The 'Opposite of Marketing' Isn't Research Communications
Why media-centric communications makes us all bad actors.
Getting scientists to work with science communicators used to be easy, at least when I was a science communicator. Tell them you’re committed to communicating their work accurately (unlike the media) and, if that didn’t persuade them, tell them what you do is “the opposite of marketing.”
Their eyes would pop wide at this phrase. For them, “the opposite of marketing” meant: The opposite of hype, exaggeration, and distortion—the opposite of lying. “The opposite of marketing” opened the doors of the mustiest of scientific hermits, because marketing was the devil. And even if I later used some marketing tactics on their behalf, the enemy of their enemy was their always their friend.
I’ve been thinking about “the opposite of marketing” ever since reading a recent piece by Paul von Zielbauer, a former New York Times reporter, who used his Substack to ask hard questions about a study published in Nature Aging from Stanford researchers claiming, as Fox News put it, “aging speeds up ‘massively’ at two points in one’s lifetime” (around age 45 and again at around age 60) due to what Stanford Medicine’s comms team termed “massive biomolecular shifts” that make biological aging in humans “anything but constant.”
If you regularly read health research, you develop a pretty sensitive bullshit detector. Mine went all Geiger counter when that study came out. Unfortunately, the legacy media’s didn’t—part of a “deliberate two-step,” as Von Zielbauer lays it out, “that is all too common in the world of grant-funded research”:
First, researchers and their research comms team oversell the findings of a study in their press comms;
Then, journalists read the press comms instead of reading the study and print the headline the research comms team want them to;
Stanford gets “major-media coverage for research that future donors will surely notice (and potentially reward), while
“The news companies banked lots of revenue-generating clicks.”
Von Zielbauer’s right: The two-step is deliberate, and it’s all too common as well. There’s a tweetstorm or Substack or (or even sometimes, if we’re lucky, an article in the legacy media) seemingly every week lamenting how the marketing of a study got way out over the skis of the actual findings and then, instead of being corrected by the legacy media, gets exploited by those outlets (rushed and/or science-illiterate) for their own ends.
What confuses me is von Zielbauer’s conclusion, which everybody else always reaches as well: We need better guardrails, because…this shouldn’t be happening. This isn’t what science/research do.
Really?
Is it a bug, or a feature?
The Media-Centric Communications Trap
I think to understand this fully, we need to go back to the old days of research communications. By which I mean: Before the pandemic.
Because, back in the old days, reseachers and their communications folk spent quite a lot of time feeling helpless—supplicants trapped in a media-centric communications world.
That doesn’t sound like “Saw IV” if you’ve never had to live it. But if you’ve been a researcher who wanted to reach an audience you couldn’t already reach, you had little choice but to try to reach it through the media, which theoretically might have that audience (who knew?). So you pitched/sucked up to the media in a dozen different ways that almost always left you feeling exhausted, ignored, misunderstood or used—sometimes all of the above. Then you’d have to do it all over again the next time you had a new paper or something to say. They had the power; they had the platforms. And, unless it wasn’t crystal clear, they really didn’t care about you or your nuances or that important thing they left out of the quote.
YouTube and Substack and X et al. have changed the game for researchers. These direct-to-public platforms have given rise to what I call the new public experts, experts who use their own content and the platforms’ conversational capabilities to cultivate their own audiences, without intermediaries. As traditional media implodes, direct-to-public media continues to grow. The current presidential campaign—in which both major candidates avoided legacy media interviews but rushed to talk to podcasters—exemplifies the shift. The Age of Niches is upon us. If you’re not joining it, you should be. It is audience-centric and expert-centric, not media-centric. It is altogether healthier and more productive for all parties (except for the legacy media).
Of course, legacy media are still with us, and you or your communications folk might still think dealing with them is to your advantage. So this is where I ask: What’s the legacy for researchers of decades of media-centric communications? What are the maladpative habits that research communications has learned from decades of putting the media and its priorities first—and that don’t transfer well to being a new public expert?
