Dialogue: Time to air dirty laundry

By DITA DE BONI

If Air New Zealand's planes were as old-fashioned as its public relations strategy, the flying machines would be in danger of internal combustion every time they took off from the top of the milking shed.

In a modern era, where good communications strategies are characterised by openness and honesty - in theory, if not always in practice - it seems the management and PR department of the national carrier cling to the belief that information is far too valuable to be wasted on the wider community.

When Air New Zealand was flying high, able to soar above the demands placed on ordinary companies, it could get away with taking a defensive attitude to the public, the media, investors and its own ground troops - but that era has passed.

Authorities on both sides of the Tasman are investigating whether the airline has kept the markets adequately informed, and there is a growing chorus of criticism about its communications strategy.

Air New Zealand seemed to acknowledge the need for a new approach a few weeks ago, when it hired external PR consultants to salvage what remains of its tattered image. But it is hardly surprising that the company's legendary tight lips have proved immune to the arrival of a few new faces.

Indeed, even a request to Air New Zealand's public relations department to explain why it had hired outside consultants - including Cedric Allan, Malcolm Boyle and Neil Green - to deal with the current crisis met with a brick wall.

The request was passed to the PR department's Mark Champion, who scoffed at such a question. "Why should we reveal any part of our business strategy to you?" he said.

Cedric Allan also declined to explain anything: "Would a divorce lawyer give you intimate details of the case he was working on?" he asked.

Such reticence would have had more resonance if at least one of the team had not blatantly leaked details of the imported PR team's clever new strategy to another business publication, apparently in support of a bid for them to acquire a permanent role.

Are selective leaks part of the airline's new PR strategy?

Perhaps not, given that more recent leaks suggest the new team's involvement may be rather short-lived.

The airline could reasonably have pointed out that since the crisis broke it has been deluged with inquiries from both sides of the Tasman to a level well beyond what its regular staff could be expected to cope with. Instead it preferred to rely on the tried and true approach of saying nothing.

Almost every journalist has a piquant anecdote on the difficulties of dealing with Air New Zealand.

Alastair Carthew, who headed the department before leaving for a post in Hong Kong last year, once tried to deny that an 0800 line (0800-PINK) set up for gay travellers might be courting the pink dollar, or that the airline flew to "known gay resorts".

Only after a prolonged argument was he forced to concede with a huff that packages plainly marketed to the leisure-seeking gay traveller "might be gay-friendly".

His replacement, Cameron Hill, has been known to answer his cellphone by barking "don't you know my landline number?" and wastes little time with niceties.

Defensive in the extreme when questioned about a lightning strike during one flight which had left passengers shaken, he is said to have quipped sourly: "Why can't lightning ever strike Ansett planes?"

Rosie Flay, the third member of the team, is also known to be less than enthusiastic about responding to queries outside working hours. One journalist, who had the temerity to call her in the weekend on a story about deep-vein thrombosis, got a frosty response - and insult was added to injury when Ms Flay failed to hang up the phone properly.

The journalist learned exactly what Ms Flay thought of her in language that left little to the imagination.

PR chief David Beatson, who has been in hospital recently, is known as more accommodating, but tends to confine himself to corporate "wheat", generally leaving it to his minions to keep the media "chaff" at bay.

But the airline's communications strategy looks too consistent to be the work of the individuals hired by its PR department.

One veteran aviation journalist attributes the attitude not to individual personalities, but to a corporate culture. "I've just accepted that any time I deal with Air New Zealand it will be more difficult than with any other company," the journalist said. "It's how they operate."

Even at the height of the crisis, when the Herald offered the airline space to tell its side of the story in its own words, the opportunity was ignored. The same offer put to Qantas was taken up within hours.

Columnist and media personality Gordon McLauchlan, who once headed Air New Zealand's public affairs unit, says in his day the job was mostly glad-handing.

He eventually left when asked to "obstruct" information.

But Mr McLauchlan says there is no way out for the airline and its mouthpieces this time, except to be completely honest about everything. "If they're being rude at this stage, that's indefensible and only compounds the problem."

Overall, the way the crisis has been handled is "absolutely abysmal", he says, but may not be entirely the fault of the PR department.

"Sometimes, you can give management all the good advice in the world but if they think they're cleverer than you they'll do what they want anyhow."

A former Air New Zealand insider says the PR department's clamming up should be seen in the context of an entire company loath to share information.

According to the former staffer, those in the PR department who routinely dealt with the media were often left out of the loop themselves, especially when Gary Toomey was brought in to run the company in January.

"You had whole layers of New Zealand management removed, and everything being run out of Melbourne," he says.

"People were being told by Australians how to run their intranet, all their internal communications. A lot of people simply lost the will to carry on, and many did not bother starting new projects. Everything was more or less put on hold."

Morale plunged. Not only was the company's internal communications overrun by people wearing Ansett badges, but Air New Zealand's external communications and advertising almost slipped across the Tasman as well.

The Ansett crowd nearly managed to have Melbourne agency George Patterson Bates steal the Air New Zealand account from local agency, Ponsonby-based Colenso BBDO.

To the horror of Kiwi commentators, already alarmed at the amount of advertising business slipping across the ditch, Patterson Bates looked like a shoe-in for the transtasman business at one point - on the strength of its "Absolutely" campaign which introduced the public to the formerly mystical, po-faced Mr Toomey.

Advertising industry sources from both countries confirm that a "hypothetical brief" was issued to competing ad agencies for the total Air New Zealand/Ansett business by Ansett bigwigs this year. The brief centred around a fictitious "Australasian Airlines".

Most of the big agencies pitched in - including DDB, Patterson Bates and Colenso - some spending up to $100,000 in time and resources.

It was - as many suspected it would be - a waste of time. Before the process was completed Ansett had folded, leaving both finalists - DDB and Patterson Bates - without an account. Colenso retains the Air New Zealand business.

Its ads - one starring business executives hamming it up to advertise Koru class, another trumpeting the "Gotta Go" packages, and the barefoot waif entertaining Australians and gate-crashing a wedding - continue to play.

One wonders for how long ...

* Fran O'Sullivan's regular column will return next week.

Dialogue on business

nzherald.co.nz/aviation

nzherald.co.nz/travel