Useless PR people

I am so sick of having to chase PRs because they can't write press releases that don't have glaring errors. There's been a spate of it recently. It is so irritating to start on a story and then find it doesn't add up.

This morning's is a silly little filler piece about the Legoland in California. They are about to attempt the world record for the tallest tower built in Lego.

"The current Guinness World Record is held by AS Rekato Ltd., the company who organised the building of a LEGO tower built in Tallinn, Estonia in August 1998. The tower took four days to build reaching a height of 25 metres (82 feet) and was made of 391, 478 LEGO bricks. LEGOLAND California will have to create a tower at least 83 feet in height to break the current record", the press release says.

So far so good.. until I look at the caption for the accompanying photo..

"William Zetina, left, looks up at the LEGO World Record Tower as his brother Eduardo Zetina, right, works on his own LEGO creation before the official measurement of the world's tallest LEGO tower at LEGOLAND California Monday, Feb. 16, 2004 in Carlsbad, Calif. The tower made of over 500,000 LEGO bricks is over 90 feet tall breaking the previous record of 89 feet held by LEGOLAND in Denmark."

??!!

So which is it?

(My guess was that this is an annual event for them and somebody simply cut & pasted the copy from last year's press release. But no. It turns out that Legoland in California and the one in Denmark have both broken the record before. In the case of California they set a new record last year. The problem is they weren't verified by Guinness. You would think maybe that should have been mentioned on the release!).

But how about these for examples of brain-dead PR execs...

Two late availability/bargain press releases for family holidays. One of them was for a family holiday at an all in family price.... to Las Vegas in the middle of term! And the other was for a "half-term family holiday", at an all-in family price, to the Costa Brava... by coach for ten days!

Bright young PR things, clearly without children or brain cells!