PR Partisanship and Divisiveness-for-Hire: Davos Keynoters Offer Two Takes
Mary Beth West: "When it comes to politics and its current negative impact on PR, Mr. Holmes and I appear to agree on practically nothing."
Kudos to all organizers, participants, and award-winners at the Davos, Switzerland, World Communications Forum Association (WCFA) Summit last week.
It was my honor to be part of this year’s event as a keynote speaker – made more special by the opportunities I enjoyed, in learning diverse insights and viewpoints of my colleagues hailing from all over the world.
We don’t agree on everything, but that’s what makes these exchanges invigorating, enlightening, and useful.
Many of my newfound, valued colleagues in Davos (like Lebo Madiba of South Africa) have already provided amazing recaps and summaries online about what was shared and learned (see below). So I encourage everyone in the PR industry to search – particularly on LinkedIn – those postings via “WCFA” and #WCFAsummit.
For purposes of my own blog post here (which – to be clear – I’m writing here on my own behalf, not WCFA’s), I’d like to amplify the theme of my keynote presentation, juxtaposed with messages shared by this year’s keynote headliner, longtime PR industry publisher Paul Holmes of PRovoke Media.
This analysis also merits a bit of industry background.
Mr. Holmes is a perennial favorite on the U.K. / European PR industry speaker circuit, judging by his longtime popularity as an invited keynoter at a wide range of events.
I’ve seen him speak numerous times, such as when I attended PRovoke’s U.S. industry summit a few years ago in Washington, D.C. (an outstanding event). Indeed, Mr. Holmes was very kind to visit us in Davos.
I’ve also found Mr. Holmes’ publication to be of value, given its online archive chronicling the “Who’s Who” of the PR agency, corporate and public affairs worlds (a past year’s Omnicom agency snapshot, below):
In particular, I’ve tapped into PRovoke’s historical coverage over recent months of one specific entity – Ketchum (owned by Omnicom). Ketchum was paid tens of millions to propagandize (my choice of word) on behalf of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Government for many years in the lead-up to Russia’s more destructive exploits and aggressions in Ukraine:
To my knowledge, neither Ketchum nor Omnicom ever issued an apology to the world for undertaking this misguided work to make Mr. Putin appear innocuous, which translates to me that they’re not sorry in the least… not one iota.
Happy to stand corrected on that, if I’m in error.
As this is but one example where PR intersected geopolitics in a remarkable if not cataclysmically destructive way – and please pardon the sidebar here – but I must say: Ketchum apparently did such a good job fooling the world about Putin’s alleged harmlessness that even then-U.S. President Barack Obama and his own intelligence apparatus were rendered helpless to all the smoke-and-mirrors, a decade ago.
Few American voters can forget that famous one-line zinger that Mr. Obama hurled at then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney back in 2012, while Ketchum’s Kremlin contract was still in full-swing.
One might even wonder whether Ketchum officials had been called in to write the pre-scripted zinger for Mr. Obama during his team’s debate prep. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Here’s the clip, for those who don’t remember it:
Turns out, the 1980s didn’t need to call anyone back to prove that Russia remained an international pariah, even despite Ketchum’s best efforts to convince us (and Mr. Obama’s State Department) otherwise.
Just ask the award-winning Ukrainian PR delegation present in Davos, as they know all too well, with Russia dispatching a fresh batch of bombing in Ukraine in only recent days.
But I digress. Sort of.
Such topics as Ketchum’s and its holding company, Omnicom’s, past pro-Russia exploits – or the fact that merger buddies Omnicom and Interpublic are currently, as of February 2025, under investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission – didn’t make the talking points list for Mr. Holmes’ industry chat in Davos.
Hmmm… wonder why?
Such an omission was a real missed opportunity for relevance, if you ask me.
And it’s an even more legitimate question, given that Mr. Holmes and his crackerjack reporting staff somehow have been unable to see their way clear to report heavily on the Omnicom / Interpublic (IPG) merger’s keen interest by U.S. Congressional elected officials and the FTC, on alleged grounds of potential antitrust violations, collusion, and operating an anti-conservative cartel (see documentation, further below).
Is there some PR trade media blocking-and-tackling going on?… as in, mainly blocking, by PRovoke and other PR media that want to remain in good graces with both advertising-dollar behemoths before Omnicom and IPG merge to become a global advertising-dollar Kraken?
Just a question! <curious face emoji>
But then, when it comes to politics – and who within the PR industry deserves protection / deflection / coddling versus who gets thrown under the bus before being thrown to the wolves (speaking of collusion) – Mr. Holmes and I agree on practically nothing… I can tell you that much.
And this is the part where I have to push back on Mr. Holmes’ talk in Davos, with due respect to him and to the fact that he traveled all the way to the Alps of Switzerland only to join our event for about 45 minutes.
