The Times: How eBay invented its creation myth
When truth is too trite: How did eBay make a boring tech firm look sexy? By inventing its own 'creation myth'. David Rowan reports
It was the warm, smalltown story of a corporate giant's humble beginnings that enticed Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, even the fact-obsessed New Yorker. When Pam Wesley wanted to boost her collection of Pez sweet dispensers, her fiance, Pierre Omidyar, built a website for her to trade them. That website grew to be the huge online auction house eBay, one of the internet gold rush's few success stories - even though, in the words of the company's PR chief, Mary Lou Song, it began simply "as kind of a love token".
It was a touching tale, recounted in endless profiles on both sides of the Atlantic, with only one flaw: it was a lie. As Song admits in a new book by Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, she invented the story five years ago to generate publicity for an otherwise dull tech company. "No one wants to hear about a 30-year-old genius who wanted to create a perfect market," Song confesses. So she constructed what corporate PRs call a "creation myth", and hoodwinked some of the world's most respected reporters. Some of her victims are furious.
"If they lied to me, and then to the New Yorker's diligent fact-checkers, then I'm angry," fumes James Gleick, who profiled eBay in the magazine three years ago and then in his book What Just Happened. "I am embarrassed. My readers are meant to be able to rely on me."
Equally indignant is Susan Moran, who covered the company for the online magazine Salon. "I feel misled, duped, embarrassed, stupid and angry," she says. "As a journalist I'm usually on guard against lies or smoother mistruths. But somehow I felt differently about Pierre. Now he's just another US CEO to doubt."
The issue raises questions about how far corporate publicists mislead journalists to generate favourable press. There is nothing new in a company's PRs exaggerating its humble origins, according to David Brain, the joint CEO of the communications agency Weber Shandwick, but an outright lie carries huge risks. "These myths of inception are a powerful way of communicating some truth about a company's DNA, and are usually told once the company has grown big," he explains. "You'll hear that Richard Branson started the Virgin record empire from a phone box at university, or Hewlett-Packard began in a garage. There's probably an element of truth there, but we'd never advise a client to fib. Once you know you've been lied to, the whole reason for trusting that brand has been negated."
Jon Aarons, the president of the Institute of Public Relations, insists that for this reason, such lies are rare. But he believes that journalists often conspire with PRs in "an unholy alliance" to enliven their stories: "The media are just as guilty for not checking out these myths."
That is certainly eBay's defence this week. "I honestly believe we did not intend to mislead anyone," claims an eBay spokesman, Kevin Pursglove, rather unconvincingly. He admits that "Pez's role in eBay's creation may have taken on a life of its own", but blames journalists for ignoring more mundane angles.
"Reporters didn't show much interest in marketplaces, or battered keyboards or Star Wars artefacts for sale," he says - until they heard the Pez story. "Inevitably, the finished story would mention the Pez angle but leave out virtually all the other factors."
Tech companies, often those hardest to sell to journalists as "sexy", are those most commonly linked with creation myths. Apple Computers and Hewlett-Packard even ran commercials celebrating their garage origins. When three management consultants launched an online betting site, Flutter.com, three years ago, it was widely reported that it stemmed from their own betting competitions during a Super Bowl party. "That wasn't the case," says a source close to the team, "but it didn't stop them winning the column inches."
(The Times, July 19, 2002)
It was the warm, smalltown story of a corporate giant's humble beginnings that enticed Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, even the fact-obsessed New Yorker. When Pam Wesley wanted to boost her collection of Pez sweet dispensers, her fiance, Pierre Omidyar, built a website for her to trade them. That website grew to be the huge online auction house eBay, one of the internet gold rush's few success stories - even though, in the words of the company's PR chief, Mary Lou Song, it began simply "as kind of a love token".
It was a touching tale, recounted in endless profiles on both sides of the Atlantic, with only one flaw: it was a lie. As Song admits in a new book by Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, she invented the story five years ago to generate publicity for an otherwise dull tech company. "No one wants to hear about a 30-year-old genius who wanted to create a perfect market," Song confesses. So she constructed what corporate PRs call a "creation myth", and hoodwinked some of the world's most respected reporters. Some of her victims are furious.
"If they lied to me, and then to the New Yorker's diligent fact-checkers, then I'm angry," fumes James Gleick, who profiled eBay in the magazine three years ago and then in his book What Just Happened. "I am embarrassed. My readers are meant to be able to rely on me."
Equally indignant is Susan Moran, who covered the company for the online magazine Salon. "I feel misled, duped, embarrassed, stupid and angry," she says. "As a journalist I'm usually on guard against lies or smoother mistruths. But somehow I felt differently about Pierre. Now he's just another US CEO to doubt."
The issue raises questions about how far corporate publicists mislead journalists to generate favourable press. There is nothing new in a company's PRs exaggerating its humble origins, according to David Brain, the joint CEO of the communications agency Weber Shandwick, but an outright lie carries huge risks. "These myths of inception are a powerful way of communicating some truth about a company's DNA, and are usually told once the company has grown big," he explains. "You'll hear that Richard Branson started the Virgin record empire from a phone box at university, or Hewlett-Packard began in a garage. There's probably an element of truth there, but we'd never advise a client to fib. Once you know you've been lied to, the whole reason for trusting that brand has been negated."
Jon Aarons, the president of the Institute of Public Relations, insists that for this reason, such lies are rare. But he believes that journalists often conspire with PRs in "an unholy alliance" to enliven their stories: "The media are just as guilty for not checking out these myths."
That is certainly eBay's defence this week. "I honestly believe we did not intend to mislead anyone," claims an eBay spokesman, Kevin Pursglove, rather unconvincingly. He admits that "Pez's role in eBay's creation may have taken on a life of its own", but blames journalists for ignoring more mundane angles.
"Reporters didn't show much interest in marketplaces, or battered keyboards or Star Wars artefacts for sale," he says - until they heard the Pez story. "Inevitably, the finished story would mention the Pez angle but leave out virtually all the other factors."
Tech companies, often those hardest to sell to journalists as "sexy", are those most commonly linked with creation myths. Apple Computers and Hewlett-Packard even ran commercials celebrating their garage origins. When three management consultants launched an online betting site, Flutter.com, three years ago, it was widely reported that it stemmed from their own betting competitions during a Super Bowl party. "That wasn't the case," says a source close to the team, "but it didn't stop them winning the column inches."
(The Times, July 19, 2002)
posted by David Rowan at Friday, July 19, 2002
<< Home