Cash for good media coverage backfires on Australian banks

Mr Frank Cicutto, head of the National Australia Bank (NAB), is not a man given to public confession, but he had to make an exception when giving the keynote speech to a conference on business ethics organised by the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne.

Perhaps it was the "divine intervention" he later alluded to which put Mr Cicutto, also chairman of the Australian Bankers' Association (ABA), on the podium in the midst of a huge public outcry over revelations that the ABA had paid a radio talk-back host 1.2 million Australian dollars to stop criticising the banks on air.

Fulfilling a long-standing commitment to the archbishop to speak last month, Mr Cicutto found himself apologising to the banking industry's customers, employees and shareholders for the controversy swirling around its cash-for-comment deal with Mr John Laws, a veteran Australian radio presenter and the most influential of the commercial talk-back jocks.

Such is Mr Laws's influence with his estimated two million listeners that when the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, wanted to sell an idea to the electorate, he would pop up on Mr Laws's morning show on Radio 2UE in Sydney knowing that the jolly, easy-going chat between two "mates" would be bumped out to another 78 stations throughout the country.

His influence has also made Mr Laws enormously wealthy. Depending on whom you talk to, the "Golden Tonsils" earns anything from Aus$3 million to Aus$6 million a year.

A canny way with advertisers is the big money-spinner for Mr Laws, on whose daily programme the line between editorial content and advertising is often blurred. The Tonsils will switch from chats with callers to stentorious, highly-opinionated comment to - live-read - advertisements with barely a pause for breath.

According to Australian advertising and media guru, Mr Phillip Adams, who once worked behind the scenes on the Laws programme, advertisers paid Mr Laws a fee of Aus$150 for each "live read" of an advertisement on air, totalling about Aus$24,000 for the 160 reads he averaged each week, plus extra payments when the reads were replayed on the 78 other stations.

And then there were the casual plugs, for which the banks and others gave generously. So the Aus$1.2 million deposit made by the banks was probably small beer to Mr Laws. Not so for the 10,000 Australians whose annual fees to the banks add up to the Mr Laws's payment.

But it was not until a media watchdog programme on ABC-TV, the government television network, investigated Mr Laws's business arrangements and exposed the deal with the banks last month that anyone had publicly questioned Mr Laws's methods.

The outcry was immediate and furious and the ripples are still being felt as media organisations and the influence peddling industry of public relations and spin-doctors feel the heat of public disapproval.

"I just find it quite extraordinary . . . that you people are so amazed that an individual like me should use a little entrepreneurial skill and go out and make some money," Mr Laws told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper when the deal came to light.

Mr Richard Ackland, a lawyer and presenter of the Media Watch programme, had obtained a memo written by the executive director of the ABA, the banking industry lobby group, for a private meeting of the association's executive - mostly the chief executives of the big banks. The arrangement was formalised in October 1998 and revealed on July 12th to have been designed to "reduce the negative comments about banks by John Laws from the present average four a week to nil" - concurrently to receive positive comments from Mr Laws (over and above the paid advertisements) - and by doing so, to shift Australians' perceptions of and attitudes towards banks".

Earlier this year, there were also embarrassing revelations of a NAB staff newsletter that advised tellers how to "hit back" at incessantly complaining customers. An "attacker" criticising the bank's Aus$2 billion profit, could be told by the teller that this was necessary to keep the bank's share price buoyant so it would not be taken over by a foreign bank. This, said the newsletter, would cause their "assailants" to "slink off, silent and defeated".

When the Aus$1.2 million deal was signed with Mr Laws, the banks were able to enjoy a far more positive spin on subjects close to the hearts of Australian banking consumers - waves of forced bank closures in suburbs and remote rural areas and ever-increasing bank fees while the bank executives themselves saw hugely inflated pay packets (Frank Cicutto's predecessor at NAB, Mr Don Argus, enjoyed a salary package of Au$2.71 million in 1998).

SO what happened once the deal was signed?

"So there you are, banks make big profits, but are they unreasonable about it? Maybe not when you know the whole story," Mr Laws told his 2UE listeners on March 1st, 1999.

"You know we do forget sometimes when we criticise them that banks are made up of people, too," he opined the following month.

Four days after the Media Watch expose, the Prime Minister added his voice to the roars of protest. It was only then that Mr Laws and the banks stopped denying the deal. On July 20th, the ABA terminated its image-building arrangement with Mr Laws and 2UE, saying it could no longer tolerate the criticism, much of it from official institutions, that the deal had generated.

The Laws affair is now to be the subject of six separate inquiries by the Australian Broadcasting Authority, Federal Parliament and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Meanwhile, the people the banks were trying to fool show every sign of not having taken the bait. As this letter from bank customer Ms Dorothy Simons, published in The Sydney Morning Herald, states: "As soon as the rain stops, I'll do two things: transfer the money from my bank account to the credit union and sell my bank shares."