Tick-tock, tick-tock, as a 4 turns into a 5 - live!

One of the biggest mysteries known to mankind is where does December go? One second we are in late November beginning to come up with ideas for presents for loved ones, then it's back to business, last minute end-of-year deadlines and the usual round of office parties and social events. We wake up and it's suddenly December 20th, with everything else to be done in two or three days, as the pressure gauge begins to hit the red zone. 

It's totally imaginary, of course, but we always seem to lose a month in December each year, just when we probably need some extra time the most, but there are only 24 hours in a day and there's nothing much we can do about that. In any case, I discussed the "Christmas craziness" at work in last week's post, so naturally this time we come to that other perennial of the festive season and end of year - resolutions for the next 12 months!

I have never, ever been a fan of New Year's Eve, even when younger. There's something I find actually counter-productive about it, and I think it's due to all the fuss that's made over it and how one is expected to party like it's 1999, and put aside any/all of the resolutions that one felt better for having made earlier. People resolve, then go nuts, then wake shell shocked in no fit condition to resolve anything, with the Christmas dream over and the cold, hard reality of January 1st staring them in the face. The day is built up so much, that just about any day coming after it simply has to feel like a downer, right?

It seems we don't learn from our mistakes, and so we continue to make futile resolutions that are so easy to make on December 30th or 31st, but so difficult to stick to , even by January 3rd or 4th! Clearly, it's the easiest thing in the world to proclaim one will stop smoking in 2015, then head out to a massive party with extra smokes in store to make up for all the smokes one will miss next year, and suddenly mere days into the new year, one is, well, smoking again - or smoking still, may be the more accurate way of putting it. 

I don't know why us humanoids insist on setting overly ambitious goals for ourselves, when it's been proven that it doesn't work, instead of setting more reasonable and attainable goals and sticking to them. I mean, how often do you hear someone exclaim that they are gonna quit smoking, in comparison to how frequently you hear someone state that they are going to smoke less? If one could do something less for a few years in a row, who knows, it might be more easily dropped - permanently - rather than failing repeatedly at the cold turkey approach. 

Putting aside bad habits in our personal lives, I think we can benefit from a similar approach in the workplace. Why resolve to make massive changes in particular aspects of our work performance which tend to slip away frighteningly quickly upon facing the horrors of the office in the first week of January? It would be much more productive to examine honestly what things we were good at and did well at, and commit to focusing on doing more of that, and correspondingly facing our weaknesses and commit to them manifesting less in our day at the office. If we set the impossible goal of pleasing everyone all of the time, then surely we are destined to fail. Conversely, if we are determined to please more people than we did last year, then that may well become reality. 

The whole new year resolution and new year party thing seems to be a case of putting off till tomorrow what can be done today, and it's always better to do it today. One doesn't need to wait till December 31st each year to try to improve ourselves; if we mean it, it can be started today, even if today is in summer of autumn. The sooner we begin to act on having thought it or even said it, the more chance there is that we do mean it and will execute it, thus increasing our chances of actually succeeding at it!

There is an added advantage to taking a more ongoing project management-style approach to our resolutions and will power - one doesn't awaken at  midday on January 1st feeling like one did die in 1999, with all sorts of added pressure on one's shoulders from what one promised the wife or husband, kids, friends and colleagues just the day before! Now that surely makes January 1st a much less depressing affair, converting it into a day that requires a lot less resolve and one filled with significantly more optimism and less regret from the night before.

Keep it real, keep the improvements realistic, and don't be overly hard on yourself for not (yet!) being the perfect you - this is my recipe for a healthy assessment of the past year and being primed to eagerly face the new year ahead. But luckily that's still a few days ahead of us, and for now it's all about some serious R&R after a quite spectacular year. So on that note, this is EU signing off for 2014 - I will no doubt be back in touch in early 2015 - and until then, happy holidays! - Kevin Mc

Video killed the radio star - block it, don't rock-it!

In another example of the "gift" that keeps on giving, we continue to hear more detail and back story to the CBC's own version of video killed the radio star - yep, natch, we are talking about the Jian Ghomeshi scandal which rocked the CBC nation severely in recent times. In fact, one reason why the story remains top-of-mind is that the CBC themselves keep it there, via their silence on the internal investigation ongoing, their lack of a replacement for the disgraced host, and by now removing all traces of him from their brand by pulling archive videos of his interviews. 

One could argue for ages whether those interviews (as interesting as some of them were) should remain online or not, but we don't have time to get into that. The guy was a pretty good interviewer, even though with time it began to become terribly self-congratulatory and evidently self-indulgent, with he himself preening like a peacock who had just rocked it. As much as many would now rather block-it, not rock-it, well, a new story involving none other than rock-tt (promotions) got our attention today. 

If you recall, this was one of several rats-off-the-sinking-ship agencies who after staunchly standing by their man in the early days of the media explosion, then turned around and disowned him totally, by dropping him like a lead zeppelin. Business as usual probably for such agencies that feed off the lifeblood of the fatted star calf - once the fame or the money or the marrow has all been sucked away, well, it's time to walk away. It's business, not friendship, even if rock-it head honcho Debra Goldblatt-Sadowski made it sound that way:

"I stand with massive solidarity by my client and dear friend @jianghomeshi. His courage is remarkable and admirable." 

