The random walk of my career has led me to interact occasionally with the PR staff at banks, and there is cultural issue here.
A retail bank likes to announce happy stuff about new products, creating jobs, etc. Most of which is stolidly ignored by the press. They occasionally act as fire-fighters when a screw up threatens to hurt the brand.
But investment banks don't market much to the public, who really don't care about them, at least until recently...
They have a bunch of talking heads who say wise things about why the currency is going up or down, M&A etc on business TV, and PR's job is mostly to get them on TV. But apart from that, a week when their bank does not appear in the media is a good week. Their job is to smother stories, and they are no in any way proactive.
People sometimes wonder why my name is to be found in so many varied media, some unkind people even claim that there are people who know better. This was true, even when I did totally different things and was a wage slave. Fact is that at any large firm your contract of employment explicitly forbids you from talking to the media. I was once Test Director at PC Magazine, and I thought it quite funny that my contract explicitly forbade me from talking to journalists.
At non-banking firms, people who are authorised to talk to the press and top level execs get good training in being on camera, and are briefed on individual interviews by a professional.
It's quite clear to me that GS and other Wall Street execs seem only to have been prepped by lawyers, good / expensive lawyers, which is necessary but as we've seen, far from sufficient. I would bet money that in the 48 hours before they appear on TV to defend their actions they spend more time with the person that cuts their hair than their PR.
Talking to the press is really quite tricky. Back when I was running a gang of quants and developers developing a trading system, Britain's most left wing newspaper (The Guardian) interviewed me on nepotism in banks. Obviously they'd have preferred someone more famous at a bigger firm, they got me because no one else would go on the record. That was much harder work than merely handling arguments between the quant and dev teams.
GS can afford the best PR people, and I think it has them. But they are the wrong PR people for the task, and I am not sure that one could easily find the right people.
GS could give some lump of money to help Pakistan, but of course there is a chance that the money ends up in the hands of terrorists, and of course it's such a corrupt place that money given to it's government is largely wasted.
The culture of IB PR is to see that risk, and that's enough to stall big gestures.
There are some good stories in GS. Remember that in the real world, $200K per year is a big income. There are a vast number of people from poor backgrounds, who belong to every minority who now make good money. That's true of IBs in general, I know one extremely successful banker who was basically a street criminal who wised up.
I read resumes for a living, and I know that many reading this will have backgrounds which are in no way privileged.
Those are great human interest stories, which would help GS (or ML or JPM or whatever) present a human face. Most of us who've made our way up in this industry feel occasional pride when we look at the gap between what they might have been and what they are.
That's great material, a given the interest in banks would be "serious" journalism but also pretty popular.
Will never ever happen.
GS could do something where staff charity donations are matched by the firm for some generally accepted good cause. Not cheap, but tax deductible. Not only won't it do that, but the respectable amounts of money if gives away seems to be more secret than the details of it's prop trading strategies.
ICAP, smaller, but with better PR has charity giving of such a high quality that it gets Prince Harry (Princess Di's son), and Elton John to pitch up at their offices at Xmas. Been there when they've done it, quite a hoot.
But to run this properly their PR would have to engage with the press, and most IB PRs have burned their bridges with individual journalists. In the real world of PR, there are favours given in both directions. A good PR will actively look around their firm for genuinely interesting stories, and feed them to specific journos to build up goodwill.
Also, it's worth understanding that the bulk of journalists are freelancers, who typically are paid by the word. That means research is unpaid work, and when they've spent the time doing it, they want to get as many articles from it as possible. If you make it hard for a journalist to do his job you are costing him money, and if you help him you are in effect paying him.
That's true to a large extent for staff journalists, their visible productivity is words on the page / screen. So you can smother a story by making life difficult for a hack, but the better way is to give him something to write. Bank PRs nearly always go for smother, and so have no friends.
GS PR is not worse than other banks, but it's quality of PR is below that required for the environment.
