Branding with Brendan

After seeing a guest post by Brendan Mullin, Director at Peppercom Strategic Communications on Steve Cody, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Peppercom's RepMan blog, I felt compelled to revisit the Nixon-Kennedy debate. Brendan wrote about Ben Bernanke, who is the current Fed Chairman, and how he recently declared that he will be holding quarterly press conferences. He compared the upcoming conferences to FDR's fireside chats during the Great Depression.

In a Time piece titled How the Nixon-Kennedy Debate Changed the World that we read earlier in the semester, Kayla Webley detailed the significance of the Nixon-Kennedy debate. She described how Nixon's sickly appearance during a television debate ultimately led to Kennedy's victory. Kennedy himself said that "It was the TV more than anything else that turned the tide."

Fireside chats, televised debates, and even blog-posts – all of these things are part of a larger brand that you create for yourself. The way you appear to the public can be an asset, or it can bring you down. It's all about how you brand yourself. This includes just about everything – at a basic level, how you look, but also the activities you participate in and the people you associate yourself with.

Brendan came to speak to our Public Relations class yesterday about creating a brand for yourself, and using your personal brand to break through the clutter as a gateway to success in the workplace and beyond. His presentation compelled me to search my name on Google, which I do periodically, but I decided to check it again. I found myself scrolling through at least ten pages of results published in the past few months alone, including blog posts for Isn't Media Political?, posts written for my marketing internship, pages and pages of Cross Country race results, and even a mildly embarrassing candid shot of me taken by a newspaper reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

A brand can be a very powerful thing when utilized properly. Take the time to go through your Google results, check your Facebook privacy settings, and by all means do not participate in a television debate before you've checked yourself out in the mirror.

Money Well Spent?

The NY Times, in a recent article about the money spent on private jets for presidential campaigns details both the necessity for private travel and the tremendous amount of money spent on it. Marc Ramthun, operations manager at CSI Campaign Travel Services, estimates private campaign travel costs at somewhere between $3 to $5 million dollars, and that’s just in the initial stages of an election. Later, leading candidates may spend up to $20 million on private travel.

The demanding schedule of a political candidate necessitates multi-leg flights, multiple times a week. The author of the article, Joe Sharkey, estimates that it could take half a week to try and schedule a typical campaign day's itinerary via commercial airlines.

Are these costs unnecessary in principle, or does the efficiency in time and privacy of a chartered flight justify spending millions of dollars on private air travel?

I'd say it depends on who the candidate is, how much their travel costs weigh out in commercial VS private travel costs, and how much is at stake.

Any thoughts?