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Bad PR for Bahrain's PR agency...

 ‘The really ethical PR agency', a new protest group targeting the unacceptable face of the PR industry, was born today, in a protest this morning against Bahrain’s PR agency, the British firm Bell-Pottinger, at Bell-Pottinger’s HQ on High Holborn. Here is TREPRA’s 1st communiqué, that we handed to passers-by and to B-P employees (one of whom stopped to congratulate us and to tell us, “I agree with you”!), outside B-P’s HQ:

 

Bell-Pottinger needs to stop trying to spin the unspinnable…

The Bell-Pottingers of this world need to wake up: the world is changing. As tyrants fall across the Middle East and North Africa, it becomes more and more clear that it makes no sense for Britain to 'lead the world' in representing the last ones standing. So, we in 'The really ethical PR agency' urge B-P to drop its business-relationship with the murderous Bahraini regime; but also to pre-emptively take the same step with regard to all its other tyrant-clients.
For in the new, more democratic, cleaner world that is starting to emerge, there will be no place for dinosaur companies that try to spin the unspinnable: autocracy and government-sponsored terror and murder. A new breed of ethical PR agencies is starting to emerge. In the future, the only PR agencies that will be taken seriously are ethical ones, who only take clients with clean hands. For no-one will believe a word that the front-men for murderers and dictators say. . .
We urge B-P to drop the briefs that they are holding for dictators, before it is too late. (Otherwise, we in 'The really ethical PR agency' will dog them until they do.)
Because, at the end of the day, it isn't just that we are ashamed that it is _British_ companies who the Gulf autocrats turn to to spin for them, when they commit terrible crimes (though we ARE ashamed, for Britain, of this). It's that, at the end of the day:

REPRESENTING DICTATORS WHOSE HANDS ARE BLOODY IS JUST REALLY BAD PR...

 The really ethical PR agency, Spring 2011.                        thereallyethicalpragency@yahoo.co.uk

 

DROP THE BAHRAIN BRIEF, B-P!

______________________________

The protest today was covered by PRWeek, the industry’s in-house mag. It went straight in at number one story on their website!!   J

Here is the story:

http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/1057005/Bell-Pottingers-work-Bahrain-Government-spotlight

After you have read it, do read the 1st comment to the story, by someone called Stuart Bruce, of Wolfstar PR agency:

http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/1057005/Bell-Pottingers-work-Bahrain-Government-spotlight/#comment Very interesting, well put. Lord Whatshisname, boss of B-P, clearly hasn't got a leg to stand on in his 'defence' of B-P against our criticisms - what he said to the PR Week reporter surely goes against the PR industry's own code of practice, without a doubt.

This is exactly why B-P and their ilk give themselves a bad name over accounts like that they have with Bahrain. And why no-one can believe a word that they (or those that they are clients for) say, any more…

 

--
Rupert Read
Green Party Councillor, Norwich.
http://rupertread.net
[If you have an urgent email for me while I am away from a regular computer, you may wish to try contacting me instead on rupertread+mob AT gmail.com]
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