Off-the-record. Part 2. Dishing the dirt

By Gonzalo López Martí / LMMIAMI.COM

  • Last week I admitted I am a de facto mouthpiece for various professionals in our industry who, for a number of reasons, want their opinions to be known while obsessively keeping their identities out of the picture.
  • Yes, that’s the secret sauce: north of 50% of what I write is not strictly my opinion.
  • I get a lot of material from peers, colleagues, rivals, competitors and outright enemies.
  • So now y’all know how to be a clean mean writing machine gushing out 1500 characters of copy every single week of the year without the aid of drugs while holding a full-time job in the ad business.
  • That’s the method to the madness.
  • That and the fact I have been working in marketing and advertising for close to 20 years.
  • For agencies and clients big & small, in all the categories imaginable.
  • In the three Americas and parts of Europe.
  • This racket holds few secrets to yours truly.
  • I’ve seen it & heard it all.
  • If I had a dollar for every time I offered space in this column to a “source” to freely express their opinion or simply to vent on the record -with mugshot et al- only to get an emphatic refusal ipso facto I would have a small collection of classic Italian sports cars.
  • Trust me, I insist.
  • Every single time I get a call, text, WhatsApp, Twitter DM or email (from their personal email addresses) with some POV or other, gossip, suggestion, exclusive, rebuke, rebuttal, refutation, insult, threat or idea for an article I duly proceed to kindly offer an on-the-record slot in my column.
  • I even throw in my most sincere help to review and polish the copy, should they need editorial support.
  • (As I pointed out last week, most mortals tend to be scared shxtless of the blank page, it gives them deer-in-headlights jeers. Moreover, I don’t need to remind you that an awful lot of college grads and even post grads working in the corporate world are utterly unable to express an idea in writing. If you are a frequent user of that thing called “email” you know what I’m sayin’)
  • See, most of my sources are higher-ups occupying C-suite jobs who ask me for strict off-the-record privileges (through my 20 years in this racket I met a lot of people).
  • Because?
  • Cuz, believe it or not, the PR departments of the companies who employ them have a tight grip on who can talk and what he or she can say.
  • That and peer jealousy.
  • Funny: these men and women wield substantial power in the organizations they work for.
  • They control budgets of millions, even tens of millions.
  • They can hire & fire employees at the drop of a hat.
  • They fly first class.
  • Yet the idea of openly sharing their unfiltered opinions with colleagues in a perfectly legitimate and respected industry publication gives them the jitters.
  • Talk about freedom of expression.
  • The proverbial golden cage.
  • Needless to say, my sources have big egos and would loooove to see their mugshots on the trades.
  • Vanity is a powerful force.
  • Actually, their faces grace the pages of industry publications all the time.
  • But they only communicate through carefully worded press releases vetted by PR and legal departments.
  • When it comes to speaking their minds on the record, their lips are sealed.
  • Hence, yours truly gets all the dirt to happily and recklessly dish out for your amusement.
  • Mind you, my lips would be sealed too if I got paid seven figures to attend meetings and nod.
  • BTW, d’you want to know who my informants are?
  • Well, I can’t reveal my sources.
  • In mobster vernacular it is called Omertá, the code of silence.
  • However, I can tell you this much: if you peruse my list of connections on LinkedIn, most of them are there, mugshots included.
  • In the age of social media, secrets are hidden in plain sight.

 

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