Burson-Marsteller

“Reverse Ferret”

by Dennis Landsbert-Noon on 8th May 2008 • The Cast Blog

I have to confess to having a little titter at a story in the UK’s Daily Telegraph this week of how the feminist icon Germaine Greer was allegedly humbled by a young pupil at my old, boys-only school.

Lecturing to a bunch of young male brainiacs on the subject of “Shakespeare and the Irresistible Boy”, the author of The Female Eunuch apparently lost her iron grip on the ever delicate matter of sexual politics and remarked to the assembled adolescents that she had seldom “…found herself in a room amid so much masculine beauty”.

Times have clearly changed since I was at that school, when she would have come face to face with a crowd of boys sporting long greasy hair, pimples and oddly bulging craniums. But no matter…

One thing hasn’t changed though. Apparently, the Telegraph reports, when it came time for questions, one of the young smarty-pants stood up and suggested that “if she were not a 69-year-old woman addressing a group of boys, but a 69-year-old man addressing a group of girls, such talk might have resulted in great umbrage”, leaving Greer unusually (and rather gratifyingly) lost for words.

Chuckling aside, I was struck that what had made the story so entertaining and compelling was the way it had been turned completely upside down.

It’s not unusual for media relations consultants to sit scratching their heads, wondering how to make a rather dull and straightforward story really come to life for their clients.

An anecdote springs to mind about the legendary editor of The Sun newspaper, Kelvin MacKenzie, who used to shout at his terrified newsroom to “put a ferret down your trousers”, when he wanted them to get excited about a story. It was MacKenzie’s particular talent, though, to spot the flip side of the tale (or should that be ‘tail’) – at which point he would memorably bellow “REVERSE FERRET”.

And that’s why, at its zenith, MacKenzie’s Sun was such a gripping read for millions of incredibly loyal readers.

So for us media consultants, it is always worth trying to imagine, for example, what might happen if Company A didn’t do what it is announcing in a press release that it is going to do? Or, what would the world look like without Product B?

These might provide the far more interesting angles that we are always looking for when trying to sell our story into a skeptical media.

Equally, beware! An innocent announcement of a company’s wonderful new development can just as easily make a journalist wonder what on earth it was doing before…

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