It’s a little embarrassing to be in the PR business on the day that the Wall Street Journal calls out Coke for the “most unintelligible news release ever.”

DealJournal’s Dennis Berman points to a news release announcing a large, but essentially inside-baseball deal between The Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola Enterprises. The deal is announced in a release remarkable for several reasons.

1. It’s 3,402 words long (just the release, not the fact sheet or FAQ)
2. Cut and pasted from the web, it took up seven pages.
3. The actual release is 1,290 words, followed by 2,112 words of “abouts” of the parties in the transaction, disclaimers, forward-looking statements, etc.
4. The factsheet adds 898 words on two pages
5. The seven-page FAQ adds another 2,497 words, for a total word count of 6,797.
6. The opening quote from Chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent goes 302 words. It reads:
   

   CEO Muhtar Kent, probably not reciting a 300-word quote

   “Our 2020 Vision calls for decisive and timely action to continuously improve and evolve our global franchise system to best serve our customers and consumers everywhere. Consistent with the 2020 Vision, our roadmap for winning together, we act today as an aligned system. We are not acquiring CCE, rather we are acquiring their North American operations, and they remain one of our key bottling partners with world-class management, financial and operational capabilities. We have a strong and unrelenting belief in our unique and thriving global bottling system. Our new North American structure will create an unparalleled combination of businesses, which will serve as our passport to winning in the world’s largest nonalcoholic ready-to-drink profit pool. This transaction offers compelling value to both The Coca-Cola Company and CCE shareowners and will create substantial and sustainable benefits for both companies’ stakeholders. Our North American business structure has remained essentially the same since CCE was founded in 1986, while the market and industry have changed dramatically. With this transaction, we are converting passive capital into active capital, giving us direct control over our investment in North America to accelerate growth and drive long-term profitability. We will work closely with our bottling partners to create an evolved franchise system for the unique needs of the North American market. Additionally, we will reconfigure our manufacturing, supply chain and logistics operations to achieve cost reductions over time. Importantly, the creation of a unified operating system will strategically position us to better market and distribute North America’s most preferred nonalcoholic beverage brands. At the same time, in Europe, we are further strengthening our franchise system to provide broader, contiguous geographic coverage and optimizing our marketing and distribution leadership.”

7. One of the highlights at the head of the release read:The Coca-Cola Company will generate immediate efficiencies with expected operational synergies of $350 million over four years, and the transactions, which are substantially cashless, are expected to be accretive to EPS on a fully diluted basis by 2012
   
8. It is chock-a-block with bankrupt phrases and words like “drive long-term profitability.”

It seems ironic that I am writing this almost exactly four years after Tom Foremski wrote his blog post headlined “Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!” on February 27, 2006.

I’ve written stuff sort of like this from time to time. Never so wordy, never so turgid, but I’ve written some releases that I KNEW would never fulfil their stated purpose. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and do it because that’s why you’re there. And I’m far from the only one who has. I imagine EVERYONE has in this business.

And that’s why people like Todd Defren created and developed the social media news release. To try and kill these releases.

On one level, it would seem that Coke has ignored the move to social media releases, the thirst for change that Foremski epitomized. By any standard, this news release is awful. The quotes don’t sound like anything ever said by a human being; it makes absolutely no effort to demystify some of the arcane concepts it’s describing; and it is so incredibly long.

So here’s where I’m going to try to look at this in a new way.

I have been thinking for a long time that many “news releases” aren’t done with the goal of obtaining news coverage at all. My first thought on this was that they were to be found online by readers — part of the fabled “disintermediation”. But now I’m thinking there’s a whole purpose to the type of news release issued by Coke and mocked by the Journal.

I believe news releases like these are written for two reasons:

1. to satisfy regulatory requirements
2. to officially document the action on the company’s web site.

If that’s true, here’s my proposal:

This isn’t a news release. It’s a bread crumb on the trail of a corporation’s life. So take this type of news release away from PR and give it to Finance. Forget about quotes and the like. Just list the facts. Do what you have to do. Let communicators do more rewarding and valuable work. If this is indeed news, then let them write things that will actually sound like human-produced documents, that will have a chance of engaging readers, that may result in media coverage. Don’t make people like me grit their teeth and crunch Tums while they write crap like this. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t do anything. Stop wasting our time and your money and let us do what we’re good at.

That’s my proposal. Are corporations and organizations ready to accept it? Or at least think about it? Let’s hope so.

Photo: Martin Cathrae (http://www.flickr.com/photos/suckamc/ / CC BY-NC 2.0)

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