Pulling teeth: the unenviable task of getting basic information out of an inhouse PR department

Pulling teeth: the unenviable task of getting basic information out of an inhouse PR department

Getting basic information from an in-house PR agency in Dubai can prove a Herculean task. We challenged 10 of them to provide Kipp with some tricky, but not impossible, bits of company information.

June 30, 2008 10:16 by Aarti Nagraj

Emirates

Q: How many people have mortgages with NBD

The in-house PR person told us that they were not in a position to answer the question, but asked us to try our luck with the marketing department. In spite of using the PR reference, the marketing person seemed quite skeptical about why we wanted the information, and asked us to send a mail with our company details.

He then put us to another person, who finally told us that the information was confidential. We asked them whether there was any legal problem, as we didn’t need any names or financial data, just the number of people. There was no legal issue, they said, just that the company didn’t wish to share those details with us.

(3 stars)

Roads and Transport Authority (RTA)

Q: How much is the average taxi driver’s take home pay?

As soon as they heard we were from the media the PR person said we needed to send an email. Which we did. And got no response. So we sent another reminder mail. Again no response. Another call. ” We have sent it to the concerned people, we’ll try to get it back to you soon.” Despite repeated reminders, we are still waiting.

(0 stars)

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Tags: agency, business, damac, Dubai, Duty free, emaar, emirates, Emirates NBD, information, Jumeirah, nakheel, phone call, PR, press