A snitch, a biscuit, and the anonymous PR pro who got it right

There are many reasons I am infatuated with this month’s Atlantic cover story, I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America.

It’s gripping, hilarious, heartwarming and informative, and absolutely worth setting up a free trial to read it (be advised it’s so long it took me three sittings, probably an hour total, and I still didn’t want it to end).

But even if you miss out on the joy found in its pages, here’s a fun and informative PR lesson the author didn’t know she was sharing.

Any honest exploration of the best free restaurant bread in America must obviously include Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits. So the author wanted to visit Red Lobster’s test kitchen and meet Damola Adamolekun, its 35-year-old wunderkind CEO.

She emailed the brand’s agency rep and was politely diverted to email or Zoom interviews with other execs. Not what she wanted. So she emailed the CEO directly, having obtained his unlisted direct email address from a mutual friend. From the article:

And that is how I learn that Damola Adamolekun is a snitch. The next day, I receive an email from the same PR rep. “The brand and I connected following your email to Damola,” she writes. “To keep things streamlined and to spare Damola’s inbox, feel free to continue corresponding through me. 😊”

The story then moves on without Red Lobster.

Did the brand miss an opportunity? Should the agency rep have pushed more aggressively?

No and no. Even though the writer goes on to take some subtle shots at the agency rep (who is appropriately not named), this PR pro did her job well.

As much fun as this article is to read, it didn’t justify scarce CEO time. Although The Atlantic is prestigious, that alone doesn’t make an interview strategically valuable. Speaking generally, its readers are not Red Lobster’s core audience, and this particular writer’s previous work makes clear she was never likely to produce a straightforward business-revival story.

So good for this anonymous PR pro and her clients for having educated their CEO about the importance of staying aligned on media access.

They were wise not to use some of his scarce media access on this case. They were still helpful by offering to make other execs available.

And, as it turns out, they were in good company. The author devoted an entire segment of her piece to the responses she got from publicists declining participation in the article. Her favorite:

“What a nice article this will be to read,” Oprah Winfrey’s ultra-classy publicist writes, while unequivocally declining her client’s participation.

And that it was.

But “fun to read” and “worth CEO access” are different standards. Good PR pros know the difference.

P.S. In reviewing my draft of this post, I noticed a little extra verve in my writing. Wasn’t intentional – it must be a natural consequence of marinating in the excellent writing of the Atlantic article. So chalk up another reason to read it.