Take 30 Seconds to Read!!

Here’s a story of a lovely lady — who is so pissed off she turned to me to vent!

“Richard,” she wrote. “Here’s a really stupid email pitch.” What she meant: What’s wrong with this woman?

First, the pitch – which I have to say is about the dumbest I’ve seen in many months, so her name is left in (sorry Kev): [Brackets mine.] And I got to say this is the first bad pitch about cake, which I did not think was possible, since I'm all about the sweets in life!

Here you go, for your reading pleasure:

...Donna B's Bakery in Laguna Niguel [yet] was chosen to serve the wedding cake tower at the Mamma Mia Premier event on July 18th where 20 couples were formally wed to kick off the new movie at the IKEA Stores [This is like Mad TV!] in Burbank, CA.

The wedding cake cupcake "tower" was a huge hit and was featured on Entertainment Tonight and other entertainment news venues [No wonder ET’s ratings are down, eh.]. A copy of the photo of the tower is available on request. [Please, please send me???]

Donna B will be celebrating 15 years of serving her gormet [sic, nice use of Spell Check, kiddo] cakes, cupcakes and now new [now it’s new, okay] double-dipped brownies. Donna B began by selling her cookie dough and became the first to do the cookie dough fundraisers for education. [Don’t even tell me.]

Donna B would love to talk with you about her latest baking inventions, offerings and successes, please let me know if you have any availability for a discussion.

Sincerely,

Karen Gleason
GGC [standing for Great, Good Ca-ca!] Public Relations, LLC

My friend runs a blog that is SOOOOOO not anywhere in the same vicinity as to do a damn thing for Donna and her cakes. (See the rest of thi for more.) Plus, "Mama Mia" is a little more than a 180 from her sensibilities (again, see below).

So, here is HER vivid, unedited response, with her name left out because, well, you can go to her fabulous blog and learn about this woman (who, incidentally, is hardly a complainer and a ton of fun!):

...Karen:

I'm baffled [she wanted to say “Asshole!”] as to why I received this email from you. My web site is devoted to cooking every dish in The French Laundry Cookbook [www.frenchlaundryathome.com] and writing about it. If you had taken 30 seconds to read my blog and my mission statement in the blog's header as well as in the right-hand navigation column, you would have known this email was not appropriate to send to me. Bad targeting aside, you have two different spellings of the movie "Mamma Mia!" in your subject line and the body of the email, and you didn't even spell the word "gourmet" properly. On top of all that, there's nothing at all newsworthy about the email you sent me, so I'm not even sure what the purpose of this email could have been. Oh wait -- I do know. You needed to bill your client -- an independent businesswoman who trusted you to know your stuff -- for work, and this is the best you could come up with. Not cool. Not cool at all. [Not only not cool, kids, but silly and the kind of thing that gets you bad press, like, well THIS.]

Take it from someone who has been doing public relations for 20 years and has owned her own successful public affairs firm since 2001, emails like this, quite honestly, give the entire profession a bad name. [Amen!]

[And the kicker that no one wishes to receive:]

Please remove me from your distribution list.

...Do you wanna know what my pal does on her blog? She’s making the menu of Thomas Keller’s un-touchable French Laundry restaurant at home piece by piece.

All I can add to the sad but hilarious tale of the bad pitch is a repeat of the above: TAKE 30 SECONDS TO READ WHO YOU ARE PITCHING or get out of PR. Is it that difficult? Cause if it is, then one more piece of advice: We are watching you carefully. The BPB is going to get the Karens of the world. And stop the madness.

I hereby refuse to let this woman have her cake and...you know the rest.