Among the PR World’s card-carrying Trump-haters par excellence, Mr. Holmes ranks among the most notable and verbose. Some of his comments hit like a Mack truck, when parsing out his points from among his impressive litany of on-stage f-bombs, which, frankly, I could do without (this was Davos, Mr. Holmes, not Cannes Lions!).
It’s beyond stunning to me that Mr. Holmes knows full-well the history that Omnicom / Ketchum was flacking for the Russian government — even maintaining offices in Moscow until only very recent years, immediate-post-invasion of Ukraine — yet somehow, these connections don’t seem to parlay into a bit of concern about how an even more-powerful post-merger Omnicom will behave in its pursuit of potentially dubious clients with nefarious aims.
Omnicom officials had no problem seeing their competitor, Bell Pottinger, brought to its demise in receivership over “stoking racial tensions” in South Africa some eight years ago (an Omnicom senior officer — who is another well-documented Trump-hater — even served on the PRCA committee that did the expelling of Bell Pottinger)… but Omnicom’s own flacking for Putin for nearly a decade seemingly to help make the world fall asleep at the switch — á la Obama — gets a free pass?
These are the questions of politicization of our industry that matter.
I’m not saying that the Bell Pottinger expulsion decision was the wrong decision to make; I’ve in fact been an advocate of it for years.
But truthfully, my advocacy was prior to my knowledge of who-all composed that decision-making table and some of the perceived conflicts of interest. What mode of PR standards make Bell Pottinger’s work expulsion-worthy but Omnicom’s / Ketchum’s work for Putin totally A-Okay! and apparently passing every aroma-challenged smell-test in sight?
Just a question! <curious face emoji>
Normally, Mr. Holmes’ and my political differences would be no big deal or headline. After all, in the PR World, I’m just a country mouse, living and working stateside in the eastern foothills of Tennessee.
By contrast, Mr. Holmes is a big, important, world-famous London-based PR industry content creator and agenda-setter for whom much of the PR agency and even corporate-comms illuminati fall all over themselves to curry favor, in hopes of a positive headline or even a mere mention that might ultimately translate into a biz-dev lead or a new job paying more elsewhere.
But in this case of the WCFA Summit in Davos, it just so happens that Mr. Holmes’ presentation and my own talk given later that morning hinged on much the same topic, in essence: partisan politics and its impact on PR counsel.
As one might expect, Mr. Holmes and I offered vastly divergent takes on the matter.
Long story short: Mr. Holmes appears to relish promoting and propagating partisan politics in our industry… but only of the far left-wing variety, mind you. The more lefty, the better, as ordained by Mr. Holmes’ PRovoke machine and either fully endorsed or at least tolerated by his advertisers. Mr. Holmes’ and his staff’s uniform preferences and policies of pro-liberal spokesmanship are nothing if not patently consistent.
After all, societal divisiveness is “good for business” in PR these days, akin to that old saying from the film “All the President’s Men”: Follow the money.
It’s a shameful fact about which I, for one – speaking on behalf of at least some of us country mice and maybe even a few city ones – am displeased. Such was the crux of my own presentation in Davos, which Mr. Holmes hastily avoided…
Republicans / conservatives in the PR industry – even the fairly moderate ones, like me – are rarely allowed microphones, panel slots, or spokesmanship column inches, if Mr. Holmes has anything to say about it… one notable exception being Nikki Haley in October 2024, but of course, she was working for Edelman. And of course, at PRovoke, Mr. Holmes has everything to say about it. Such is the nature of “power of the pen” and ink by the barrel. We all learned this reality, in PR 101.
Not to defend them outright, but PRovoke is hardly the only industry media outlet whose hard-left amplifications compose its core business model.
I could rattle off at least half a dozen others with ease that follow the left-patronage rubric. Somebody’s getting paid something somewhere to be this skewed and journalistically off their rocker from a “balance” perspective.
My educated guess is that the big multinationals and PR / ad conglomerates pay something or another to make sure this politicization is the universal PR trade-media reality, since it’s good for their agency businesses… at least it is for those that might (?) be operating an anti-conservative cartel at a global, industrial scale engaging billions of client dollars to help convince the world through selective media buying and other techniques that Donald Trump is the Antichrist:
That said, I would have valued having a one-to-one, civil discussion with Mr. Holmes after his interesting talk in Davos, so that we could engage in a real-life conversation, which we’ve never, ever had. Judging by my little critique in this blog post – we likely never, ever will, unless someday he opts to surprise the bejeezus out of me.
For his part, Mr. Holmes hit the Davos exit door so fast following his own keynote speech that one would have thought the law was after him, like a Tom Homan ICE brigade sicced on Tren De Aragua.
