Let’s face it: the marketing industry is partially responsible for promoting the stereotypes that we all seem more than willing to embrace. Real men are interesting, handsome and confident. Real women are sexy, supportive and apparently love to do laundry. And then there are the rest of us, the real people.

Brands want us to think that we need their products to land that dream job, take that dream date home to bed or be that perfect parent to our children. Reality, of course, is much more complicated. Unlike the actors in commercials, not everyone in life has straight teeth, perfect hair or the driving ability to park an SUV atop a mesa.

Marketers, of course, believe that by selling us a varnished version of our tarnished real lives, the public will gladly hand over its money for a taste of the life exalted in the advertising. And that’s fine. This is how human beings have sold products to each other for centuries. This dynamic, however, may be changing. In many respects, the public is becoming more self-aware and self-accepting. The public wants models that look more like regular people and products that don’t specifically target stereotypes of men or women.

The public also wants brands to recognize our humanity, and that humanity includes our need to be old, vulnerable and far from perfect. Enter NFL star Tony Siragusa, the new face of Depend Guards and Shields—products aimed at men with bladder leakage problems. You heard that correctly, leakage. It’s not a word many advertising copywriters would circle and say, “Let’s leverage the power of this word.” Read more

UPDATE: We’ve just learned that the account in question was a fake, so as far as we know MetLife Stadium has yet to incur any bad karma. Whew!

PR professionals believe in karma. We just do. It’s part of the job.

As soon as you start believing that everything will go right because you’re prepared and you really mean well, something goes wrong. When the lights went out during the Super Bowl last night, we cringed at the thought of a billion people pointing and laughing at those who would surely lose their jobs. It wasn’t life threatening, but it was a public relations disaster for the Superdome, New Orleans and the NFL. The lights went out… for 34 excruciating minutes.

Admittedly, we laughed with everyone else at the jokes blaming Beyonce’s explosive halftime show for the outage and poking fun at the poignant irony of rich people being trapped in the Superdome. And we admired the brands that made the most of this “people are bored” promotional opportunity on Twitter and elsewhere. But when MetLife Stadium–site of the 2014 Super Bowl in New Jersey–jumped on the bandwagon, we had to take a step back.

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PR challenge of the day: working for a professional sports league (the NFL) that still inspires thousands of fans to pay $25 to sit around and watch its biggest stars act dumb for the camera. Just kidding–”Super Bowl Media Day” is one big, we-know-you-love-us party.

As one player put it, “It’s like Mardi Gras without liquor and with cameras. It’s cool. It’s an exciting time for us”. And it might just be the slickest media relations gig around.

In short, journalists hang on millionaire athletes’ every word as they talk about how they’re the best at anything ever while representatives wonder what could possibly go wrong. Based on this guy’s outfit, we’d say nothing:

What does this event teach us about football players?

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Indisputable fact: Americans love football. Pretty much every member of every key demographic watches the Super Bowl, even if we’re more concerned with the commercials. But anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with the sport also knows that American football has a big PR problem best summed up in three words: traumatic brain injury.

Is this an old story? Yes–but it’s not going away anytime soon, and eventually the NFL will have to address it to the satisfaction of the public.

The family of former star Junior Seau, who committed suicide in May 2012, filed a wrongful death suit against the league last week. The suit cites Seau’s post-mortem TBI diagnosis and blames the NFL for a perceived lack of oversight in warning players about the negative long-term effects of all those concussions (they’re also suing the company that makes players’ helmets). This is not an isolated case: over the past few years more than 3,800 former players have sued the league in more than 175 independent cases. Is the NFL really to blame for their injuries? We can’t say–but it’s a classic PR conundrum.

Perhaps most importantly, President Obama brought the story back to the nation’s attention right before the Big Game in a recent interview with the rebranded New Republic magazine, saying:

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Ever find yourself stuck in a foreign country, unable to satiate your desire for live American football? While football fans’ sights are set on the upcoming Pro Bowl in Hawaii and Super Bowl in New Orleans, the NFL’s senior director of events, Dave Wintergrass, is looking farther afield. He works on the league’s International Series events, organized by the NFL on Location in order to deliver the (live) goods to American football fans abroad. The next two games in the series will take place this fall at London’s Wembley Stadium, including one game featuring a Super Bowl contender, the San Francisco 49ers.

The NFL’s international efforts are part of a growing trend to increase the visibility of American professional team sports worldwide. Other notable examples include the NBA hosting a game between the New York Knicks and Detroit Pistons at London’s O2 arena last week, and the World Baseball Classic.

Wintergrass spoke on a panel about experiential travel at The New York Times Travel Show on Friday in New York. He said that the NFL wants to expand its global branding efforts by taking advantage of the league’s online media platforms and providing an entertaining, social experience in which only some of the customs mirror those of American football. Click through for his play-by-play:

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It was every sports journalist’s dream story: Promising college senior, Heisman trophy runner-up and near-certain first round NFL draft pick Manti Te’o suffers the deaths of his grandmother and his beautiful, supportive girlfriend within 24 hours–just before dominating the field in his team’s upset victory and continuing his streak as one of the nation’s most promising college football players. His heartbreaking tale of grief and victory quickly spreads beyond the world of sports.

One problem, though: it wasn’t true.

