Bad Blood: The Theranos Story

If it seems too good to be true, dig a little deeper and you may find out that your instincts were well founded. I remember about two decades ago how a woman claimed to have solutions to the energy problem. I can't recall the details other than that it was clear this CEO had a very capable PR team. She was on the cover of several magazines, if I recall correctly. A year later, she was gone. 

Businesses work very hard to project a positive narrative and in a world as messy as ours, there are plenty of folk with money who are eager to invest in (and be part of) the next big thing. Who doesn't like stories that generate hope? We love the feeling of being amazed. 

Unfortunately, many of these stories are more mist than substance. Here's but one example: Theranos. The company's story is told in Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by journalist John Carreyrou. Released in May 2018, Carreryou covers the rise and fall of the multibillion-dollar biotech startup headed by Elizabeth Holmes.

The company was founded in 2003 by then-19-year-old Stanford dropout Holmes. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft and Steve Jobs dropped out of college as well, so there's some glamor to these stories of dreamers who skip the formalities of a touted degree.

Holmes claimed that Theranos had developed a revolutionary new blood-testing technology that could run a wide range of tests from a single drop of blood. The story had legs, and Theranos quickly attracted the attention of investors, including a number of heavies like former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Senator Sam Nunn, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. By 2014, Theranos was valued at $9 billion and Holmes was being hailed as the next Steve Jobs.

All this success drew attention to the company and with it came a skeptical WSJ journalist who began digging a little beneath the surface. When Carreyrou exposed the truth about the company's unfounded claims, Theranos collapsed and Holmes was eventually charged with fraud.

The problem here is that many of the people who invest in these "story companies" have no real understanding of the technology they're reading about, so they buy the yarn. Carreyrou's book is a story about ambition, hubris, and the lengths that people will go to in order to achieve success. Does the name Enron ring a bell? How about Bernie Madoff.

Ultimately, Holmes was convicted of wire fraud in January 2022 and sentenced to 11 years in a federal prison in November. Her attorneys put in an appeal, however, and the rest of the story is yet to be told.

Moral of the story: don't believe everything you read or hear.

Illustration is an AI-revised version of a painting by the author called The Student.

Torches of Freedom: The Use of Propaganda to Get More Women Using Tobacco

I believe it was adman Claude Hopkins who massively increased the sales of shampoo by one single word. He added the word "Repeat" to the instructions after the word "Rinse." Not everyone washes his or her hair twice, but an awful lot of people certainly do. It says to do so right in the directions.

We're influenced by media far more than we realize. This past week I read an article about how women took to the streets in protest in order to obtain the right to smoke. The person who wrote the article did not realize that this was an event in which women were paid to publicly smoke cigarets while marching in an Easter Parade.

The marketing man Edward Bernays was the architect behind this "women's liberation" movement, the right to smoke in public. Instead of being labeled "Coffin Nails" as some people called them when I was younger, Bernays promoted the idea that they were "Torches of Freedom." The Wikipedia account begins in this manner:

"Torches of Freedom" was a phrase used to encourage women's smoking by exploiting women's aspirations for a better life during the early twentieth century first-wave feminism in the United States. Cigarettes were described as symbols of emancipation and equality with men.

This particular Wikipedia story calls Bernays the "father of public relations" but in those days it was not called PR. His book was titled Propaganda, a term that had to be dropped after the Nazis had given it a bad name.

Today we are bombarded with spin. A primary battlefield in the culture wars is the media. As Orwell noted, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." For this reason history is continuously being re-written. Yesterdays heroes become today's enemies. (How many Columbus statues have fallen this year? Tomorrow is being called Indigenous Peoples' Day.)

I've been a student of PR in the course of my marketing career. The experience opens your eyes. The more you learn, the more you shake your head and roll your eyes. As the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, "With much wisdom comes much sorrow."

Here's but one of my articles on this subject: He Who Controls the Narrative Controls the People.

There's still more here in my review of Jacques Ellul's volume, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

In Wikipedia's Torches of Freedom account we find that Bernays had a very defined objective: eliminate the social taboo associated with smoking. American tobacco companies were thrilled to double the size of their potential market in this manner.  

Bottom Line: How much of what you believe, especially with regard to current events, has been crafted by other people? The follow up questions are: By whom? And for what end? How much of what we're seeing in our streets right now is being financed by others behind the scenes? And for what end?

Robert Lillegard Shares Practical Insights on How to Get Published in Major Media

Yesterday's Twin Ports Social Media Breakfast, hosted by UMD, convened in a rather impressive room on the third floor of Maloskey Stadium. On a perfect Duluth summer day with cloudless skies, the light streaming through walls of glass gave such a welcoming feel that it was hard to get started and hard to leave. A special shout-out to Molly Solberg for organizing these events.

