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AAt this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, public relations juggernaut Edelman will publish the latest edition of the “Trust Barometer,” an annual survey that measures whether people around the world trust businesses, governments, NGOs and the media. .
There’s just one problem: As Edelman promotes the brand and hounds customers with stark warnings about the importance of trust, critics say the company seems unwilling to follow its own advice. The company’s clients range from ExxonMobil to the Saudi government and members of the Sackler family, former owners of opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma.
The company’s CEO, Richard Edelman, said in a 2021 blog post, “Trust is my legacy to the PR industry,” and there’s no doubt that his company has been successful in aligning itself with the concept.
Edelman has published a Confidence Barometer every year since 2000. A speaker at an expert meeting in Davos last year described the survey as “a leading measure of trust in institutions.” Constantly quoted by corporations and their executives, and in influential outlets ranging from the Financial Times to the Economist to the New York Times, Edelman reliably finds popular recognition.
In the year “He’s successfully positioned himself as a source of credibility,” said Christine Arena, a PR expert who left Edelman in 2014 to work for fossil fuel companies and last year told a US House subcommittee on how PR firms have blocked the climate. Law. “This is a compelling proposition for many clients who are trying to build trust themselves.”
The survey is “recognized as one of the most important pieces of research on trust,” an Edelman spokeswoman said in an emailed statement to the Guardian. “Our goal has always been to help businesses and other institutions navigate their complex environments and communicate effectively with all stakeholders.”
When Edelman released a new edition of the Barometer in Davos, it highlighted a finding the company has been pushing for years: that business is the most trusted institution in society. At the World Economic Forum, “I will once again have a bully platform to tell business that it must continue to lead on social issues,” Richard Edelman wrote earlier this month.
Edelman’s website calls trust “the ultimate currency.” Faith certainly proved worth it for Edelman. Last February, Richard Edelman attributed the organization’s recent financial success in part to publishing 10 Trust Barometer reports and “trust-based media buying.” In an interview in June, he predicted that “faith tools could be a very big business for us.”
Edelman’s ongoing trust publications and events, as well as notable efforts such as the Trust Institute, a think tank that publishes company research, have increased the Institute’s sense of expertise on the subject. One of the “core solutions” the company sells to clients, Edelman Trust Management, says on its landing page, “We know how and when to use it and how to create strategic opportunities to grow trust” (along with Edelman’s Net Trust Score and Edelman Trust Management studies).
What you can show the client is, ‘We’ve helped these companies move to a better place in society, and they’re more trustworthy. We can do the same for you,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the Center for Climate Research, which exposed Edelman’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. “They … trust the specialists because trust is the bottom line for a PR campaign.”
Melissa Aronczyk, Rutgers University, a professor of media studies, has studied how PR firms go beyond simply promoting and spinning — they infuse the public discourse with the perspective of their clients. “What will come in the end [is that] These companies not only manage the trust but also b to do Confidence,” Aronczyk said. “And if they themselves are the owners of that survey, or barometer, or whatever, they will, of course, be the owners of that kind of value.
Edelman’s most effective case study for demonstrating this value to clients may be the firm itself. The business model has managed to develop a reputation for trust even if it appears to go against the advice and recommendations of the CEO. For example, the Guardian reported last month that over the past four years, Edelman has signed nearly $9.6 million in deals with the Saudi government and regime-controlled companies, while at the same time urging businesses to stand up for human rights.
But climate change is an issue that Edelman’s public position is very different from where the company makes money. Edelman executives frequently implore corporations to lead the global response to climate change. Richard Edelman has called climate change “the biggest crisis we’ll face as a society.”
Over the years, these businesses have included ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, the National Coal Mining Association and the American Petroleum Institute (API), the lobbying group for some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. Edelman’s work for API has proven particularly lucrative, netting the PR firm nearly $440 million since 2008. The astronaut group that Edelman helped launch for the API contributed to the defeat of climate efforts in Congress. One study found that between 1989 and 2020, Edelman made at least 60 “engagements” for oil, gas, coal, steel and railroad clients–more than any other public relations firm.
In the year In 2019, Edelman received a PR industry award for the “We Make Progress” campaign he created for the American Petroleum and Petrochemical Producers (AFPM), a fossil fuel lobby group so destructive that some oil giants, including Shell and BP, canceled themselves. Memberships, BuzzFeed News reports. The award lauded Edelman for “a multimedia advertising campaign designed to build brand awareness, favorability and trust among AFPM audiences in the DC metro area.” Climate newspaper Heath, which first reported on AFPM’s campaign, calculated that Edelman earned at least $20 million from his work for the group.
The main obstacle to tackling the climate crisis is “government’s unwillingness to enact tough laws to change business,” lamented Richard Edelman at a recent event about his company’s “special report” on “Trust and Climate Change.” . “Reliable information on climate change is very hard to come by,” Edelman said at the event. “Business has to be the main source of that information.”
The CEO did not mention the hundreds of millions of dollars in work his company has done for petroleum customers. But a year ago, Edelman was excited about the job. “I believe in the energy industry. I think they’re making the transition,” he told Axios in November 2021. “We work with the oil majors. I’m proud of our work.” “We are committed to being the agency of choice for organizations taking climate action,” said an Edelman spokesperson in a company statement to the Guardian.
Last January, in response to external criticism of his work for both the workforce and the oil and gas industry, Edelman announced a series of steps, including requiring all employees to undergo “climate change communication training” and “establishing an independent climate council” of experts. He did not promise to stop working for the oil industry.
Since then, Edelman has “parted ways with clients, turned down some new opportunities and is continuing to monitor and evaluate some operations,” a company spokeswoman said. “Whilst we don’t talk to individuals or past client engagements, we have a process for evaluating engagements and are committed to continuing to drive change through communications.”
“What you want to do if you’re under fire is to deflect blame and promote false solutions, pretending you’ve solved the problems that are driving you,” said Arena, a former Edelman executive. “Edelman is implementing some of the methods and strategies we know have helped our clients execute.”
After examining the oil and gas contracts, Edelman concluded that the flaw was not the work itself, but how he defined that work. As Richard Edelman told the Financial Times, there were “zero examples of us getting the facts wrong.” What we found, however, was a lack of context.
This distinction—between how a company makes money and how it says it will make money—sits at the heart of Edelman’s decades-long faith campaign.
Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, who will welcome Richard Edelman and other corporate leaders to Davos next week, may have expressed the public’s confidence in superannuation in a 2014 op-ed. While Schwab celebrates that “companies are acting socially responsible,” the real message is found in the article’s title, “The Profitability of Loyalty.”
“It’s all a form of PR, that trust is something you can monetize,” says Alison Taylor, a professor of corporate responsibility and ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “What is called ‘reliance’ here is not ‘reliance’ on any kind of academic understanding. This is a good name.
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