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©The Malaysian Insider (Used by permission)
by Justin Ong

JUNE 28 — The continuing furore over Indonesian maids (or domestic helpers, your preference) serves to illustrate that many Malaysians – and Indonesians – are yet to grasp the dynamics of an employer-employee relationship, even if they are already in one at work.

For some inexplicable reason, these individuals have resorted to lowering the worth of their maids to little more than chattel, to be traded and treated any way they see fit. Less than human, and possibly even less than the dogs and cats that they keep at home.

When you hire a maid, you are doing exactly that – hiring someone. Nothing more, nothing less. You do not own them; they are not your slaves; and while they owe you their living, they do not owe you their lives. Paying someone for services rendered does not in turn render you the right to maltreat, abuse, torture, or in any way make their existence miserable.

The whole affair also serves as an apt analogy for the advertising/media relationship. Just as some people get carried away when they pay for a maid, so do some companies when they take out an ad or three in the media.

When a company chooses to advertise (with a magazine, newspaper, website, whatever), that is all they are doing – advertising. Your advertising ringgit buys you ad-space in the medium of your choice. Nothing more, nothing less.

This advertising money does not buy you allegiance, it is not a method with which you curry favour, and it is certainly not the best way to go about winning friends. So while an advertisement allows you to use the media as a platform to get your message across, it does not mean that you get the media's endorsement along with it. One is not the same as the other.

As with abusive employers, there are far too many companies that see fit to misuse advertising to leverage pressure on the media. They feel it is perfectly acceptable to threaten outwardly the withdrawal of advertising as a means to “punish” wayward (in their eyes) editorial content, or to dangle it like a carrot to encourage positive reports.

I know of one incident where a company cancelled all their ads with a motoring pullout. What grievous insult prompted such severe action? A writer in that pullout opined that he preferred white-coloured lights to the green ones used in one of the company’s products, as he thought white looked more modern.

The painful fact is that such absurdly disproportionate reactions are the norm rather than the exception. If they get so riled up from just a passing comment about their choice of colours, what more when someone points out an actual flaw?

In the high stakes game that is business, bad news (though the above example shows that there is a huge sliding scale for what constitutes bad) is often taken as disastrous; that is understandable.

Yet it is only proper that everybody take a step back, if and when bad news does surface, to consider if the news really is as negative as it initially looks.

Someone saying you’re a dirty, rotten scoundrel peddling sub-standard products to unsuspecting buyers is bad news. Someone saying white is nicer than green is not, that is just an opinion. And it’s time everybody involved learned to tell the difference.

Take criticism for what it is: advice and motivation to get it done better the next time around or now, if it is still possible. And if it’s a misconception or inaccuracy, that’s why you retain an expensive press relations/public relations/corporate communications setup. As for fair comment? Well, you just gotta roll with the punches.

I doubt anyone would get upset should a company react to malicious content by pulling their advertising, but there is little value in muscling editorial just because they don’t paint a perfect picture every time they sit down at the keyboard.

Corporations that regularly choose to flex their considerable “economic influence” are doing nothing other than undermining the credibility of the very medium that they themselves have chosen, an exercise that can only ever be ultimately self-defeating.

The media, for their part, should also take pains to sequester their editorial staff from the marketing/sales team – for never the twain shall meet. Life would be so much simpler if writers view the sales team as the people who make it so money magically appears in their bank accounts at the end of each month while the latter should always maintain their view of writers as “the bastards who make our lives a living hell.”

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