Our speaker for August was Robert Lillegard, founder of Be Our Guest PR who was also a guest speaker in late 2016. His presentation at that time was both practical and thorough, which no doubt contributed to the strong turnout yesterday.

Lillegard essentially presented an outline of his career with each anecdote designed to teach a lesson about the writing life. The title of his talk served as a drawing card, mainly because he's done it: How To Get Into Major Media.

1. We all start somewhere.
He began by sharing how in 2005 he wanted to become a journalist. He shared an anecdote about his first assignment for the campus newspaper, how he went out and began surveying students regarding their level of concern regarding terrorism.

2. Rejection is part of the game.
He next spoke candidly about the numerous rejection letters he received when he first began pitching story ideas to editors. It brought to mind my own experience of sending out queries back in the days when you typed letters and included a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE). After maybe dozens of form letter rejections I received a form letter rejection with a hand-written note on it from the editor. It was thrilling to learn that an actual human being had read my pitch and rejected it personally. Editors were real people.

3. Learned about newsroom from inside.
Lillegard landed a job in which he had the opportunity to experience what it was like on the receiving end of pitches. This gave him a number of insights, including the following:
a. Never complain to media
b. Do send nice letters
c. Send photos
d. Send stories well in advance, not last minute
e. Be persistent

4. You can always get better.
He began in 2008.

5. NYTimes published an article about an idea he had had … he never pitched it.
He shared a story about an idea that he had regarding a craft beer event here in the Twin Ports. He was nearly floored when he read a New York Times story about that very same event, as if someone had read his mind. On take away for him was that he was on the right track. His idea was on target. Another lesson is to pay attention to what is being written to see what kinds of stories the media are looking for.

6. Your Content is what is important.
He underscored the importance of content. Editors are looking for stories people want to read.

7. Large Media looks at Mid-Size Media which is looking at Small Media
Media begets media. We can be seduced into thinking that the smaller media are just emulating the big dogs. The reality is that the Times is looking down at the smaller media, sifting for stories that are worthy of a wider audience. Begin at the bottom and work your way up.

He left an extensive time for Q&A and the audience, which had been full engaged, had many practical questions. Afterwards he briefly reiterated his career path and then outline his three step process for getting published in major media.

1. Come up with stories worth writing about
2. Tell editors
3. Repeat

Related Links
Tips for Aspiring Op-Ed Writers from the New York Times
How I Got Published in the NYTimes on My First Try
And finally, there is a Facebook Event Announcement of note: Michael Fedo, author of The Lynchings in Duluth and many other books, is having a book signing party for his newest release from Holy Cow! Press, Don’t Quit Your Day Job: The Adventures of a Midlist Author
I mention this only because he will be having a writers workshop preceding the book signing. The workshop will focus on how to write publishable Op-Ed articles. Details on the book signing and workshop here.

Meantime... if you're a writer, write on.

Lying in Advertising: Is This PR Campaign All Wet?

About three years ago I wrote an article about synthetic motor oil designed to answer the question, "Are synthetic motor oils too expensive?" In the article I started by comparing the price of bottled water, which does not require a great deal of complex chemistry, to the process of making synthetic motor oils, which involves a variety of raw materials -- from base stocks to additive packages -- and a host of complex formulation issues.

So when the press release regarding an upcoming PR campaign against bottled water slid into my inbox yesterday, it caught my eye. At first blush, I wondered if I were seeing the front end of another Alar scare. But upon checking into it, there were some interesting and thought provoking facts brought up. I decided to pass this along and see what others think.

The campaign is called "Lying in Advertising." Being an ad man myself, campaigns need a theme, and this one does catch your attention. The headlines in the ads are all lies. For example, the first ad exclaims, "Bottled Water Makes Acid Rain Fall on Playgrounds." I'm like, "Huh?" How does bottled water cause acid rain. The next says, "Bottled Water is the Primary Cause of Restless Leg Syndrome." I guess I never knew that, but I never heard of RLS either.

The third, again over-the-top, announces that "Bottled Water Causes Blindness in Puppies." What! Kids, do NOT put our bottled water in the puppy dish, please. Finally, in a page from the global warming playbook, "Bottled Water: 98% Melted Ice Caps. 2% Polar Bear Tears."

Well, I bit, just like most readers who see these ads will probably bite. Because each headline has an asterisk. The askerisk leads to some fine print which says, *if bottled water companies can lie, we can too. Followed by links to two websites: tappening.com and startalie.com

The first is a blog about the project. The latter is a game, obviously intended to be fun, but not a lot of fun if you are marketing manager for a bottled water company.

Very clever. So who are these people and what's their motivation?

