My client Eric Owens had a recital at Carnegie Hall‘s Weill Hall last spring. Typically, I was doing seventeen things at once, two of which were working with Carnegie’s Creative Services department on Eric’s program and e mailing Hilary Hahn a photo of a dog wearing a yarmulke. No particular reason for that latter task.
The person I was working with at Carnegie asked which photo of Eric I wanted in the program. I cut and pasted the URL of a recent photo of Eric from the IMG Artists website and sent it off to him. I received an e mail back saying, “Attached is what we have on file for Mr. Owens. I’m not sure you want us to use the photo below.”
That would be…of a dog wearing a yarmulke.
Amanda the Consummate Professional strikes again! What PR prowess. What charm, what grace!
Yesterday, I e mailed someone at Decca a response that was meant for someone else at Decca. Something like, “I just don’t think that naked statue photo screams ‘party'” as a reply to an iTunes question. On the ball yet again! My own incompetence made me think: a while back, we collected a list on Life’s a Pitch of the things that annoy journalists about publicists (here) and that annoy publicists about journalists (here). Now I want a list of everyone’s biggest PR bloopers. Come on…publicity is funny!
Comment anonymously or as your proud, mistake-making self here.
How amazing would it have been if they had just gone with the dog photo! I would treasure that program forever.
As someone who is on the other side of PR and who receives dozens of PR blasts a day, I sometimes get emails that still carry the artifact of someone else’s name/organization/journal in the salutation. We all know it’s great to get personalized messages, but this is really annoying. It’s better to just write a generic blast and send it out to everyone rather than risk the mistake.
Personally, my worst moment was when a watercolor artist emailed me to submitted his (TERRIBLE) artwork to my organization, hoping to be included in a big gallery exhibition. I meant to forward the email to the President of the org for the final decision, but hit REPLY without realizing. So I wrote something along the lines of “This is terrible artwork. Should I just send him the standard ‘No Thank You’ reply?” Years later, I still cringe when I think about it. And the only way I realized my mistake is when I looked in my “Sent Items” folder a few minutes afterwards. Ouch. I still feel so bad for that poor guy. Maybe I crushed his spirit and ruined his career? We’ll never know!
Oh. Oh, yes. Fortunately, Amanda was kind enough to remind me of this crowning jewel.
There is a certain journalist who happens to have a blog that I may stalk. (The BLOG.) He has mentioned his partner a few times, and even posted lovely photos of their pets–let’s call them “aardvarks.”
At a premiere a couple of years ago, said journalist approached the press table, and with great enthusiam I blurted out “HI, _____.” Then looked at the nice fellow he brought with him and said “IS THIS YOUR PARTNER??!!” (!!??!!??!!??)
“This is my editor.”
At which point, Amanda evacuated the scene as I scrambled to recover “OH. I’M SORRY. I WAS JUST EXCITED TO MEET THE OWNER OF THE ‘AARDVARKS, UM…” #FAIL
From that day, I have adopted a simple mantra that helps me in such situations: “Shut up, Sarah. SHUT. UP.”
I think I looked down and started playing Brickbreaker on my Blackberry so as not to be at all affiliated with the situation. -AA
Once wrote a press release and forgot to mention the venue. Not only that, but I didn’t even realize my mistake until a journalist called and said, “Um, Steven, where is this happening?”
Well, just yesterday, I hit send on my constant contact press release and poof, my sweet friend Rebecca Davis pointed out – it has a template boilerplate at the bottom of your release that says:
Bucklesweet Media
Amanda Sweet
Job Title
ugh, can I just stop and triple check my work? No, too much to do!
This is the smallest of many blunders I have had over the years.