Deadspin broke the astonishing story yesterday as a web of complex lies promoted by some of our most respected publications began to unravel and the damage control campaign began.

A summary for those who haven’t been following: Manti Te’o is a gifted football player and devout Mormon from Hawaii who claimed, via his Twitter feed and various public statements, to have developed a relationship with a woman known as Lennay Kekua who he supp0sedly met after a 2009 game between Stanford and his team, Notre Dame. She had a Twitter account with which Te’o frequently interacted, expressing his love and encouraging his fans to follow her sister (both fake accounts were later deleted).

Then came the news that, right after the (real) death of Manti’s beloved grandmother last September, Kekua passed away from leukemia approximately a month after suffering a serious car accident. Manti doesn’t attend her funeral because she had insisted that he not miss a game. South Bend Tribune fleshed out the story through interviews with Te’o before Sports Illustrated, ESPN, CBS, the New York Post, The Associated Press and pretty much everybody else in the media world reported on it. Someone set up a charity in Kekua’s name. Manti Te’o was an American classic: the tragic hero.

And then things began to fall apart.

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The present is a great time to be in the public relations industry: never before have so many people done so many things while in contact with so many others.

Thanks to social media and the continuous miracle that is technology, we never do anything alone anymore (with a few obvious exceptions, ahem).

There was a time when television was a passive pursuit that involved tuning into a favorite program and ignoring the rest of the world. That dynamic, however, has changed. Watching TV has become an active–even interactive–experience.

So it makes perfect sense for TV ratings monolith Nielsen to join forces with Twitter, creating a new ratings system that will generate metrics for viewers who comment on TV shows and those people who read or interact with said comments.

It’s fun to open a bottle of red wine and log onto Twitter while movie stars walk down the red carpet to accept awards in clothing worth more than your apartment. It’s entertaining, cathartic and always good for a laugh.

But if the Oscars aren’t your thing, there is always the NFL, which suffered a major public relations disaster this weekend as the league’s less-informed (and, let’s be honest, flat-out racist) fans took to Twitter to vent their displeasure about President Obama’s speech in Newtown, CT, taking precedence over the New England Patriots vs. San Francisco 49ers game. Wow. Not exactly the image the NFL wants for its fans.

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Last week we joined a group of voices in questioning whether Breast Cancer Awareness Month and its primary sponsor, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, have lost a bit of focus in recent years.

Aside from the political squabbles that arose over the conflict between Komen and Planned Parenthood, many observers argue that what started as a movement to benefit the millions who struggle with breast cancer every year has descended into a celebration of consumerism marked by the official (and unofficial) promotion of products and services ranging from underwear to alcoholic beverages to streaming adult video (the website Pornhub.com, which features exactly the kind of content you’d expect, plans to donate one penny to Komen for every 30 views of one of its…breast-themed videos).

The question at the middle of this debate: How much of the money donated to Susan G. Komen for the Cure and associated charities goes directly toward real-world cancer research–and how much of it goes back into subsidizing the PR efforts of Susan G. Komen and its many related for-profit partners and properties?

A report filed last week by Business Insider concerned one of Breast Cancer Awareness Month’s most prominent promoters: the NFL. While the article isn’t quite damning, it does provide ammunition for those who argue that the NFL and other companies involved in the “pink” campaign may not be as generous as they seem.

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We’re guessing the title above either made you shout an expletive or emit a compassionate sigh. Michael Vick is what we call a polarizing figure, and the public views him as either a heartless torturer of innocent animals or a man who has paid his dues to society and earned the right to move on in life.

As PR professionals, we won’t judge Vick here, but we will break down his relationship with the public because, like it or not, Michael Vick is a public relations textbook still in the making. Here’s the story:

Michael Vick, from Hampton Roads, Virginia, was the electric quarterback for Virginia Tech before being selected as the number one pick in the 2001 NFL draft by the Atlanta Falcons. Vick had undeniable talent, awe-inspiring athleticism…and tens of millions of dollars to show for his gifts before playing a single professional down. This was a 30 for 30 script long before the show ever aired on ESPN.

A series of poor financial and personal decisions, alongside a smug attitude toward his quarterbacking duties somehow culminated in an FBI investigation, lies to the NFL commissioner and, ultimately, jail time for running a dog fighting ring with “friends” near his hometown. This wasn’t the usual cocaine and hookers–this was brutality and Fido. The public wanted blood. Vick went to jail, and most thought the story would end there, as any aspirations of a comeback seemed doomed by both human reality and spiritual karma. Read more

Today the US Patent Office Granted the New York-based firm D Simon Productions official trademark approval for the term “PRketing™.”

Company CEO and President Doug Simon describes PRketing ™ as “a new approach to brand building that relies upon content creation and distribution to achieve business and marketing goals.”

In order to fall under Simon’s newly trademarked banner, content must be good enough to inspire journalists (or, let’s be honest, bloggers) to share it across various media platforms while simultaneously heightening the public’s awareness of a given client and serving its larger PR goals. Sounds like a new way to describe brand journalism, doesn’t it?

We’ve written a good bit about the “boundary-free” appeal of firms beefing up their content-creation capabilities in order to offer both marketing and PR services in the same tidy package–and we can say with confidence that it’s hardly a new idea.

Here’s the given D Simon Productions example of PRketing ™ in action:

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