Valleywag
After reading Tuesday's post on Apple unresponsive PR department, a tipster sent us the following juicy tidbit about the miserable life of Apple's PR staff. Apparently, they're kept almost as unenlightened as the press they work so hard to keep away. And a social life? Forget about it. More after the jump:
I never ran this myself, but through a friend of a friend I heard that Apple PR teams are not allowed to communicate internally with one another, i.e. the iPod PR people are not allowed to know what iMac PR people are up to. It is totally divide-and-conquer inside the company.The whole "friend of a friend" aspect has us wary, so we called and checked with Steve Dowling, the head of corporate PR for Apple. Or rather, we left a voicemail for him. As you can probably guess, Apple has not yet returned calls for comment.Externally, you're also not supposed to cultivate relationships with journalists. It's the complete opposite of other vendors. In fact, my friend said, if you're an Apple PR person and you are seen in the company of a journalist, at a party or any place other than an Apple event, you better have a good reason why.
Comments
High-tech public relations has got to be one of the most soulless career paths on this planet.
i'm told they tell apple tells its pr people they will be fired if they are quoted in stories. which is weird since they're pr people and they're supposed to speak for the company, right? apparently not - only steve speaks.
Not necessarily. Public relations person does not equate to public spokesperson. Basically, public relations is about controlling the company's image to the outside world and managing media contacts.
At some companies, there are PR folks who can speak on behalf of the company. At other companies, they are silenced. About the only comment these latter folks can say is "we have no comment".
Apple chooses to have certain key executives and (when appropriate) some key product managers comment about new products and services. Steve is not the only one who speaks. CFO Peter Oppenheimer does the quarterly earnings result.
@cv: You forgot about HR.
Apple PR SUCKS. I worked at a medium size general interest magazine and when FedEx broke a monitor being returned to us by a photographer they refused to send us anymore product to shoot until we paid them back. It was like $350 (cost) and FedEx was going to reimburse in like 3 months but the stupid PR wench wanted immediate payment or we were cut off.
No, I did not forget about HR.
High-tech PR trumps high-tech HR in terms of soullessness. HR is in a distant second.
I'm thinking maybe handling PR for Philip Morris might leave you with a few guilt-ridden sleepless nights. I was going to say Paris Hilton but that would be kinda cool-the parties must be amazing.
I emailed the entire PR gang at Apple last week for a comment on the teen iPhone hacker from NJ. Didn't even get a 'no comment' back.
No matter what their life is like, Apple PR did a phenomenal job here. Valley Virgin (see Blogger) probably makes the case better than anyone I've seen.
"the iPod PR people are not allowed to know what iMac PR people are up to. It is totally divide-and-conquer inside the company."
That reminds me of Jack Tramiel's typical corporate strategy at Commodore throughout it's lifespan as a computer manufacturer. The belief that internal competition drives innovation, ignoring both the HR friction and the cost of additional resources required to pursue parallel projects.
What possible benefit could something like that have in the PR world? 3rd generation gossip or not, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Left hand, meet right hand.
-bp
Seem's y'all don't really realize first-hand how the world of media relations works. Apple speaks and responds when Apple wants to speak and respond. You don't really get to choose (or whine)because you didn't get a call back. They speak when it's good for the company and for the strategy they've agreed on. And by the way, they do work hard.
They should just have told the reporter that Steve Jobs has already responded to that claim himself, in his open letter titled "Thoughts on Music." Here is the relevant bit:
"Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company's music store. Is this true? Let's look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store - they are the industry's most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that's 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
Today's most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It's hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music."
Comment on this post
Reply by EmailLogin with your username and password below. Or comment on this post via email.
Forgot your username or password? New User?