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This Is What Happens When A PR CC’s 400 Journalists On An Email
Posted on 26-08-2015
Ah PR.
It’s often a thankless job, especially when you’re at the mercy of journalists (shout out to #UAEPR). But every so often, you have to stop what you’re doing an educate someone in how not to work in PR.
Every day journalists are sent press releases – some good, some bad, some irrelevant to what they cover. Which is sort of expected really, so it’s just a simple matter of deleting the rubbish ones that come through. But this morning was a total riot, as one PR person decided to do a double whammy.
To put things in context first, the press release was about a product that a pregnant mother had dreamt up while she was in bed nursing a broken foot. “The Holding Cell” is a little bit of plastic that slides under your mattress and holds your cell phone while you sleep. Because of course, the idea of a bedside table is dumb as fuck. It’s currently on Kickstarter trying to raise $22,000 to make this plastic dream a reality:
But this blog post isn’t about shitty Kickstarter ideas, but rather about the PR that sent it. Because in their infinite wisdom (or lack thereof), they decided to send this press release to 400+ journalists. All in the ‘CC’.
Yup, I’m not kidding around, all of us were in CC as plain as could be.
And that’s of course when everything went to shit. The first blow was dealt by lovely Noreen:
Owen pitches in with a gif (the first of many)
Federico summed up the situation perfectly:
Jordan was clearly ecstatic:
By this time the poor PR having realized their mistake, decided to try and make the best out of a terrible situation:
Full points for effort, but Brock was quickly dethroned by Cody:
Which was quickly followed by this scathing comment from Katie:
Charles straight up said what we were all thinking:
While Steve tried to lighten the mood a bit:
But Shanley was having none of this bullshit in their inbox:
Bur thankfully Noreen and Anne were not impressed by this outburst:
And that, is what happens when you cc 400+ journalists on a terrible press release.
Should I be gutted I didn’t make the list?
This email string was the best part of my day yesterday. And, I’m still enjoying it today. I’ve never been so glad to be on someone’s mailing list… much less on a pitch gone wrong. 😉
467 people – I’m taking Shanley off the list – now have new drinking buddies worldwide. Today was so quiet and sad by comparison…
I’ll be honest I laughed so hard I made embarrassing snorty noises resulting in quizzical looks from my colleagues. But I took two things away from this:
1) This poor PR had quite a time of it and has probably learned their lesson, and
2) How did 400-odd emails not get dumped into spam or rejected by mail servers outright?
All this for a night stand…