How to Fail at PR | Vivek and BuzzFeed
Vivek Ramiswamy's laudable attempt to pull an Elon on the world's worst media company.
So… if you didn’t already know, BuzzFeed, like most media companies today, is a complete dumpster fire.
BuzzFeed, built on millennial takes on pop culture in the age of listicles, is down 94% from its initial listing price.
Who could have guessed that that would happen when they went public?
Apparently media conglomerates that write such deeply considered and spectacular works of journalism as Buzzfeed’s “You Might Be Cleaning Your Penis Wrong,” and “17 Foods That White People Have Ruined” just can’t find the viewership they need to justify all of their iced latte expenditures.
But good news, guys. BuzzFeed has a new white… I mean, brown knight. Folks, that’s right, our very own Vivek Ramaswamy recently purchased 9% of BuzzFeed. He joins the hallowed halls of other rich dudes that also bought news outlets.
Chris Hughes bought The New Republic, Marc Benioff bought TIME, Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post — and haven’t all of them turned out so great?
Unfortunately for Vivek, he has a long way to go before he’s the proud owner of BuzzFeed.
As of December 31, 2023, Jonah Peretti (and affiliates) held 96 percent of the Class B stock, which has 50 times voting rights of Vivek’s Class A stock. That’s 64 percent of the votes in any proxy contest.
So unfortunately, the internet won’t soon be doused in new listicles like “5 reasons why Hyak would have crushed Keynes in a fistfight” and quizzes like “Which era of Ron Paul are you channeling today?”
I’m not a finance guy, so I don’t know what the chances are of Vivek’s capacity is to pull this off. What I can speak to, however, is his plan for the brand if he does, in fact, get control.
He outlined this plan in a Nastygram he delivered to Jonah, BuzzFeed CEO.
Pirate Wires founder
has it:“To save this failing company, he explained, the path was clear: pivot to AI, embrace the creator economy!, and rebrand.
Now, Jonah already pivoted to AI (infamously (it won’t help)), and “have you heard of the creator economy” would have been more interesting ten years ago. However, the brand suggestion… okay no, that was also wrong. But it was wrong in an interesting way. All political voices must be welcome, Viv explained, rather than solely the Evil Woke Left, and the company must embrace a Policy of Truth (sound familiar?), rather than Lies and Fake News. But while “diversity of thought,” which is to say a strong commitment to no single thought in particular, works as a fun debate retort to regressive racial politics, it’s not how you find the truth, and it’s certainly not how you build a brand. When a man stands for everything, he stands for nothing. And nobody subscribes, for money, to nothing.”
Great brands have two whole balls. Vivek’s 3 points is the perfect example of how conservatives try to get by without them.
Vivek had to have at least one ball to buy a 9% stake and use it to highlight woke media BS, but this “naked pursuit of truth” plan falls short of convincing me he has a second one.
Cutting the workforce down and leveraging AI won’t save BuzzFeed. Investing in the creator economy is too little too late, and no one is interested in seeing Tucker Carlsson and Bill Maher discuss “Voldermort’s Penis” in video podcast form… ok, maybe I would like to see that.
At this stage, the nastygram is a more of PR stunt, and one that only other journalists are the only people talking about.
What Vivek Might Have Done
If Vivek wanted to buy the attention of the whole internet with his BuzzFeed shares, he could have looked to Johnathan Swift, the most legendary practical joker of all time, for advice on how to create a modest proposal.
When the Irish people were starving, Swift proposed, as seriously as he possibly could, that hungry Irish people sell their babies as food.
A modest proposal from Ramaswamy might have advocated ardently for Buzzfeed to hire a team of diversity officers to ensure all 72 genders are adequately represented in all BuzzFeed thumbnails.
He could have advised that anyone who uses the incorrect pronouns be sentenced to the dread punishment of forced Buzzfeed article reading. Deadname a tranny and permanently lose at least 10 IQ points.
It might have outlined a pathway to maximizing equity by eliminating roles with terms like “vp, director, or manager” because hierarchy is antithetical to true creativity… as a matter of fact, do we even need a white male CEO anyway?
He might have ended his plan by calling for the firing of all white people.
Now THAT would have been funny enough to get the whole internet to collectively drop sunglasses on Vivek.
Instead, alas…. we will have to make due with the obvious dunk that he made by calling them out for shoddy reporting.
This is the particular failing of conservatives. Progressives have no problem turning their entire corporate operating system into a propaganda machine. Just look at BuzzFeed!
Conservatives on the other hand, seem pretty sheepish about leading with their principles—and fair enough, not every brand should have a political opinion.
That said, the more leaders try to accommodate differing opinions, foster dialogue, and “keep personal opinions” out of it, the more boring they become. In today’s 8 second attention span economy, boring means dead.
That’s why people like Ron Paul were so popular. There wasn’t a hill small enough for that dude to die on. He voted "no" more than 600 times during his tenure in Congress from 1976 to 2013. He made the most boring institution of all time, the Federal Reserve, the enemy with his riveting 2009 book “End the Fed.”
Trump is the same way. Just watch his exchanges with reporters:
Trump’s aggressive stance toward the media is a significant part of his popularity.
Unfortunately, we’re living in a time when all of the kid gloves are off. Everyone else is playing for keeps. If you’re going to take a swing at the establishment, whether a political incumbent or a market leader in your industry, you better be ready to go all nine rounds.
Most of you are entrepreneurs or builders, not politicians, so let’s translate this lesson into brand speak.
Every brand doesn’t need to be explicitly political. But every brand should have hill they’re going to die on. If you don’t have opinions that would trigger Karen, the HR director, you don’t have a brand.
A great way to discover and capitalize on your unfair advantage is to write about your band enemy.
I have a free worksheet for you if you want to do this yourself.
Avis, a brand with an enemy
Here’s a fantastic case study on how a brand can leverage a brand enemy.
In 1962, Avis, which, at the time, was run by real men with real cojones. They hadn’t been profitable in over a decade, and their forcast looked pretty grim. Hertz, the market leader at the time, was killing them. Avis decided to come off the bench swinging.
Their ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach created a legendary campaign that embraced Avis’ underdog status and subtly called out Hertz as lazy. Their new tagline: “When you’re only No. 2, you try harder or else.”
The “We Try Harder” ads were a slam dunk. In just one year, Avis went from losing $3.2 million to earning $1.2 million—it was profitable at last. Hertz then largely ignored the campaign from 1963 to 1966, and the market-share percentage gap between the two brands shrunk from 61–29 to 49–36. When Hertz finally started striking back in 1968, it was too late. Avis settled into a steady market share of about 40%, and the feud continues.
This ad campaign was perhaps less on the nose than Donald Trump’s average speech, but it was a very courageous one nonetheless. With it, Avis threw down the gauntlet and almost doubled their market share.
In this longhouse era where it seems good men lack courage and evil men hold all the cards, the desire to see real fighters do battle for real stakes has only grown.
Vivek’s attempt to take a swing at BuzzFeed is laudable, but at his nastygram plan perfectly encapsulates how underdogs and dissidents routinely play it too safe.
So here’s the message for dissident builders: half measures avail you nothing.
Define what you stand for and go all out, or don’t play the game.
Vivek, if you’re reading this and you actually have a plan to take over Buzzfeed, the guys at Babylon Bee probably know just what to do with it.
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm-neither hot nor cold-I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”
Revelation 3:15-18
PS. If you are building a based business and want to make a bigger splash with your marketing than Vivek made with his $3.3 million investment in BuzzFeed, please reach out. I’d love to make sure you don’t set your money on fire.