Evidently Tappening was founded by two guys whose aim is to encourage the public to drink tap water whenever possible, thereby sending a message to the bottled water industry about its unnecessary and extreme waste of fossil fuels and resultant pollution of the Earth.

Mark DiMassimo and Eric Yaverbaum are New York PR guys. DiMassimo says, "We’ve spent these two years using our marketing and public relations abilities to un-sell bottled water hype. But I still see cascading waterfalls on labels that do not list the source of that water.”

Yaverbaum adds, “This creates an illusion that it is superior to tap water, because that’s what billions of dollars of bottled water advertising has claimed or implied. The thing is, that's simply not true."

For the record, I am not a bottled water guy myself, though not for environmental reasons. I am essentially a cheapskate. (Frugal is the nicer way to say it.) Thus I have had a lot of non-bottled water over the course of a half century, and frankly, some tap water tastes pretty bad. My experience is, however, that if you have ice on hand even the worst water is palatable. I'm fortunate in that the well at our rural home produces wonderful water. (Except every fourth year for about two weeks during the spring rains at which time the flavor takes on a hint of hydrogen sulphide, famously associated with the smell of rotten eggs.)

DiMassimo and Yaverbaum are sinking $535,000 into this campaign which will include what they call "wild postings" in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Las Vegas. By means of Twitter, Tappening Facebook and MySpace groups, and Friendfeed they expect more than 100,000 of their viral ads to fly around the Internet within 24 hours of release.

While we're on the subject of bottled water, did you know that there is magnetically energized water from a spring in Japan’s Magnetic Mountain that purportedly makes you resistant to disease and gives you longer life. At $99.95 per milliliter, or $10,000 a liter, you won’t want to spill a drop. That's no lie. (Not the part about healing, but the latter part, about not wanting to spill a drop at 10K per liter.)

Well, I hope I've given you something to drink about... I mean, think about. What do you drink? I mean, think. Am I all wet?

PR & Propaganda

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” ~ Edward Bernays, Propaganda, c. 1928

“We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” ~ ibid.

I have finally obtained my own copy of Edward Bernays' ground breaking manual on mass manipulation. The irony is that the word propaganda was a good word back then. When this book was written, the liberal elite liked the idea of controlling the masses without having to resort to guns.

Unfortunately for the mind-shapers and benders, a not so nice guy across the seas liked these ideas so much that our first mental association when we say the word Propaganda these days is Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda who made the famous statement “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Quite naturally, after the war American proponents of values shapers and manipulators could no longer call what they did propaganda. Thus was born the public relations industry. Today, it is PR that rules the world. No elected official in high office could exist without spin-masters at his or her right hand. Spin…. organizing today’s massive quantities of information into a tool for massaging minds, controlling perceptions, creating a pseudo-harmony that enables our complex society to function as a somewhat cohesive whole.

Heaven forbid, however, that people should read between the lines and think for themselves. What’s really going on here? What’s really happening in America today? How much of what is really happening do we see in the papers… and how much is spin?

This is a theme that I will undoubtedly return to…

Snickers Story Has Unexpected Twist

“Detectives used a partially eaten Snickers found at the Cato Pet Hospital in west Jonesboro to track down the suspect in its January 2007 burglary. Police sent the nougat-filled chocolate bar to the state Crime Laboratory, where medical examiners obtained DNA, Jonesboro detective Jason Simpkins said.” ~ Kenneth Heard, Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Did anyone see this news story about a guy who was implicated in a burglary because he left his DNA on a half eaten Snickers bar? Police said that DNA from the Snickers bar on the counter at the scene of the crime helped them zero in on the suspect, Brian Bass.

Here’s the rest of the story. It turns out that the Roscoe & Hermann Agency, a PR firm from New Jersey, set the guy up. Bass was apparently unaware that he’d become part of a clandestine marketing scheme. Barry Adams, a mid-level manager at the firm, told Bass that the company would get him off within sixty days. The marketing plan was nixed in the Snickers board room after legal review, but no one notified Adams or Bass.

Bass’ actions were intended to be part of a branding event designed to get the Snickers brand name into headlines across the country. According to unnamed sources, more than eighty burglaries had been slated for the same weekend, with Snickers bars to be inadvertently left at the scene of each crime. The underlying message to criminals: “Guys, this is the candy bar that bad guys eat.”

The plan appeared to include major rollouts of Snickers inventories to prison vending machines around the country. Right before the story broke, prisons in all fifty states had become buried in pallet loads of Snickers products.

When the Bass story broke, requests from inmates for Snickers candy bars became a trickle and then a flood. Because Snickers distribution pipelines were apparently in place before the news story hit the wires, several legislators have lobbied the FTC for a deeper investigation.

Kudos to Snickers for identifying this untapped market. The marketing plan is a bit nutty, but sweet.