Consequently, I was super-bummed.
I had listened politely and patiently on the front row as Mr. Holmes denigrated – to no end in sight – my beloved nation of the United States of America and castigated the U.S. President as nothing but a “chaos”-creator (as if we’re all operating under the delusional fantasy that facilitating systemic change in a federal government bureaucracy to eliminate four prior years of vast corruption, unlawful immigration with illegal drug imports and human trafficking, and billions / trillions in taxpayer-dollar waste, fraud, and abuse, would never in a million PR years cause at least a touch of “chaos” ordinarily). But Mr. Holmes was unable to return the favor to me, to listen to my ideas and opinions, humble though they may be, given my country mouse status.
Oh well! Too bad, so sad.
But isn’t that precisely the problem with our world in PR these days? Too much executing / talking; not enough research / listening?
Having indeed done my due diligence and listened carefully and with respect to Mr. Holmes’ speech and that of all the other very fine presenters in Davos, here are the three points I would have wished to share with Mr. Holmes, had I been given the opportunity:
- “Truth” is far more than what your partisan lens is allowing you either to intake or regurgitate, Mr. Holmes.
Had you heard my presentation — modest though it was — you might have had the opportunity to ponder the question I posed to our friends in Davos, “What is Truth?” in the larger sense.
Truth is rarely what we want it to be, Mr. Holmes. It is instead the amalgamation of – yes – data, facts, documentation, etc., but also the full 360-degree range of human experience in the round, in any given situation or scenario… conservatives included.
When you — as a media outlet, no less — purposely cut out and censor some 50% of that lived experience of your own audience and their own stakeholder groups because it does not comport with your personal world view / political ideology, Mr. Holmes, then you’re lucky if you’re reporting even half the truth on your best day.
- The partisan one-sidedness you endorse and operationalize in the PR industry only generates more problems, not solutions.
This stifling of viewpoints is not helping the industry balance ethics in service to society. It’s not helping anyone communicate with anyone else in a more civil, productive manner.
And it’s certainly not helping the “DEI” situation, given that increasingly, this industry is overrun by women, in a pink-collared ghetto that certain male-run and male-owned trade publications and conglomerates help lord over, while publicly opining the gosh-darn tragedy and injustice of it all, with a wink and a smile. I may be crazy, Mr. Holmes, but I’m not stupid.
If this industry actually gave one whit about “diversity,” industry leaders and its trade media would have ramped up efforts years ago to recruit to the entry level ranks our most urgently and egregiously underrepresented general workforce demographic: straight men. But this industry doesn’t wish to fix the diversity problem; it only wants to politicize and weaponize it to the rounded-up billable hour… and then ponder out loud into their headset-mics while keynoting industry events why on earth Donald Trump is POTUS… again!
Puh-leeez.
- There is money to be made in PR that doesn’t involve dragging brands into leftist ideological debates and causes célèbres that focus on stoking up victimhood, demonization, and divisiveness.
If the industry executed the multitude of far more productive strategies (like nonpartisan bridge-building across ideologies to foster genuine discourse and cross-cultural understanding), then we might have already fixed (or be fixing) the many decades-long, historical struggles of PR being misunderstood, disrespected, misused, undervalued, and improperly compensated.
But it hasn’t. So we haven’t.
Keepers of the current status quo are harming, not helping, our industry. It doesn’t take an immense number of I.Q. points to see precisely from whom and where the status quo is entrenched, to their own for-profit benefit.
On a final note to Mr. Holmes:
You might not find an American media personality more likely to be your liberal spirit animal embracing an equal penchant for f-bombs than Bill Maher. Yet even Mr. Maher has found a way to understand that lounging around in one’s own echo chamber is a nonstarter in this day and age, if you really care about society’s wellbeing.
Please hear Mr. Maher’s recent experience at The White House, and take his comments to heart (and like you, Mr. Holmes, Mr. Maher is quite fun and charismatic and engaging, as is, apparently, Mr. Trump… Who knew?!).
Reader Alert: if some rough language is offensive, you may wish to skip this link to Mr. Maher’s monologue; but to the Davos attendees — if you made it through Mr. Holmes’ talk, you’ll make it through this:
Again, my congratulations go to all of the attendees in Davos for contributing to meaningful dialogue and – for those who actually stayed beyond the summit opener – to participate in real relationship-building and positive exchanges with global colleagues.
Together, if we can listen to each other and respect that we always have some differences but that they don’t have to be insurmountable as long as we share the microphone with genuine care for one another, then we can accomplish a great deal.
Mary Beth West is a 30-year strategic communicator, based in the U.S. A co-founder of The #PRethics Community on LinkedIn, she can be followed on X at @marybethwest and on LinkedIn.