Amazon Public Relations
. Amazon hires public relations firm to counter popular hostility to headquarters project in New York City By Clare Hurley 11 January 2019 “Happy New Year from your future neighbors at Amazon! Going in to 2019, we want to express how excited we are about becoming your neighbors in Long Island City, Queens,” proclaimed a propaganda ad that appeared in local news and social media last weekend. The Amazon conglomerate faces growing popular opposition over its low wages and brutal working conditions, as well as over its ability to unilaterally dictate terms to both political parties. Following a bidding process in which state and local politicians, both Republican and Democrat, competed amongst each other to offer the most favorable terms, Amazon decided to split its second headquarters between Queens in New York City, a short distance from Wall Street, and Crystal City, Virginia, a short distance from the Pentagon.
In New York City, where Amazon plans to build a 4 million square foot office complex in a former industrial area on the East River across from midtown Manhattan, Amazon has launched a charm offensive. It has hired former elected official-turned lobbyist Mark Weprin and the public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker, which boasts such high profile clients as former president Barack Obama, New York State governor Andrew Cuomo, and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. As part of its charm offensive, Amazon is claiming that locating one of its two new headquarters in New York City will be a boon to local residents. All of Amazon’s claims along these lines should be treated with skepticism if not outright contempt.
160 Amazon Public relations jobs in Bellevue, WA, including salaries, reviews, and other job information posted anonymously by Amazon Public relations employees in Bellevue. Find Amazon Bellevue Public relations jobs on Glassdoor. Amazon is taking a new approach to public relations -- it's farming out some of its PR work to a 'Holiday Customer Review Team,' made up of Amazon customers who've written a lot of reviews on the site. (Talk about making community work for you.) The company has announced what it calls its 'Holiday Customer Review Team.'
This is, after all, the same corporation that only months ago that it was doing workers a favor when it gave many of them a pay cut. With its headquarters project, Amazon is pursuing nothing more than naked business interests, as well as its objectives of further integrating itself into headquarters of finance capital (Wall Street) and the headquarters of the apparatus of military aggression and internal repression (Washington, D.C.). Amazon’s after-the-fact public relations campaign is aimed at ironing out popular opposition to what Amazon has already decided to do. In addition to its promise to create 25,000 “well-paying” tech jobs over the next 10 years—in exchange for which it will reap as much as $1.7 billion in state and local tax breaks—Amazon claims that the building of its campus in Anable Basin, a stone’s throw from the largest public housing complex in the US, will result in tens of thousands more “indirect” (and mostly lower paying) jobs in construction, building services and hospitality.
It also pledges to offer career training for local residents, many of whom are immigrant and minority, with a median income of $58,243 for those ages 25–44, and considerably lower for those under 25 or older than 44. This is nothing more than a rehash of the old trope of “trickle-down” economics.
The rich, by virtue of being rich, spend lots of money, for which the population should supposedly be thankful because this behavior “creates” jobs. Moreover, the number of jobs Amazon is required to “create” under the terms of the agreement is an ever-shifting and nebulous target. First announced in November 2018 by Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill De Blasio to be fifty thousand in ten years, it became clear that it actually will be twenty five thousand jobs since the overall number is to be split between Queens and the other headquarters that will be built in Arlington, Virginia. To obscure matters further, de Blasio has been citing a longer term number of forty thousand over 15 years. Skepticism is widespread. Greg LeRoy of the watchdog organization Good Jobs First believes the actual number of jobs Amazon would create would likely be much lower.
“I can’t identify another corporate headquarters that employs 50,000 people when they already have people elsewhere.” Even if Amazon were to create the full number of jobs, there is no guarantee that they would be full-time jobs maintained long-term at the promised $150,000 per year. Moreover, this cynical figure of $150,000 can in no way be accepted at face value, since it appears to involve averaging the pay of the high-paid Amazon executives with the rest of the workforce. Hostility to the Amazon headquarters project in New York City is more far-reaching than questions of the conglomerate’s misleading and ever-shifting promises.
Amazon Public Relations Director
There is a growing mood of combativeness among Amazon workers internationally over conditions in the company’s network of fulfillment centers, which is bound up with mounting opposition in other industries and sections of the working class. Moreover, the secretive and quasi-dictatorial way in which Amazon dictates terms to cities like New York City has exposed in stark terms the relationship between conglomerates like Amazon and America’s politicians.
In New York City, Amazon demanded (and politicians dutifully agreed) that Amazon’s development plans would be allowed to circumvent review by the City Council and be exempt from the usual land-use regulations. Bypassed entirely and left with no political cover whatsoever, a number of local elected officials have publicly denounced Amazon’s behavior, including City Council Speaker Cory Johnson and Councilmember for Queens, Jimmy Van Bramer. Van Bramer, embarrassed by having supported the deal a year ago before the full terms were clear (which among other provisions mandated a helipad for Amazon VIPs), issued a scathing report with State Senator Michael Gianaris in November, in which both politicians said they were not elected to “serve as Amazon drones.” At a raucous City Council meeting in December, city officials grandstanded and protesters unfurled a banner and heckled from the balcony.
For the benefit of those in attendance, Johnson, Van Bramer and others grilled two Amazon executives, who barely deigned to answer their questions. By that point, the deal was already an accomplished fact, having been structured by the governor’s office to circumvent the council’s approval altogether. Having saved face, Van Bramer is now more reconciled to drone status. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on them to answer for what they’ve agreed to in the deal.
