You’re the Boss Blog: Maybe There Is Such a Thing as Bad Publicity

Sustainable Profits

The challenges of a waste-recycling business.

In part because we are a social enterprise with a mission that most people support — keeping waste out of landfills and incinerators — TerraCycle has been blessed with a lot of good publicity. In fact, we talk about having what we call a “negative-cost” media department that in 2012 generated more than 4,500 articles around the world. That’s more than 12 articles per day! (You can see an example of this coverage here.) We call the department negative-cost because we have been able to produce marketing — books, TV shows — that earns us money while also promoting the company.

While most of this attention has been positive, ABC’s 20/20 did two segments on TerraCycle in December that some folks on our staff didn’t think were entirely positive. One was focused on holiday parties, the other on “workplace romance” — a segment inspired by a post I wrote for this blog about our somewhat liberal approach to romance at the office.

Both pieces seemed to exploit our openness to try to find something salacious or prurient to titillate viewers. The romance segment focused on sex in the office and “who is hooking up with whom,” and it rubbed a few of us the wrong way because it seemed to take our approach a bit out of context. While we were hoping to depict an environment where we neither encourage nor discourage romance, as long as it is mutual and doesn’t offend anyone, we may have come across as actively encouraging it.

The other segment was about what not to do at an office Christmas party. Here, one of our highly valued team members was mocked for demonstrating “overtone chanting,” a form of singing that is actually quite cool and very hard to do. Again, we felt our actions were taken out of context for the sake of “good TV.”

On the other hand, 20/20 is a huge TV show with seven million viewers, and from my perspective, any publicity is good publicity because it increases public awareness of what we do. Think of it this way: a commercial during either of those 20/20 pieces would have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars, and only given us 30 seconds of exposure. This way, we got more than three minutes on ABC, twice in one month.

The reality is that our “negative cost” publicity does have a cost — it’s just measured not in dollars, but in the control of our own message that we give up because we don’t own the content. When we did a mini-series for the National Geographic Channel (“Garbage Moguls”), there was always some tension because most of the show’s producers insisted that we generate drama that, had I controlled the message completely, I would have preferred not be included. But in the end, TerraCycle made close to $100,000 in talent fees (all profit) and got more than four hours of TV time that has been replayed hundreds of times since, all over the world.

So, yes, there is such a thing as negative publicity — just ask the tobacco companies — but to get lots of attention, you sometimes have to play into what the media outlets want. Just make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. At least, that’s how I look at it.

What do you think?

emTom Szaky is the chief executive of a href=”http://terracycle.net/”TerraCycle/a, which is based in Trenton./em

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/maybe-there-is-such-a-thing-as-bad-publicity/?partner=rss&emc=rss