That comment was posted on October 26th and yet he was history at the agency by October 31st - now that is one telling turnaround! From using terms like "remarkable" and even "admirable" about him, her "massive solidarity" suddenly turned into total disassociation in mere days. Of course, she probably knew more about what had gone on than we did, but the situation had been converted from a PR challenge to save his ass into one where Ms. Sadowski's agency had to try to save its own ass, because her credibility had taken one big tumble over her Twitter post above. 

It sounds like she could have used a PR firm to guide her own PR firm on how she should have handled the PR forest fire instigated by one of her top clients, and rock-it surely did not come across as anywhere near sophisticated enough to deal with the Ghomeshi file, in the end. And business is business after all, so they bailed on him for the same reason they reeled him in, in the first place - money! Previously he was in a position to make them money, so they engaged him, and then he was in a position to hemorrhage money, so they dumped him. It's not personal, it's business, they say, even when it involves a "dear friend". 

Rock-it dropped him with a minimum of fuss with zero media splash, and you can be pretty certain that Debra G hoped she would never hear his name or be asked about him again. But a new piece in the becoming-legendary Toronto Star (thanks to Jesse Brown!) has brought the mess back to rock-it's doors: 

"How Ghomeshi's publicist worked to shut down Toronto Life story".

In what is clearly perhaps only half as bad as it looks, the Star implies that Ms. Sadowski went out of her way to block a commissioned story about various girls that had dated #JG, due to the fact that the former radio star was far from happy about it. So like all self-indulged narcissistic minor celebrity little boys, he had gone to mommy to cry and complain, and then Ms. Sadowski got to work on killing the story, apparently. 

“We feel this is a really unfair and absurd piece” she said in the summer of 2013. In return for the story being buried, the Star reports that she offered full access to the former star for a more elaborate story - but not one that included what his proclivities might have been at the dining table or especially in the bedroom. It was the publicist equivalent of a gag order, but what is not clear is just how much rock-it understood about why #JG was so nervous about the original story. It can be viewed simply as a PR firm doing its job, or as someone desperately trying to cover up the sins of their "dear friend", depending on how cynical you are. 

For sure, if Debs had heard the rumours freely circulating around Toronto media circles about his boudoir "idiosyncracies", and one can only imagine that she had, then any move to gag Toronto Life reflects a darker underbelly. When the paper asked Goldblatt-Sadowski recently if she had tried to evaporate the story about ex-girlfriends in exchange for offering access for another type of piece, Goldblatt-Sadowski said by email:

“Yes - and what’s your point? I did my job."

Someone really should talk to her about doing her own PR with the same thoughtfulness she may utilise with her clients, because she comes across as impatient, if not downright testy, and isn't doing herself any favours. It was she who jumped the gun and posted her massive support of the former radio star while theoretically not knowing all of the facts, which seems awfully naive for a PR firm facing a media firestorm. Or, if she was aware of the facts, then her support mutates from simply looking foolish into something a lot more suspect.

Completely inexplicably to this boy, she now admitted in the piece in the Star, that she actually saw the sure-to-be infamous Facebook post that was banged out hopelessly by #JG on the day he was fired by CBC. In an earlier blog about this whole sad, sorry story, I expressed disbelief that any of them (his various agencies) had pre-screened it, and that he must have impulsively cranked it out in desperation, but no - she actually must have approved of it, given her Twitter outburst of support after reading it - even if she attempts to exonerate herself of any responsibility for his outrageous post and turned the spotlight onto Navigator. 

“Jian genuinely wrote it (as far as I know),” she said via email. “He did read it to me before he posted it live, but he had others advising him at this point as I don’t handle crisis communications and he had a firm advising him that did.”

That just sounds woefully weak and inadequate, and perhaps further underlines the lack of true sophistication mentioned above, because I am no PR expert but the second I read that bizarre work of pure fiction on Facebook, I told our Cris that he was either out of his head or one of his agencies must be, because it was as sure to come back to haunt them all as the Demonic itself. Quite what Ghomeshi, rock-it or Navigator hoped to achieve with it (other than perhaps another payment made by the former to the latter two) is incomprehensible. It was nothing more than an act of sheer desperate fear - a fear of what was coming next. 

"Behind every story, is a publicist that has pitched it" is the tagline and one cannot help but wonder how rock-it really feels about having for years pitched a story that was just that - a veritable work of self-promoting fiction covering up the darker truth hiding in plain sight on the comfy leather sofa in front of them. The leather did indeed run smooth on the passenger seat, until the wild ride was over - and it surely is over. 

Rock-it is maybe better at dealing with home furnishing or sports brands, and they should leave PR work for (minor) celebrities to other more specialised agencies that are sufficiently sophisticated to handle them - even or especially if that sophistication is used to tear off the self-serving exteriors of such types to get to the real person hiding underneath - then the job can be less about dealing with BS and more about actual scintillating PR. 

