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Shit or Shinola
A Vital New Communications Vehicle for Today's Public Relations Operative
by Greg Coyle

Connections are often made in the queerest of ways. An unexpected bear mauling and you realize it's probably best to ditch your new fragrance, "Dumpster" for Men. A visit from the good people at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and you discover that those emails are traceable. A destroyed couch and it becomes clear that no matter how smart sponge pants might be for the small-bladdered, there remains one nasty design flaw. This is all to say that realizations often come at the most unexpected times, triggered by the most mundane of activities. And it is the good PR professional that is on guard for such moments, no matter the circumstances.

Consider the revelation I had recently. First, some diet background for color. I'd earlier on this particular evening enjoyed a dinner of spicy Indian fare, followed up later by a visit to a local watering hole and the introduction to the business end of a few pints of the good stuff. Maybe it was the chicken vindaloo talking, or perhaps it was the half dozen flagons of stout, but soon something was afoul in Bumbay. Without going into details, let's just say I landed in the middle of a troubling digestive episode.

Excusing myself, I braved the place's bathroom, which had all the hygienic cleanliness of a Soviet gulag. The stall, a perfect name considering it was barely fit to house incontinent farm animals, was small and the kind of place you read about the authorities finding one-time child stars passed out in their own filth. What it did have going for it, aside from a certain suspect privacy, was a museum's worth of artwork and graffiti. As my urgency made finding and bringing reading material an impossibility, I was pleased to discover such was being provided for me. So while I gave my chicken masala a stern talking to, I took to reading the walls around me.

Many of the standards were there. You know, "For a good time, call Tina 555-1875," "Ted B. sucks big green donkey dicks," "Why are you looking up here, the joke is in your hand," "Tap more than twice and you're beating off," etc. Let's be honest, these tried and true contributions never fail to satisfy. Their near ubiquity makes me wonder if there isn't perhaps a branch of, say, the FDA that sees to it that all new bathrooms, and all newly painted bathrooms, are immediately outfitted with these ageless bits of wit and wisdom.

Reading on, I found the familiar ("Most people come here to take a shit, I come here to leave one," "Don't throw cigarette butts in the urinal, as it makes them soggy and hard to light," "If you're reading this, you're pissing on your shoe."). Some were rhymed of course ("No matter how you jiggle, and how you dance, the last few drops end up on your pants."). Others were political or philosophical ("Save the whales - collect the whole set," "Confucius say: STOP QUOTING ME!" "God is dead. - Nietzsche, Nietzsche is dead. - God."). But best of all were the conversations between strangers. One wrote, "My mother made me a whore," to which someone else added: "If I give her the yarn, will she make me one too?" Another writer scribbled: "I screwed your mom last night," under which was written: "Go home, dad, you're drunk."

But then such have been an important part of doing our business for millennia. Even good old barely bipedal australopithecene man, his woolly-mammoth drawers at his ankles, was surely prone to scratching obscene pictographs on the cave wall showing Og having congress with a yak. A few generations later, the following was supposedly excavated from a Roman bath in Pompeii: "Wine, women and the baths destroy our bodies and our minds, but make life worth living." And right under it: "Nero gives good head."

The point is this: Before there were town criers, there was graffiti. Before there were newspapers, or radio, or television, there was graffiti. Before there was the fax, the Internet, chat rooms, email, banner advertising, online marketing, Web casts, streaming video, real audio, wideband anything, there was graffiti. As long as humankind has grunted out that day's breakfast burrito or its equivalent, people have sought to make some record of their visit for others to enjoy.

So there I am, endeavoring myself to deal with the spicy consequence of one especially hot chutney, and it comes to me. It was the kind of elegant idea on which careers are made. Like the guy who came up with "now with Retsin," or the genius behind the "McRib" sandwich," or, not to be forgotten, the visionary who said yes to a talking Chihuahua as taco shill.

What is this amazing idea? Simply this: As PR flacks, we need to take our client's story not to some editor with webbed toes and an English-Klingon dictionary, or some analyst who lives alone with cat and a home library of Barbra Streisand movies. No, we need to take it to the dirty, foul-smelling trenches, where real people do their daily impersonation of "The Thinker." We need to take it to the bathroom wall, the stall door, even to those slivers of grout separating otherwise indelible squares of tile! We need to take it to the paper towel and toilet seat cover dispensers, the toilet paper roll, even the mirror if we happen to have a Sharpie. And if there are pictures on the bathroom wall, we need to make dialog bubbles for those depicted and have them distribute our message!

You're a public relations professional, so get to communicating with the entire public, male, female; rich, poor; old, young; constipated, loose-boweled; smart, moronic. And do it in that one place that cannot be avoided - the can, the head, the john, the loo, whatever you call it. Forget the Web, analyst tours, press releases, and that soporific waste of paper known as the trade publication. Who really reads "Pulleys and Winches Quarterly" anyway except certain sexual fetishists who misunderstand the title? No one, that's who.

But those same no ones have to eventually pass that General Tso's chicken they had for lunch, and you'll be there waiting for them, right there on the back of the stall door. Beneath "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think," you write, in a durable company-issue marker: "So let us do the thinking for her! [insert company name] has leveraged its technology to create a new paradigm in [insert industry]." Or maybe someone has written: "JESUS SAVES!" so you add: "But if you're still spending too much, let [insert company name] show you its proven [insert industry] value-added solution, delivered at a competitive price point."

Those are just two ideas. Put your brightest minds to work on it, and who knows what might be cooked up. There are nearly as many opportunities in this untapped communications vehicle as there are asses in the world. Get a bran muffin manufacturer in your client stable, or a coffee maker, or a peddler of cranberry juice or prunes, and you double your chances for success, completing a perfectly designed marketing circle...!

Here's the advantage. Suddenly, every bowl of bad clam chowder, ever Mexi nugget, every Monte Cristo sandwich and plate of fried cheese is working for you. Every glass of tap water or herbal tea, every beer, every supersized soda, they're all fueling your PR program. And don't forget perhaps your greatest allies, the calorie-counting scientists who gave us that old stool-softener, Olean. All are now in service of your client!

As for me, well, I realized that next time a two turban on the spiciness scale will be plenty. But don't you worry; I'll be fine. I'm restored by the knowledge that I'm changing the marketplace, and that I'm doing it the old-fashioned way, one asshole at a time.