On the anniversary of the 1987 market crash, I have a message: An economic downturn is coming. And it’s overdue. Anyone who has worked through a recession (and in my career, I went through four) knows how devastating its effects are. Business starts to dry up. Clients disappear. […]
I’m not a big Twitter user. I have an account, but I rarely tweet. From time to time, I check my notifications because Twitter sends me an email telling me to. But I am fully aware that many people rely on Twitter almost exclusively to communicate, with […]
As we are confronted daily with the Trump Administration’s obvious disdain for the media and the truth in general, it’s instructive to look at a sad chapter in US history – one that has some potentially frightening parallels today. One hundred years ago, as President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly […]
When United Airlines gets tired of mugging its customers, they’ve always got their employees to batter. The latest news out of the Sears…er…Willis Tower (sorry, I still call 200 Park Avenue the Pan Am building) is that United’s executive brain trust tried to eliminate a longstanding performance […]
Over the years, several of the agencies at which I worked took on controversial clients. Whether it was Big Tobacco or the Fur Council or Big Pharma to name a few, the argument has always been that any client deserves representation. We help them tell their stories and […]
How many CEOs wish they could say that? (Answer: All of them.) How many CEOs actually would say that, even to themselves, let alone in an investor meeting? At least one. In September, that’s what came out of the mouth of Doug Parker, CEO of American Airlines, […]
About 20 years ago, I was speaking with a former agency colleague who was then the head of PR for a large bank. I was recounting a problem I had experienced with my own bank. My friend sighed and said, “You know, I am always surprised by how […]
The 27-month-old boy sprawled across his mother, both under one seatbelt, and the elbow of the stand-by passenger who was given the child’s fully paid seat. I thought I was done with United Airlines as a topic. I was wrong. It has been more than two months since […]
I try not to stray into politics in this blog, but I feel compelled to comment on something I read in the New York Times yesterday. Evidently, President Trump has been blaming his travails on bad PR. If his PR team were not incompetent, none of […]
It has been a bad couple of weeks for America’s airlines. First was the incident at United, where a passenger was assaulted and dragged off the plane by airport security. Yesterday, on American Airlines, a flight attendant “following the rules” barely missed clocking an infant when he yanked […]
Chris Atkins’ Random PR Thoughts