Memo to Veritas President Beverley Hammond: We’re vacation deprived! Just kidding. But raise your hand if you haven’t taken a vacation yet this year. And hey, the year’s almost half over. That’s why it was such a Touchdown, in terms of both timing and content, for the travel website Expedia.ca to release an Ipsos Reid poll this month indicating that Canadians are, in fact, vacation deprived. The survey showed Canadians are taking fewer vacation days now per year, 19, than they were last year and rank third-lowest in vacation days among other major countries. In France for example (did we mention how much we love France?) workers average 39 vacation days per year. There’s a Touchdown-worthy lesson here in the use of effective polling data to drive home your message. That’s something we’ve talked about before, but this is another excellent example. In terms of timing, what better month than May to come out with such a survey, when many of us are realizing summer is almost upon us and we haven’t made any vacation plans yet. Yikes! This story got major pickup because it had all the elements: good polling data, a timely hook, a spokesperson who specialized in ‘workplace stress,’ and a ‘watercooler’ quality to the subject matter. Bravo.

You’ve got to hand it to Madonna. Just when you think attention has turned to American Idol winner Taylor Hicks, or the latest music sensation, here she comes, again, to prove she’s not ready to be knocked off the top of the music heap quite yet. Other aging music stars (Keith Richards, anyone?) may only get attention when they fall out of a tree and land on their head. But Madonna, consistent with her controversial brand, always finds a way to stun and surprise audiences and that’s long been a key to the success of her branding as a music icon. This time, she staged a mock crucifixion in one of her concerts, singing while wearing a crown of thorns and hanging from a mirrored cross. Christian groups reacted with outrage (heck, the Pope urged people to boycott her concerts way back in 1990), but Madonna took it all in stride. "I don't think Jesus would be mad at me and the message I'm trying to send," she told the New York Daily News. "Jesus taught that we should love thy neighbour." Oh, and not coincidentally, she has a European and North American concert tour underway that continues through September. The communications lesson here is an extreme one in terms of breaking through. Controversial acts can be your best friend or your worst enemy as my colleague Bob Reid likes to say. But when it’s consistent with your brand, as in Madonna’s case, it’s a Touchdown.

We weren’t going to touch this story in TD&F, but this week it just got too messy to ignore. Here’s our verdict: to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who claims the Ottawa press gallery is anti-Conservative and so he will ‘end run them’ and go directly to local and regional media: a Fumble. To the Ottawa Parliamentary Press Gallery, some two dozen of whom walked out on a Harper press conference this week after he refused to take their questions: a Fumble. The over-arching lesson here, we believe, is that at a time when the vast majority of Canadians are cynical and disengaged about politics, both Harper and the press gallery fed into the notion that the elites in Ottawa are absorbed with self-interest and couldn’t care less about the issues that concern Canadians. For Harper specifically, it’s a Fumble to go to war with the media. That’s a communications rule. Be firm, but don’t fight. As Chris Dornan, head of Carleton University's journalism school, told reporters, Harper insulted Ottawa journalists by asserting that they are pro-Liberal, and he insulted regional media (who in our view don’t get credit for the outstanding work they do) by suggesting they are easy prey for his party message. As for the Ottawa press gallery, imagine what the late Ray Timson, legendary former Star managing editor, would say now (loudly and a little more colourfully) to those complaining about the PMO’s media policies: “Just get out there are ask the damn question! Yell it, scream it! Chase him up and down the stairs, to his car, to his house, everywhere he goes until he damn-well answers!” That’s the journalists’ job. They’re not the story. They go get the story. And given the public’s increasingly low opinion of journalists and journalism, many might agree with Timson that the Ottawa crew should stop boycotting press conferences and get back to work.

Bill Walker is a former journalist and manager with the PGA Tour. He is now Vice President at Veritas.

I’ve often noted in this space that the court of law and the court of public opinion are two very, very different venues. Yet sometimes there’s a commonality at play between the two, and it was evident this week in the convictions of former Enron head honchos, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, on a variety of fraud and insider trading charges. An analysis piece by Barrie McKenna of the Globe & Mail’s Washington Bureau details how Lay’s communications efforts – his testimony at trial – played a key role in the jury’s decision to convict. “In contrast to the genial, big-picture executive that Mr. Lay claimed to be, the jurors said they saw glimpses of a man who could be intensely controlling and who had a big chip on his shoulder. And that didn’t jibe with the defence’s portrayal of Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling as unwitting victims of the collapse,” McKenna writes. McKenna says Lay was combative in court, and came off as prickly and arrogant. “Mr. Skilling arguably had a much tougher image problem to overcome. He was regarded as an abrasive and hands-on CEO. But on the stand, Mr. Skilling was poised, self-confident and on-message,” McKenna says, although in didn’t end up helping Skilling in the end. The lesson here is simple: communications plays a key role in how you are viewed by the public or any other audience. If you’re well prepared and use communications opportunities to your best advantage, the benefits can be tremendous. Mishandle it, and you can potentially become your image’s own worst enemy.

I always admire a spokesperson who can take a tough issue and actually make some headway with it in the media. Truth be told, that’s how we at Veritas help our clients a lot of the time. So a tip of the flak hat this week to one Robert Cummings, spokesman for Lafarge Canada Inc. They make cement. Making cement requires a really, really hot kiln. Lafarge has a cement plant in Bath, Ontario, and they’re thinking about re-tooling the kiln to fuel it by burning discarded car tires. Obviously, that’s a tough sell – a proposition that would naturally be met with great opposition from a variety of environmental groups (and it has been). But Cummings and Lafarge took the right approach: they put a rational, fact-based argument together, one which was supported by at least one key, independent stakeholder. Lafarge detailed the experience they’ve had with one of their plants in Quebec, which re-tooled from coal to tires and ultimately ended up improving its overall emissions as a result. Furthermore, their application to burn tires as fuel has been endorsed by none other than the province’s Environmental Commissioner, Gord Miller, who said “I am not nervous about burning tires in cement kilns. I know it can be done within acceptable standards.” The combination of those two elements - facts and a credible, supportive voice – earned Lafarge an overall positive story that was positioned on page one of Tuesday’s Toronto Star, of all places.

Communicating complex scientific concepts to a lay audience is a tall order, to say the least. It’s very easy for lab-coat types to be too technical or to use the jargon that’s everyday parlance to them but so much Greek to the rest of us. So it was a Touchdown-worthy move by Sir John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at London’s Imperial College, and his colleague, Duke University professor of electrical and computer engineering David Smith, to explain their advances in using metamaterials to manipulate electromagnetic waves by talking about … Harry Potter. They explained that by bending such waves, they could make the invisibility cloak that allowed Harry Potter to wander unseen through the halls of Hogwarts a reality. “The cloak would act like you’ve opened up a hole in space,” Smith said, further explaining that an object hidden in such a cloak would turn invisible because electromagnetic waves would flow around it was water flows virtually undisturbed around a smooth rock. Those kinds of easily-understood analogies and illustrations turned what could have been scientific gobbledygook into something that even this commentator can get his head around … thank you, Harry Potter!

Bob Reid has been a journalist and media advisor to a former Ontario Premier. He is now Veritas’ principal media coach.