Sometimes the best PR is a capacity to zip it, and not make a fool of oneself with impulsive misinformed Twitter posts, or comments to newspapers, or ridiculous Facebook rants. Whoever encouraged the $55M lawsuit against CBC was living in the same fantasy world as the former star, while taking his cash for their so-called "advice". The one single piece of good news for the former radio star is that he finally got some good advice, from Marie Henein, his lawyer, who seems to know how to deal with the media better than any agency he hired previously, i.e. she (and now he) has been a paragon of silence. - Kevin Mc

Video killed the radio star

The photo above doesn't need much explaining these days, as that pillar has to be one of the most reported-on pillars in Toronto, if not in all of Canada. It is of course the pillar in CBC headquarters in downtown Toronto which used to bear testament to the rising star of a certain CBC golden boy radio persona. The self-aggrandising giant shot was summarily scraped off following the termination of said radio star, and the blank space left sort of says it all. 

That the blank space speaks volumes is mirrored by the silence of the former golden boy subsequent to his Facebook fiasco, and of the CBC themselves, who have not adequately responded to the landslide of questions/concerns that arose out of their (mis)handling of the entire affair. Is there anyone that is going to stand up and take responsibility for this mess, even if only to imply that there is anything remotely resembling actual leadership at CBC?

It sure doesn't seem to come from Heather Conway, based on her somewhat clueless conversation with Peter Mansbridge, and after watching "The Fifth Estate" last Friday, it certainly doesn't seem to have come from Chris Boyce, head of CBC radio/audio. As much as we can sense his angst over whether they should have gone to the police or not, to report what they saw on a video but were not in possession of, this is not really the point over which many feel let down by CBC.

Totally irrespective of whether the former radio star was guilty of any criminal activity, it was abundantly clear to almost everyone that there was serious dysfunction rampant in Studio Q, and by their inaction, incompetence and lack of desire to reel him in, the CBC effectively sanctioned that dysfunction. In what contemporary workplace could a male superior be able to state that he wanted to "hate f**k" a female subordinate, or actually hump her from behind in mimicry of what he must have wanted to do to her?

For anyone to imply that such behaviour is both quite common yet difficult to police or discipline is completely ridiculous - only an outfit with an excuse for a human resources department could have turned a blind eye. But yes, I can hear you all stating that abuse by superiors is extremely common in the workplace, and when someone is powerful (and in this case, famous too) enough then the rules do not apparently apply to them. This certainly seems to have been the case, and the former radio star was so high profile that not only the subordinates were running scared, but so were upper management at CBC.

The key question is why, and it's not so complicated. Sadly. The key to this situation was not only that the radio star (as he then still was) was a major brand in and of himself, one adored by all, but that it was CBC themselves who had constructed this brand from the ground up; the corporation needed a big star golden boy and so they built one, using a template that was very carefully selected. He didn't disappoint, either. 

It was a very symbiotic relationship; one where both parties got a big return from their investment with the other. After having built his brand, and benefiting enormously not only from syndication of the Q radio show, but also from all the free publicity that the former radio star was bringing them, CBC were not going to let some "idiosyncrasies" get in the way of business-as-usual. 

It was an error of spectacular proportions and one that would ultimately cost both partners in that symbiotic relationship - heavily. As his star rose, so did the problem become a bigger one, even if that was not apparent at the time. The former radio star, perhaps sensing that he had become too powerful in the corridors of the Front Street HQ to be questioned, actually let it go further to his head and continued with his (not so) merry ways. 

But there was a ticking going on in the background, and the time bomb that the former radio star had become was rolling precariously towards the hard concrete foundations of not only CBC HQ, but of the very corporation itself. When that time bomb smashed into hard concrete via a video recorded on a CBC-owned media device, well, let's just say that the tremors were not only felt by the building's walls but also by the shaking knees of a whole slew of CBC management. From golden boy to a cancer, in mere minutes. From the chic confines of Studio Q at CBC headquarters, out onto the gutters of Front Street, in a heartbeat.  

There's something very poignant about the lonely stepladder sitting there where the face of the former radio star used to shine down from, leaving one huge question mark over the future for both CBC and the now charged former radio star. His fall from grace is a lot farther than for the scraped pieces of his face that fell onto that tiled floor, and while CBC clearly have no intention of saving his face, he also is going to find it impossible to save face, unless lightning strikes - twice. It's a question of his liberty now, because the job and the career and the celebrity are all part of the past. 

As for the title of today's blog, it's truly ironic that it comes from popular song, which was an art form that was at the heart of the former radio star's life and career, and even though it was written decades ago it describes the former radio star's current situation very aptly:

"In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind, we've gone too far 
Pictures came and broke your heart, put the blame on VCR
Video killed the radio star...."

Of course the tune (written by genius songsmith Trevor Horn, et al.) referred to the advent of video as promotional tool and how that impacted the business of radio, but it's a very different type of video that killed this radio star: the inexplicable part of this wild story being that the video was not uncovered surreptitiously by CBC but it was in fact presented to them by the former radio star himself. It truly did become, at that moment, the video that killed the radio star.

"And now we meet in an abandoned studio
We hear the playback and it seems so long ago
And you remember the jingles used to go, oh-a-oh
Video killed the radio star, video killed the radio star...."