In
February 2011, NBC ran a public relations generated story in its series,
America at the Crossroads, which extolled the virtues and endeavors of Intel, a
U.S. company that is spending billions of dollars of its capital on research and
development and K-12 education. The overall
message was that America once led the way in innovation and has time and again
transformed the economy, but what will be the next big thing? Intel was pitched as working vigorously and
leading the way towards the goal of finding “the next big thing.” The company’s CEO however believes the next
big thing will not be just one thing, but a combination of hi-tech, green-tech,
and bio-tech.
The
story mentioned the obstacles we have all heard; companies shipping jobs
overseas because of high corporate taxes and an education system that doesn’t
match up with competing countries. The Intel
CEO said that entrepreneurship is not the problem in the U.S., the problems are
that companies are too quick to ship jobs overseas where there are business
incentives and also university trained workers, going on to say that the U.S. has to
create conditions where both U.S. and foreign firms want to invest here.
It
was a clever PR piece and presented Intel almost as the lone warrior out
there fighting for America in its effort to regain preeminence in the
economic world. Intel has spent billions
of dollars on factories in Arizona, New Mexico, and Oregon. Also mentioned was the company A123 that is
building lithium batteries to put cars and to back-up our nation’s electrical grid
at its plant in Michigan. MIT achieved
great PR value for its professors being the brainchild of A123 and for having
26,000 active companies created by its alumni.
The story was filled
with images of workers and hi-tech equipment and was fantastic PR for Intel,
A123, and MIT. It took an issue that
almost everyone sees as critical to our future, though they may disagree on how
best to fix it, and painted Intel as the possible savior.
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