We interrupt our current Johnson & Johnson analysis programming to bring you my latest pet peeve. I mean, I know you were waiting for it, right?
Why, please tell me, why are PR agencies including "privileged and confidential" footers on their pitches?
Like this one:
—– This email is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. Dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail or the information herein by anyone other than the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering the message to the intended recipient, is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error or would like not to receive future emails from AGENCY please immediately notify us by forwarding this email to PostMaster@AGENCY.com.
And this one:
Privileged and confidential information may be contained in this e-mail and any files transmitted with it are intended only for the use of the addressee. If you are not the addressee, or not the person responsible for delivering it to the person addressed, you may not copy or deliver this to anyone else. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please notify us immediately by telephone or e-mail and delete it from your system immediately. The recipient should check this email and any attachments for the presence of viruses. The company accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted with this email. Thank you.
I do understand that these footers are added globally at the email server level, but it is beyond me why PUBLIC RELATIONS agencies, whose job it is to spread the word, would do this. Don’t you want people to tell other people?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to train staff to add this information to their email signature when something really IS privileged?
It just looks stupid to see such a disclaimer on what is clearly a generic pitch.
Unless of course they have some faint hope that this disclaimer will prevent bloggers from passing the pitches around amongst themselves.
That would really be stupid.
Tags: blogger relations
It’s a standard requirement for most large PR firms now, especially those who do a lot of crisis communications and litigation communications.
And it’s not something we can remove from our emails. It’s company policy.
And yes, it is quite often completely ridiculous and it totally undermines everything we’re trying to do.
But if you can’t count on large PR firms to be ridiculous and contradictory in our communications with real people, what can you expect? 😉
David (and everyone who saw my rant on Twitter about this) —
I know how the big agencies got here, and completely understand the need to have such a disclaimer on certain types of communications that *are* actually privileged and confidential.
However, I doubt making it company policy for *every* communication is technically necessary. By now, email filtering technology must be able put it on communications that require it and not others. Universal application is just the simplest route.
I also wonder if applying it so broadly to communications that clearly AREN’T privileged might dilute its power in an enforcement situation –ie confidential information leaked because a recipient got accustomed to trivial information being associated with the same warning. Any lawyers have an opinion?
And it really bugs me. Like I said, a pet peeve.
oh – see, Susan, you’re using things like “logic” and “sense.”
Like we can tell the difference between the emails that need privilege and which really shouldn’t have a stupid footer that makes sense only to lawyers.
yeah, umm… we don’t really do that. sorry. 😉
They’re trying to hedge bets to keep off the Bad Pitch blog!