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WORD FROM THE WISE
It’s a brave new world out there,
and marketers must up their game
and stop pandering to consumers if
they are to hit their mark, PR guru
and trendspotter Richard Laermer
tells Grainne Rothery
PUNK’S
NOT DEAD
ith more than 15 years in the PR game under his great software and digital America was just becoming big. There
W
belt, Richard Laermer knows a thing or two about were lots of hugely successful companies around that no one
hype and is certainly not afraid to use it. To coin- was reading about. We started representing all the bulletin
cide with the launch last year of Punk Marketing, a board services and the really cool tech companies. It was fun, and
book and movement that he devised and co- before I knew it we had 15 employees. I would see certain things
wrote with Mark Simmons, he and his team uploaded videos on brewing under the surface and I wanted to be a part of that bub-
YouTube of strippers talking about the punk marketing manifesto ble. By 1995, we were representing 40 or 50 of the top dotcom
as they took their clothes off. “Suddenly millions of guys cared and, companies.”
for me, that was the quintessential punk moment,” exclaims While being CEO of the company continues to be his day job,
Laermer with glee. Laermer has written a number of books and is widely seen as an
The stunt sums up much of what Laermer is about — direct and authority on a range of subjects including PR (Full Frontal PR), mar-
irreverent undoubtedly — but also veering much more towards keting (the aforementioned Punk Marketing) and trends
fun than offensive. New York-based Laermer is a self-confessed (Trendspotting and, most recently, 2011: Trendspotting for the Next
media junkie and, with a pretty informed opinion on just about Decade). With fellow PR man Kevin Dugan, meanwhile, he runs
everything, it shows. He started out as a newspaper and magazine The Bad Pitch Blog, which highlights bad PR practices. He also
journalist in 1979 and, after 12 years writing for the likes of the New finds time to speak regularly at industry events and write columns
York Times and USA Today, became public affairs director for the on the PR business.
graduate business school at Columbia University. His most recent trendspotting book, 2011, is designed to help
During his time there, he says he recognised that entrepreneurs others spot trends for themselves and their businesses. “When
seemed to have very few options in terms of getting advice on I was writing Full Frontal PR and Punk Marketing, all I kept
media relations, while many publicists tended to have a limited thinking was, one day I’ve got to write the quintessential book on
grasp of their clients’ businesses. “So I started my firm RLM PR how other people can inspire themselves to stop depending on
with the idea that we would work with entrepreneurial companies futurists,” he says. “Because futurists, for the most part, are kind of
and entrepreneurial divisions of major corporations,” he says. full of crap.
“These were the pre-internet years when people were inventing “This book is the only time that I have literally said, I don’t really
16 Marketing Age May/June ‘08
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