I think that’s a good thing and I do believe that will produce some changes here.” Local residents have voiced significant concerns over the impact of the headquarters on housing availability, transportation infrastructure, even sewage management, all of which were already inadequate in the area before the HQ2 deal. These concerns have been seized upon by “grassroots activists” led in large part by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for their own political ends. In several community meetings in December packed with DSA supporters, tenant organizers and assorted other activist groups, speakers decried gentrification, although the area has been gentrifying over the past 10 years, and denounced Amazon’s exploitative labor practices. A resident of the public housing complex Queensbridge Houses spoke in Arabic of her fear that the additional 25,000 people would overcrowd the working class neighborhood, and other immigrant residents worried that Amazon’s close connections with ICE would jeopardize their safety. Keely Mullen, a representative from Socialist Alternative, brought greetings to the meeting from Kshama Sawant, SA’s member on the Seattle City Council.
Mullen described a tax measure that SA had organized in Seattle that would tax Amazon to guarantee high quality housing.
Amazon and The New York Times are beefing. This morning, Jay Carney, one-time White House press secretary and current Amazon PR boss,. It was a response to an August on the online retailer’s seemingly brutal workplace culture—and Carney didn’t hold back. He called the reporters’ credibility into question. He claimed that the Times missed out on providing crucial context to its readers. And he revealed personnel details on a handful of ex-Amazonians quoted in the piece to contradict the report, including information on one source who was apparently fired from Amazon after an investigation found that he had attempted to defraud vendors, then hid it by falsifying business records.
The, and very out of the blue. Meanwhile, the media was on the sidelines watching the whole thing unfold. Some wrote in praise of a where the public can now see the transparent back-and-forth between two very important and established entities.
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(A spokeswoman from Medium even wrote to WIRED: “Thought this would be the perfect time to shed light on this dynamic that Medium allows and what it means for stories that provoke dialogue.”) But the most interesting story here may be one that's much more old-fashioned. In a lot of ways, it's about yet another company trying to jostle its way into a better position after taking a public hit. And when you look at things that way, then yeah, it’s pretty much a tale we’ve heard before—it's just the platform that's changed. PR Balance To be sure, a lot of thought undoubtedly went into deciding whether or not Amazon was still in a position to respond to the Times, says Howard Bragman, a crisis communications expert and the chairman of Fifteen Minutes, a public relations firm. “The balance that a PR person always has to ask themselves is, ‘Are we going to make this a bigger story if we respond, or should we just let this going away and we can withstand this?’” Bragman tells WIRED. “And then the question becomes, ‘How do we want to respond?’” For Bragman, Amazon’s response was good overall. First, the fact that Jay Carney was the one who handled the response could make the company seem more credible, he says.
“Traditionally, it’s someone from PR who drafts a response, then the company CEO—Amazon’s CEO—would sign it,” Bragman says. “But Amazon apparently decided Carney was the right person for the job, that the association. Gives Amazon the gravitas it needs.” Taking the post to social media was a smart move too, Bragman adds. “You can tell your story unadulterated,” he says. “You get to tell your story in a pure, clear voice.”. 'My feeling is Jay Carney took to Medium specifically because he wanted the media to see it, and he wanted the Times to see it.' Kathleen Schmidt, director of marketing, Running Press It’s very different from the approach taken by another company, Theranos, which is facing its own PR crisis these days after that detailed the ways in which it apparently and worked hard to hide its many problems.
Theranos, which didn’t get the same attention Amazon’s post by Carney did. “A company blog has a certain perception,” Bragman says—it just feels obvious.
That said, Amazon did respond in a pretty traditional way right after the Times report. The same day the investigation was published, an a LinkedIn rebuttal post by one Amazon engineering manager. With a companywide memo, which was. And that difference is crucial, according to Schmidt. After all, Medium is where tech VIPs and investors are increasingly airing their grievances, celebrating their successes, and confessing their failures. Its audience isn't huge compared to, say, Facebook, but the people who do read it tend to be influential in the tech and media worlds—the audiences Amazon is seeking to reach.
Amazon Public Relations Director
“My feeling is Jay Carney took to Medium specifically because he wanted the media to see it, and he wanted the Times to see it,” Schmidt says. “He wants it to be in the news in certain places.” All About Timing Okay, so why make the move now? More likely than not, this is about timing. For one thing, Amazon —its first since the Times story was published. It may have wanted to show investors and shareholders that it has done something to address its culture image problem. And there’s another Amazon-related story that’s been all over the mainstream media this week, on morning shows, the radio, television, and the biggest tech news blogs: Amazon who offered to write fake reviews for a price. Fostering trust is very important to Amazon, especially now that we’re heading into the holiday season.
Unlike the hubbub on Medium, that’s the type of story that most consumers—like, people you could walk up to in your gym—would have heard about, says Schmidt. Still, in both cases, there’s one consistent message Amazon seems to be trying to put out there. “Amazon is sending a message out to the consumer: ‘We’re the trustworthy ones. We’re taking care of it. We’re the good guys,’' Schmidt says.
And fostering that trust is very important to Amazon, especially now that we’re heading into the holiday season, now that a whole lot of people are about to decide whether or not they want to go shopping on Amazon. Schmidt does acknowledge that one weird part of this is how Amazon has chosen to try and discredit The New York Times, when it might have been easier to let that story fade away. “It’s possible that there’s something we don’t know yet,” she says, musing that perhaps Amazon is about to announce less-than-stellar results during its earnings call on Thursday.
Whatever the case, she laughs off the possibility that maybe Carney “went rogue,” and decided to pen this missive on Medium independently. “Amazon is a very public company and The New York Times is a very public news organization,” she says. “It’s not like the Times has a spokesperson handling the response. They have their executive editor going to bat for them.” “Amazon, meanwhile, has its head PR guy who was Obama’s PR guy.
But you’re still a PR person, no matter where you are. You know what you’re doing, and you know why you’re doing it.”.