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| Summit Leaves Bad Taste in Mouth |
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An urgent discussion about global food shortages, fuel security, international aid and development, as well as the environment is much needed.
However, the poor media management of the recent G8 Summit left us all with a bad taste in our mouths due to the conspicuous consumption and expense of the event – and highlighted lessons to be learnt in terms of media relations.
Bringing together the world’s leaders to try and resolve the major issues facing the earth’s 6.7 billion inhabitants is crucial. And you can even argue that it’s necessary to fly the world’s leaders to one place on the globe. Doing it over a five-course lunch, followed by a sumptuous eight-course banquet a few hours later, however, was a major PR own goal for the Japanese organisers and attendees. The situation was exacerbated by the summit’s press office, which proudly displayed the menus to the press.
If discussing the plight of Zimbabwe and aid to Africa’s poorest people while tucking into 19 individual courses was crass, the decision to release the dinner menu was astonishing.
A fact, not lost on many major charities and media receptive to criticism of the Summit, was that the event cost a total of 60 billion yen (£283 million) – enough to purchase 100 million mosquito nets to protect against malaria – ironic given that a major focus of the Summit was the plight of Africa!
The PR gaffe compounded problems for our embattled Prime Minister, who, en route to the summit, had urged us all to waste less food in order to reduce food consumption and ease what is best described as ‘unnecessary demand’.
Andrew Metcalf, Director of Maxim, said: “The numbers were big and very newsworthy – the fact that UK consumers pay for, but don’t eat, £10bn of food every year, equivalent to £420 for every household is shocking and something we need to do something about.
“Wasting 7 million slices of bread, 1 million slices of ham, 4.4 million apples and 1.3 million yoghurts every day is something we should all be ashamed of. However, telling us all, via the media, at 30,000ft on way to a global summit culminating in a sumptuous banquet was at best badly timed and at worst gross incompetent.
“The Prime Minister’s message is relevant but has now been severely undermined. It could have been a throwaway comment made during a long international flight, but that looks far from being the case. Did none of his advisers consider that telling us all to tighten our belts shortly before images of him and fellow world leaders sitting down to enjoy a banquet were beamed around the world might not play out well in the press?”
Unfortunately when it came to the delivery and timing, both crucial to PR success, Gordon Brown, as too often appears the case, either got bad advice or chose to go searching for a positive headline, something that for him is as rare as hen’s teeth in recent months. |
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