Here’s my first draft at a list:
Thinking communicating with the public is just simplification. Because that’s what the media do. When we don’t see another way of reaching our audience, we don’t think about how we might deliver value to those audiences directly, through the utility of our expertise.
Framing everything with news pegs. Media-centric communications values research-based insights only when they dovetail tightly with “news pegs” (i.e., current events that are driving or are good bets to drive the news). That sidelines insights about the drivers of broader, less visible trends and insights about microtrends that might be valuable to niche audiences—both of which are the bread and butter of new public experts.
Waiting to get picked instead of picking ourselves. Media-centric communications is about getting quoted or chosen for publication—a process that makes you the supplicant to reporters and editors and makes you completely dependent. That defines “success” as being included in others’ narratives, regardless of how divergent they are from our own. Thinking that communications is trying to get quoted rather than trying to deliver maximum value directly to your growing audience/community and figuring out your best modes for doing that. Cultivating obsequiousness to reporters and editors. Depending too much on media agendas, business models, trends and platforms to get our insights heard, start conversations and grow audiences.
Confusing media power with communications power. Defining “success” as access to media power rather than direct access to our target audiences.
Hating some of what makes us expert. Learning that nuance and uncertainty are handicaps, that process is weakness, and that what you think and know is the last thing you should say out loud.
Conflict rather than conversation. Thinking that communications is adversarial and unpleasant, a game that you win or survive in an exchange with the media, rather than a conversation that you invest in and that’s ongoing.
Excusing distortion. Thinking that distorting or exaggerating findings are OK if they get the media’s attention.
That last one brings us back to whether we all get old much faster in some random-sounding years according to a study done of a handful of rich white Nothern Californians.
Distorting Research Findings: A Feature, Not a Bug
We all live in Information Space now, as Brian Morrissey calls it. And in Information Space, everyone is vying for your attention.
Everyone, including science.
And getting attention through old-fashioned means—through the media, or even through an algorithm—is now extremely difficult, almost a matter of luck or magic. If the playing field is level, it requires some mysterious and magical combination of timeliness, outrageousness, counterintuitiveness, and a healthy pre-existing network that spontaneously agrees that sharing your message will benefit them as well.
This is why large, well-funded universities and research centers have public information officers. Their job is to get attention for their organizations’ and institutions’ research and researchers. If they’re doing their job, they’re looking for every way possible to make your new research and your work not just relevant enough, but exciting enough and urgent enough to break through the garbage-disposal noise levels of Information Space. It’s they’re job to push that envelope. In doing so, sometimes they break it.
This is a feature, not a bug, of institutional science communication today.
The media critic Alexander Cockburn once said that the corrections box in The New York Times functioned to assure you that everything else in the paper was accurate. Stories like von Zielbauer’s have the same function. That’s not a criticism of their existence. It’s an admission of the obvious: If we’re catching this many overhyped, overframed studies, how many more are slipping by unnoted, assumed to be accurate representations of the underlying science?
As a scientist or other kind of researcher, you probably understand the benefits of promoting your new research. But as a public expert, you should also understand that, once you offer your research up to Information Space through this system—the science-media-industrial-hype complex, you are committing to go right up to the line of credibility—and probably step over it. You’re entering a process and a system that punish modesty and reward exaggeration. And that this is a bad habit—not the worst—of a media-centric communications posture.
It’s a myth that PIOs and science communicators overframe studies on their own, while the authors of the study toil away in their labs, unaware of the marketing sins being committed in the name of their paper. In my experience, not a single piece of comms goes out promoting a study without at least the lead author signing off on the copy. Study authors are on the ground floor of formulating the communications strategy for the study—which includes development of the messaging, which of course the authors will have to know for interviews.
In the science-media-industrial-hype complex, there are no innocents.
There is no “opposite of marketing” anymore.
Unless it’s engaging honestly and directly with your audience.