Some of the reading I did last year awakened me to something I hadn’t thought about before. I mean, I sort of had, but it brought two ideas together for me.

The first idea is that what we do is powerful. That seems like an odd thing for someone who has been doing this for more than two decades to say, but I think we forget that too often.

In fact, it’s so powerful that it becomes imperative that we behave ethically. Because in the wrong hands, the tools of persuasion can cause real damage to our society, and if you don’t care about that, our ability to advance our organization’s interests.

As the media’s influence has waned, we have moved our focus to content creation. As someone said to me a long time ago, we need to be our own news bureau. That’s fine…except when we own the news bureau we don’t have anyone externally checking our work. We used to have to deal with skeptical reporters and their bosses.

And that can lead to the temptation to use some of the tools of persuasion for ill. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. If we don’t restrain ourselves, people are going to lose faith in the channel and we won’t be able to tell our stories in a time when we need to more than ever. Giving in to the temptation to say whatever serves our interest at the moment will be toxic to our ability to say what we need to in tough times. It’s a sugar high with a big craash.

Allow me to cite some examples.

Fear of Missing Out and Theranos

We all love to employ FOMO. When the future is uncertain, visualizing how you would feel if you failed to act can be very motivating. And sometimes action is warranted and we regret inaction. We know how that regret feels, which is why this works.

FOMO can also make smart people dumb. I give you the leadership of Walgreens, as portrayed in Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. Walgreen’s was looking to sign an contract with Theranos to provide blood tests inside their stores. As they were working on the deal, there were many red flags. Walgreens was not allowed to see the lab. They were not allowed to independently verify the efficacy of the process. Theranos refused to agree to embed an employee from Walgreens.

And yet, the executive in charge of the integration said this:

“We can’t not pursue this. We can’t risk a scenario where CVS has a deal with them in six months and it ends up being real.”

From that thinking, Walgreen’s spent a “fortune” remodeling stores to accommodate the Theranos partnership. In retrospect, they would have been better off letting CVS have it.

Theranos Validators

In PR, we love validators. It is the first thing mentioned in PR class. The old joke is advertising is when you say you are good in bed and public relations is when someone else says it. Validatiors are powerful and need to be employed correctly and judiciously and not to mislead.

When people had doubts about Theranos, they would look at the company’s board of directors, which included former Secretary of States George Schulz and Henry Kissinger, the former CEO of Wells Fargo—and other prominent men. Eminence grise greased the wheels. When people looked at the board, they would think, “there’s no way this can be a total scam, or George Schulz wouldn’t be involved.”

Which it was and he was.

Effective use of a validator is when you need to borrow some credibility until you have your own. Like when you are making a comeback. Or you have done something well but don’t have the proof yet.

Also, it’s only ethical to use validators who are fully informed (no it doesn’t matter if they didn’t ask for more information). And actual experts in the field. Neither of which was in the Theranos playbook.

Effective Context—Confederate Statues

In PR, we always talk about context. We want to tell our stories in the right environment. Go to a conference and the room is staged to support our objective. A full-page ad in the Sunday papers says “important.” We place articles into the media because that’s where the facts are. (A quaint notion, I know). We underwrite NPR to signal earnestness.

One of the most successful PR campaigns of all days is the Daughters of the Confederacy and their largely successful rewriting of history as it relates to the Civil War.

The idea was simple: the Confederacy was not a place where wealth was created through the brutal enslavement of humans. It was a special place and its soldiers had been chivalrous gentlemen, reminiscent of the Templar Knights and the Ancient Greeks.

The Daughters thought, “how does the world commemorate its heroes?” The answer was (partially) statues…in the Classic Greek Style, posed heroically and on a pedestal. So they put statues up of Confederate soldiers, dipping deep into the ranks of the Confederate Army to find its subjects.

If there’s a statue, he must be a hero.

This succeeded—along with other tactics—in rewriting history. There has been real damage, especially to race relations in this country.

Empire of Pain

A similar tactic was employed by Arthur Sackler, a founder of Purdue Pharma…long before Oxycontin, in fact. Sackler, a psychiatrist, had actually worked at an ad agency. He pioneered the direct marketing of drugs to physicians. He needed credibility. Where do doctors get credible information? Medical journals.

As we all know, the price you pay with media relations is losing control of the story. Except in this case, when he founded the Medical Tribune and mailed it to 600,000 physicians, including “research” about the drugs he was selling…and then obfuscating and lying about the connection between his company and the journal.

Conclusion

Here’s the point. This stuff works. It is powerful and it can be harmful. The world is complicated and dangerous enough as it is. We don’t need to make it worse by using these powerful tools to cause harm. If we need these to misuse these tools, that should be seen as the world telling us to fix, not obscure. If we don’t, in the long-term, we poison the well.