There’s a certain rhythm to corporate PR. A company is facing disaster—lawsuits, financial ruin, regulators breathing down its neck—and then, suddenly, a barrage of good news appears. Exciting partnerships! Groundbreaking technology! A pipeline of contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars! If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were on the verge of world domination.
Except, of course, it’s almost always nonsense. Not necessarily outright lies, but a carefully crafted avalanche of distraction. The idea is simple: bury the bad news under so much optimism that no one notices the cracks forming in the foundation. Give investors something else to focus on. Keep the stock price propped up just long enough for the next round of financing. Flood search engines and social media with so much positivity that any unflattering headlines get pushed further down the results page, like an embarrassing Facebook memory you’d rather forget.
It’s a strategy that works—until it doesn’t. WeWork did it. Boeing did it. FTX did it spectacularly, throwing money at stadium sponsorships while its balance sheet was rotting from the inside. Even the world’s best PR team can’t spin reality forever. At some point, someone’s going to ask why the company, which claimed to have secured billions in future revenue, still can’t pay its debts or deliver what it promised.
You see it all the time. A company is hemorrhaging credibility, but instead of addressing the problem, they double down on the spin. “Oh, we’re being sued? Well, have you heard about our groundbreaking expansion plans?”“We’re under regulatory investigation? But look, here’s a photo of our executives shaking hands with important people!” It’s the corporate equivalent of putting out a house fire by waving a really big flag and hoping nobody notices the smoke.
The real trick, though, is timing. The announcements don’t come randomly. They drop exactly when the company needs them most—when stockholders are getting twitchy, when lenders are looking nervous, when investors might just start asking difficult questions. The more dramatic the bad news, the bigger and louder the good news has to be. And sometimes, if they’re really desperate, they’ll announce the same good news twice, just with slightly different wording.
It would almost be impressive if it wasn’t so transparent. Because if you look closely, the pattern is always the same. The headlines are vague, the details are murky, and the numbers are suspiciously round. “We’ve secured $500 million in future contracts!” Fantastic. Who are the buyers? What are the terms? When do the payments start? No answers.Just trust us, everything is going brilliantly.
Of course, the problem with this strategy is that it only works as long as no one checks the receipts. And eventually, someone always does. That’s when the carefully crafted narrative collapses under its own weight, and all that “good news” starts to look a lot like stalling for time.
Because at the end of the day, reality doesn’t care about PR campaigns. It doesn’t care about carefully managed social media posts, staged photo ops, or enthusiastic press releases. If a company is in trouble, no amount of distraction will change that. The only question is how long they can keep the act going before everyone realizes the emperor isn’t just naked—he’s also very, very broke.