’s success — as we have for developers of all sizes, from the App Store’s earliest days.”
And it concludes: “But free isn’t enough for Spotify. They also want to rewrite the rules of the App Store — in a way that advantages them even more.”
Strong stuff. And messaging Apple would have been unlikely to be able to achieve through normal media channels. Though some would say it’s a little out of character with a brand that has traditionally stood above the competition and taken the higher ground.
Sometimes a company will respond to a particular individual on its own media channels and that’s what OpenAI did when it came to the arch provocative communicator of them all, Elon Musk.
Musk last month sued the ChatGPT maker and CEO Sam Altman arguing it had departed from the nonprofit open-source mission he agreed when he helped found it in 2015 and OpenAI rebutted the mercurial entrepreneur in measured terms in a blog from its company newsroom, point by point, with hard evidence to prove each statement.
Calling Elon by his first name throughout, the blog stated: “We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him.”
Again, strong, to the point and no-nonsense communication, backed with receipts such as copies of emails between Musk and senior OpenAI executives. OpenAI updated the blog toward the end of March with a note that it had filed papers seeking dismissal of all Musk’s claims. Let’s see how that one plays out.
In February, Google used its own media channel to apologize for the botched introduction of a new image generation feature on its Gemini generative AI chatbot (formerly known as Bard.)
The post was crisp, clear and to the point. It outlined what happened, next steps and lessons learned, nipping a potential crisis in the bud and setting the scene for drawing a line under the incident and moving forward.
Last October, Google used the same channel to adopt a more combative approach to a trademark battle it was having with Sonos.
It stated: “A federal judge ruled firmly in favor of our products, rejecting two of Sonos’ patents, building on previous rulings that invalidated the asserted claims from another two of Sonos’ patents. The decision shows the weakness of a central plank of Sonos’ campaign. The court stated that Sonos’ patents are both invalid — meaning they never should have been granted in the first place — and unenforceable, and affirmed that we developed the technology first and independently.”
Google definitely didn’t pull any punches on this one, adding: “This decision is good news for our users who will once again be able to seamlessly group and integrate Google smart speakers, and for continued innovation of new features across the industry.”
And it concluded: “With reforms like these, we can avoid costly litigation that slows down innovation, raises litigation costs, wastes the courts’ time and resources, and, most importantly, harms consumers.”
They were pissed and they weren’t afraid to show it! Quite a refreshing departure from the bland corporate speak we are used to seeing once statements have been rinsed of any character and parsed through teams of super-conservative lawyers.
TikTok – another company that has experienced big investigative reports into its internal culture, its Chinese ownership and potential security risks – went scorched earth last month with an in-app promotion encouraging its users to call their members of Congress to “speak up against a TikTok shutdown.” Lawmakers were flooded with calls from angry TikTokers, many of whom were young teenagers.
The Chinese-owned short-form video platform doubled down a few days later with a further exhortation to users, including many children, saying “your freedom to create is at risk.” It was certainly an effective strategy in terms of creating awareness, though most parents didn’t appreciate TikTok contacting their kids and it underlined the access to data the powerful app owner has and the concerns about it that politicians were voting to shut down.
I’ve particularly noticed this increase in direct and to the point engagement in the tech sector but I don’t see any reason why this isn’t, or can’t be, happening in other industries. The writing needs to be tight and to the point and in most of the cases cited above it was.
The trend raises a number of issues, from where you engage in terms of publishing channel, who you take on, what tone you adopt and how combative you are, how and when lawyers get involved – especially when dealing with regulatory or legal matters – and how you prepare for the dialogue that ensues post-publication, especially on social media.
In such a cluttered media and content environment it’s an interesting way for brands to attempt to stand out, get their messaging into the court of public opinion and engage different stakeholder groups. I look forward to seeing how this technique evolves.
