other PR people (outside of Voce of course), the thought of spending an evening
with a thousand of them gave me the cold sweats. Luckily that frigid perspiration stopped when
dinner started, as an attendee I met at this year’s PRWeek awards in NYC said “I’m not going to talk about work if
that’s cool with you.” “Definitely cool with me,” I responded.
I was at the PR Weekies (I don’t think they call them Network Appliance
“Weekies”– probably a good thing) because one of Voce’s clients,
corporate communications team of the year” award. Being the razor-sharp minded client that he
is, the Worldwide Director of PR for NetApp Eric Brown knew that this award was
really for both the in-house and Voce team, so he wanted to make sure that Voce
was in attendance.
While the dinner conversation was stimulating, the ceremony
itself was a bit lackluster. When I
attended in 2001, PR Week sprung for Darrell Hammond (aka Al Gore) from
Saturday Night Live. The comedian this year was a no name, and his act
explained why. “Welcome to the Puerto
Rico Week awards,” he exclaimed. Yawn.
After the opening act, the emcee began handing out statues
for the 262 award categories (actually there were only about 20, but it felt
like more. Next year they’ll add the
“best use of vowels in a pharmaceutical press release” award.)
Winner after winner, most of the same names popped up - Weber-Shandwick,
Fleishman-Hillard, Edelman etc. I was
again reminded that PR Week seems to cater to an audience of about five large
firms, which sponsor the event and buy ad space (that comedian ain’t working
for free, right?)
But I shouldn’t be too hard on PR Week. Someone has to feed
the egos of our industry with an award show, right? Also, the venue choice Tavern on the Green in
I met some great people and heard even better war stories. “You haven’t done PR until you get a surprise
call from the media about a customer finding a severed finger in his salad,” a
woman from food service sector told me.
I’ll stick with tech PR for now, thanks. — Dave Black
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