Last Wednesday I was sitting by myself in a stuffy copy room. I was bored. Beyond bored, really. There are few things on this planet more mind-numbing than waiting for an excruciatingly slow photocopier to finish your massive 300-page print order. In an attempt to defy the boredom, I went on social media to read my latest updates. I was scrolling through Facebook when I suddenly saw it. It was the tiniest of little press releases, barely noticeable amongst all the much more flashy motorsport news on my timeline. Ninety-nine percent of the press release’s text was in perfect order… but then I caught sight of that one word. It was only ten letters long, but my boredom was instantly forgotten. I was breathing fire.
The press release was written by someone at Aust Motorsport, presumably a PR employee. Aust will compete in the GT Masters championship this year and with the press release it wanted to announce its four new drivers for this season: Xavier Maassen, Lukas Schreier, Marco Bonanomi, and Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky. It’s not necessarily easy to write a PR-text like that. What you want to do in such a text is share some interesting key facts about your drivers to engage the audience. What you don’t want is write four full driver biographies that’ll bore that same audience to death. You need to keep your descriptions short and to-the-point. You must make your mark straight away, in no more than one or two words tops. The best way to do this is by using a noun or an adjective, possibly a combination of the two. It’s a fool-proof method to show the reader in one glance what a driver’s focal characteristic is.
Aust’s PR department knows this technique and has applied it extensively in the press release, for all four drivers. What do they really want us to know about Xavier Maassen? He’s Dutch. (Helloooo, Aust sponsors from the Netherlands! Greetings also from the marketing department!) What do they really want us to know about Lukas Schreier? He’s an ADAC-supported driver. (Woohoo! Massive young talent!) What do they really want us to know about Marco Bonanomi? He’s an Audi factory driver. (Seriously-proper-driver alert!) And what is the adjective they chose to sum up the main asset of Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky, their only girl driver?
Attractive.
Where the male racers receive a description referring to their personal achievements, Mikaela has to make do with a banal reference to her looks. I struggle to understand what Aust’s PR department is trying to achieve with this description. What could be the advantage for them in suggesting that Mikaela brings nothing more to the team than a pretty face? What benefits do they reap from insinuating that Mikaela’s entire worth as an athlete can be measured by her exterior? Moreover, what makes it good for them to ignore her entire sporting resume as a source for a description? There are so many great character tags on there. Up-and-coming racer. FIA Women In Motorsport representative. Volkswagen Scirocco R-Cup race winner. Audi TT Cup graduate. What could possibly have been the reason for ignoring all of that and instead choosing ‘attractive’, the one word that renders everything she’s ever done in motorsport mute?
I’ll give Aust’s PR department the benefit of the doubt here and assume their choice of words is nothing more than unfortunate and not thought through properly. But just in case it’s not: dear Mikaela, fight hard this season and prove them wrong.
A translation of the Aust press release.