Dot Com Super Bowl and the role of PR

Forbes.com has posted an interesting story on several dot-com companies that advertised on the Super Bowl in 2000 or the Bubble Bowl. So much for advertisers, but what role did PR play: what were those days like in PR.?

I kept a journal of my PR experience from the late 1990s through mid 2000, covering what happend in Miami, NY and Silicon Valley, as I was in all three places for extended periods of time.

It’s basically an unpublished and unpolished book, full of my thoughts and doubts and the greed of the era. The following are experts from my not yet published book (see post Feeding the PR Machine for the outline)

PR gold rush 1997-1999

Working in a major PR agency (Edelman PR as a VP in their Miami office) during this period I sat at ground zero during the heady times of excess and extreme of dot-com PR. Endured meetings with 20-somethings that thought they were going to change the world become rich beyond their dreams and all they needed to do it was a PR-driven strategy to drive the IPO.

These were the days that a successful media tour in New York ended with a trip to Tiffany’s so the client could look at what they were going to buy after they went public.

These were the days that budgets went from $10-15,000 per month to $30-40,000 plus per month and even higher in New York and California. Many times these companies had no clients, no product and no hope for success. In fact, many times the only true product they had were the press releases we were creating and pushing out over PR Newswire or Business Wire.

Sometime in the middle of the PR dot-com gold rush I realized my clients were full of shit and I started to question what the hell I am doing helping these morons get rich, when I should be worrying about my own family. Morons from HomePoint.com or LearningPays.com or from GoCo-op.com or from e-food.com. All former clients of mine and all morons who had no clue what the hell was happening to them and around them.

Later on during the boom I used my business and economics background to realize that most of their business plans were not worth the paper they were printed on. However, that did not stop me from taking my clients money. As with lawyers, everyone is entitled to representation as long as they can afford it, even OJ had his dream team, and so it was with many dot-coms with their dream team of PR hacks.

To understand the hype of the New Economy we first have to understand that The New Economy hype is not so new after all. Without turning this into an economic treatise there were many other periods of time where the good hard working people thought they were living in a new economy and the hype created by government, media and the markets forced rationale people to do irrational things. Like piss money away down a rabbit hole.

Of all the books I read in business school, one of the best, which was not even required reading, was the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay written in 1841, which examined crowd psychology including investments, an example:

“All economic movements, by their very nature are motivated by crowd
psychology. Graphs and business ratios are of course indispensable … I have always thought that if in the lamentable era of the New Economics ... even in the presence of dizzily spiraling prices, we had all continuously repeated ‘two and two still make four,’ much of the evil might have been averted.”

What is interesting is his use of the term New Economics and the fact that he was alluding to role of the public and media to use common sense in how it viewed the markets. If only the hosts of CNBC and all those celebrity CEOs and their hired PR hacks did the same in the late 1990s we too may have avoided much economic pain in 2000.