Brace yourselves, this might come as a shock to IFR readers: not all bankers are brave, courageous and bold, striding onwards and upwards with rhino-like hides, impervious to the whims of the media. Some, in fact, are ego-ridden, paranoid, fragile flowers who constantly worry they are being slighted by agenda-driven hacks obsessed with doing them down.
A case in point: when I was a comms person at Deutsche Bank, the head of equities called me to a meeting ostensibly to talk about media strategy. What I got instead was a diatribe about Merrill Lynch’s equities team getting great media coverage while poor old Deutsche kept getting a kicking. And what was I doing about it?
A few months later, I had moved to Merrill Lynch. The head of international banking called me to his office. Why, he asked curtly, do journalists write glowing reports about Deutsche’s equities business and the opposite about Merrill’s? And what was I doing about it?
Honestly, I haven’t made that up.
Indifferent
Some bankers genuinely think the media has got it in for them. Crazy, I know. The truth is, journalists are indifferent to bank and bankers, which is how it should be. They will write about both with great verve and purpose but have neither time nor inclination to foment an evil plot to discredit an individual banker or to favour one bank over another.
But bankers can be very sensitive indeed. So sensitive, in fact, that at the first sign of a non-fawning journalist on the horizon, they are on the phone berating their PR person.
If a story is involved, and the banker’s positioning is not to their liking, they will blame PRs for poor prep, or poor stewardship of an article, for not evaluating quotes more thoroughly, for not exploring the context, or for not knowing who else is being quoted – and even in what order those quoted will appear. In short, for not giving them star billing in an article that reads like the banker had written it.
Out of the window goes the confident swagger with which bankers boast among themselves about their media savvy and supposed cosy relationships with senior writers and editors. In its place is insecurity. How will their role in this story look in front of colleagues, competitors, regulators and family? What is their reputational damage?
So we PRs mollycoddle. We whisper soothing words. We tell them how great they are and how evil is the media. We point to the positives in an article that inevitably get overlooked by the thin-skinned banker who focuses laser-like on a sentence at the bottom of the article which, they cry, could have been crafted in a more positive style.
And despite advising the banker to let the fuss blow over (so to speak), we often find ourselves promising to call the journalist and ask if they can change anything in the online version of the story, knowing a) we probably won’t because it is embarrassing to do so, and b) the journo will probably tell us where to go even if we did.
We say things like “they need us more than we need them”, even when it is not always true. We commit to identifying other journalists, so-called friendlies, who might, with a fair wind and a very nice lunch, pen a lovely account of the banker’s team or business.
Bluster
It is important for PRs to remember that for all their bluster, bankers have feelings too. For those who don’t worry about their image too much and see media interaction as part of the job, do it efficiently and build good relationships, we adopt a similarly pragmatic approach. It is a pleasure to work with such colleagues and the journalists appreciate it too. As a result, these bankers are rarely stung by the media – and take any less-than-ideal coverage on the chin.
For those who are super touchy and try hard to groom their image, we put on kid gloves. We select them for media engagements where we figure the likelihood of nasty fallout is minimal. We chaperone tightly and follow up closely with the journalist to ensure there are no surprises.
We check quotes, we explore the context, we ask about other sources and comments – at least as much as we can. Most journos are reasonably patient but they have limits – too many questions can have the opposite effect to the one intended.
Over time, and thankfully, many of these sensitive souls toughen up. They won’t always call after their competitors are name-checked in an article and they aren’t. They learn to remain stoical when an award for which they have pitched goes elsewhere. And of course we applaud their new-found media worldliness.
But truth be told, PRs are often really only buying time before the next shiny object catches a banker’s eye. If a PR can source this glittering opportunity, all the better. Calm can be restored and the world moves on. That is until a banker rings me complaining that a bonus amount attributed to him in a story is much lower than he actually received, and asks what I'm going to do about it.
I haven’t made that up either.
Jezz Farr has been a senior communications adviser to major international banks for more than 25 years.