What PR Should The Edelman Firm Work On Next?

Low standards. Always. That seems to be the new motto that PR firm A&R Edelman was going for when it created out of whole cloth the fake blog WalMartingAcrossAmerica to represent the astroturf organization Working Families for Wal-Mart. You can figure out who Edelman was working for of course. Think hard now.

That’s right – the Edelman public relations firm was hired by Wal-Mart to work with the fake, Wal-Mart sponsored organization Working Families for Wal-Mart in order to create the fake, Wal-Mart sponsored blog WalMartingAcrossAmerica. Fake, fake, fake. Apparently, the way that Wal-Mart chooses to “relate” to us in the public is to lie to us.

WalMartingAcrossAmerica was supposed to be a blog set up by a couple who just love Wal-Mart so much that they decided to take a trip across America, stopping at Wal-Mart stores all along the way, and to share their experiences in a blog. There was just one detail that the bloggers decided not to tell their audience. They were paid to do it – by Wal-Mart, and it was all Edelman’s PR idea.

So, Edelman wins the lame-o PR firm of the year award, because now people like me who never even heard of the WalMartingAcrossAmerica blog have heard about how Wal-Mart couldn’t find any real honest-to-goodness Wal-Mart lovers to make a blog. No, what Edelman has shown us is that Americans have grown to hate Wal-Mart so much that they had to hire people to make a fake blog. Fake blog. Fake trip. Fake couple. Fake everything.

Oh, but it gets better, folks. It seems that one of the people Wal-Mart and Edelman PR hired to create the fake blog was a photojournalist who works for the Washington Post. Yeah, a Washington Post photographer was out there taking pictures of fake events, and passing them off as real, and taking money from a PR firm to do it.

So, what other photographs from the Washington Post’s photographers are just PR fakes? Is the Washington Post now the Wal-Mart Post?

The PR industry is out there working on a PR cover-up of this event. In the news and on the blogs now, the dominant headline is “Edelman apologizes”, and PR industry folks are out there, busy writing babble about how they don’t think Edelman or Wal-Mart did anything wrong. They’re saying that the lies were just an “omission”. Oh, how PR-licious of them.

Well, this blog is the real thing, Edelman. We’re too damn irregular to take a check from anyone. So, we call it as we see it: Wal-Mart lied. Photographer Jim Thresher lied. Edelman helped them engineer the lie.

None of this was illegal, mind you. And consider, I don’t think that it’s always unethical to lie. In fact, I think that it’s sometimes a downright ethical thing to create a lie, or a hoax even, especially when the end goal is to expose the credulity inherent in current media consumption habits.

Let me put this twist on it: I won’t say bad, bad, bad to Wal-Mart, or to Edelman, or to Jim Thresher. I’ll say bad, bad, bad to the suckers who read the WalMartingAcrossAmerica blog and didn’t bother to put one and one together to make two. Anyone who has exercised basic critical thinking skills can see right away that Working Families for Wal-Mart and the WalMartingAcrossAmerica blog are just puppet to play out the fantasies of Wal-Mart executives. The real problem is that Americans have let their critical thinking skills drown in an ocean of mind-numbing doses of high fructose corn syrup.

I expect that Edelman will continue to go on creating such fake netroots promotions for its piggy corporate clients. Let them go ahead – and let us all try to be a little bit more credulous in our reading of all media.

The question in my mind is this: Which project should Edelman work on next? The following are a few suggestions I’ve got, based on the pioneering thinking Edelman did in the WalMartingAcrossAmerica project: