Red Packets in the USA!

Posted on August 23, 2025 by Will Moss

Evaluating a New York media scandal on the international beer metric

Twenty years ago last March, I wrote my first blog post about PR in China. I had been living and blogging in China for nine months, but my early posts focused on daily life and had titles like, “I successfully speak Chinese to people,” and “I shop,” and so on. These are real titles, not jokes. I was delirious with culture shock.1

When I finally wrote about work, I started with a post on a China PR practice that I found deeply weird. This was the “transportation claim,” the practice of giving every reporter who attended a press event an envelope of cash. Coming from obsessively Windexed Singapore, where I had started my PR career, this seemed sketchy. But my colleagues assured me that it was standard practice.

In those days the going rate was 200RMB (then about US$25) for a Beijing print reporter who had come from in town. There were different rates for television crews and out-of-town reporters.

Was giving a modest envelope of cash to a reporter who worked for state-owned media a violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? I didn’t know! But the leadership of the Beijing office of the big U.S. PR firm I worked at didn’t seem concerned, so, 🤷.

I jokingly titled that old post, “A scholarly analysis of the economics of PR in China.” In it, I used beer, the PR pro’s favorite commodity, as a unit to assess the value of the transportation claim on a purchasing-power parity basis. In 2005 you could get a tall Yanjing or a pint of Beijing Asahi for RMB3 if you knew where to drink. Deducting the average cost of two typical Beijing taxi rides from the transportation claim, I calculated you’d have about RMB150 left over, or enough for up to fifty beers.

In Singapore, which was my frame of reference, I calculated you’d need an envelope with a minimum of SGD$270 (about USD$180 at the time) to achieve the same thing.2 Hand a lot of those out and you would be at real risk of a sweaty afternoon in the basement of the Corrupt Practices Bureau.

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The Life and Death of a Cool Phone

Posted on July 25, 2025 by Will Moss

That time we tried to make the Moto X in the U.S.A.

I’d been working for Burson-Marsteller in China for nearly six years when I got poached away by our client, Motorola. Jumping from agencies to clients can be tricky, but my boss at Burson gave me her blessings. Maybe she thought it would be good to have an alum as the client. Or maybe she was just happy to be rid of me and my obnoxious blog.

This was 2010 and the iPhone was popular, but not yet the Greatest Consumer Product of All Time. Smartphones hadn’t changed the world, but you could feel the change coming and everyone wanted in on the action.

I’d been smitten the first time I handled an iPhone, in 2008, and I’d bought a first-generation model shortly thereafter, on a work trip to San Diego. At the time, all iPhones were U.S. only and locked to AT&T. I had to jailbreak mine when I got it back to China so I could use it on China Mobile. This was terrifying, like performing brain surgery on your child with kitchen implements. I was sure I was going to lobotomize my new $600 superphone.1

Amazingly, the patient lived. I promptly abandoned both my Motorola Razr V3 flip phone and my Burson-issued China Mobile Blackberry, which looked like a prop from the old Adam West “Batman” TV show. This lasted until I got a nastygram from Burson’s IT department scolding me for using an “unauthorized client.” Reluctantly, I shifted my work email back to the Bat-Berry. But I used the iPhone for everything else.

No regrets! As small and slow as early models were, touchscreen smartphones were obviously going to revolutionize mobile computing and change our experience of the world. I’d known that the moment I saw the New York Times home page microscopically rendered on a 3 1/2 inch display, and again the first time I saw the map application tracking our location in real time while in a car. The only thing I regretted was losing the tactile snap! of slamming the Razr shut. Hanging up on someone would never be as satisfying again.

I was in love with smartphones and when Motorola came calling, I was ready. Motorola was still a behemoth in 2010, but activist investor Carl Icahn was cleaving the company in two. Motorola Mobility, the new smartphone-focused business, had lured Sanjay Jha away from Qualcomm to be CEO. Jha was all-in on Android, and Motorola had launched the first Android smartphone in China, the lozenge-shaped XT800. I shelved my iPhone for an Android-powered handset, a goony Motorola Milestone with a slide-out keyboard. The future was wide open and the smartphone market was there for anyone to seize!

In theory.

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The Kiss-Cam of Annihilation

Posted on July 19, 2025 by Will Moss

The reputational risks of being a Coldplay fan

Here is proof that the universe hates you:

You go to a Coldplay show with your paramour thinking you will be safely anonymous in a darkened arena full of 50,000 people with similarly questionable music taste. Suddenly, like the eye of Sauron, the arena kiss-cam falls upon the two of you. Your canoodling mugs are now up there on the Jumbotron, illuminated and 10,000 times larger than life.

If you’re at the concert with your date-who-is-definitely-not-your-spouse and with whom you have a professional relationship that absolutely precludes getting handsy at a Coldplay show, and the spotlight hits you, what is the move?

Counterintuitively, the move is to kiss for the kiss cam, and maybe smile and wave. In short, do what you’re supposed to do in that situation, and, in so doing, be unremarkable so the camera moves on.

The problem is that in this situation the human instinct to cower, hide and radiate high-energy shame particles is so lizard-brain reflexive, you’d have to be the genetic cross of Ethan Hunt and Mr. Spock to suppress it in the moment.

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In this very real and not-theoretical situation, two people conspicuously did not suppress the instinct to cower and radiate shame particles. Instead, when the kiss-cam found them, they acted as guilty as a couple on a tryst could possibly act:

View the video on TikTok

It is physically impossible to act any more busted than that. The LeBron James of acting busted1 could not act more busted.

Humans are social animals and naturally wired to recognize deep cringe. Coldplay singer Chris Martin and everyone else in the arena noticed this behavior. Within moments it was all over the Internet and the couple was promptly identified as the married CEO of software company Astronomer.io and his head of human resources who is definitively not his wife. It has since ascended into mainstream national media.2

This is a crisis! A personal crisis. A corporate crisis. And definitely a music taste crisis. Let’s take them in order.

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Who Speaks for the Killer Shark?

Posted on July 5, 2025 by Will Moss

You’re gonna need a bigger PR plan

I saw Jaws for the first time when it premiered on network television. This was in in November 1979, just after I’d turned 12 and more than four years after the movie had been in theaters.

In those days, if you wanted to see a movie after its theatrical run, tough shit. If you didn’t catch it in a second-run theater, you’d have to wait for one of the big-three networks to broadcast it. I didn’t know anyone who had a VCR or cable TV until I was in high school. Network premieres of hit movies were big events, hyped for months.

I was living with my dad in the top two floors of his ramshackle four-story Victorian in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. He was a relaxed parent, and not hung up on the child-appropriateness of media. Earlier that year he’d taken me and my younger brother to see Ridley Scott’s Alien at the Geneva Drive-In, in Daly City. That movie fucked my head for years. I still love it.

Jaws was ABC’s Movie of the Week, at 8:30PM on a Sunday night. I remember watching the first part in the living room with my dad. He’d recently upgraded his old black-and-white TV to a larger color set, a revelatory change.

About halfway through the movie, my dad sent me to bed. Maybe he thought it was getting too gruesome, but it was also a school night. Fair enough.

Old, serially remodeled Victorians have lots of eccentricities. In my dad’s house, one such eccentricity was a star-shaped cutout in one of the risers of the steep staircase up to the attic, where the bedrooms were. It was only four or five inches across, but it had oblique line-of-sight through the downstairs hallway, into the living room and to our new television. I watched the entire second half of the movie crouched on the stairs, eye glued to the star-shaped cutout.

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Good PR People Don’t Lie

Posted on June 26, 2025 by Will Moss

Also, a dumb theory of lying in PR

I stumbled into a PR career ass-backward. I say this with love and respect for those of you who dreamed of a PR career, went to PR school and diligently worked your way up. But that’s not how it happened for me.

It was late 2001 and startup number two in Singapore had imploded following the collapse of the dot-com bubble and some poor management choices. Italian furniture isn’t cheap. Six years and two dead startups into my Singapore journey, it seemed like time for a change of vocation. Also, no one was hiring “Internet” people in 2001. Sitting in the oily puddle at the the bottom of the trough of disillusionment, we were best not touched with bare hands, like medical waste.

Some of my beach football friends worked for the Singapore office of a small New Zealand-based PR firm. They had a problem in the form of Microsoft Singapore, one of their clients. Nobody at the agency knew much about technology, and the notoriously demanding Microsoft team was losing patience.

On the beach, a ropey and affable New Zealander, who was amazingly fit and fast at the inconceivably geriatric age of 45, made the pitch. I had worked in radio and television in San Francisco and co-written two books about computer games, and I had just done several years of technology project management and had a good grasp of Microsoft’s products. Had I ever considered working in public relations?

I had not. Not only that, but at startup number two I’d held our PR woman in cold contempt. I didn’t understand her job. Her requests seemed burdensome and trivial. I had important things to do!

Karma is, as they say, a bitch. I owe her the hugest apology.

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I met the agency’s Singapore office leader, Kylie, a radiantly charismatic Australian woman who was the team rainmaker. “Ehhh,” she drawled when I pointed out that I had zero PR experience. “You can write and you understand tech. We can teach you the PR bit.” Also, she offered double what anyone would pay me to do Internet related work.

I negotiated the final details of the job a week or two later, while in Laos with my father, standing ankle-deep in the Mekong in Vientiane so I could catch a Thai cell signal from across the river. And that is how, at the age of 34, I made a mid-career switch into comms. And probably also got some kind of hideous river-borne blood parasite.

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Don’t be a serpent.

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Pitchwrap Supreme

Posted on June 22, 2025 by Will Moss

The art of getting your stoner snack into the New York Times

The last time I remember being in a Taco Bell was in the late eighties, when I was a student at U.C. Santa Cruz. My buddy Darren and I had just completed a round of epic late-night bong rips at an off-campus house and the munchies had arrived as inevitably as the tide. The Taco Bell on Mission Street, around the corner, was open until the wee hours. As we waited in line, Darren slowly read the menu out loud:

“Nachos.

Nachos Bel Grande.

Burrito.

Burrito Supreme.

Burrito Supreme…with hair.”

I don’t remember if we actually ordered anything. Or, if we did, what it was. But it says something that the image of a Burrito Supreme with hair has been stuck in my head since 1989.

A lot of my college experience lay at the intersection of my friendship with Darren, our youthful love of the herb, and snacks. There was the time we dried some leaves from the plant in Darren’s room in an electric kettle (not recommended!), smoked it all and then bought every cookie in Sluggo’s, the dorm coffee shop. After dividing the cookies, we slunk back to our respective dorm rooms to devour our prey in solitude, like stoned leopards.

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For your munchies…

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Decapitation!

Posted on June 7, 2025 by Will Moss

Doing comms when a leader is ousted. Also, travel fun!

I just got home from a trip that took me around the world, from San Francisco to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to Taiwan, and then back home.

I arrived in Amsterdam at 6AM on a Monday morning with a full work day ahead. It’s always a treat to stay awake and productive after a sleepless flight and an early arrival. By the afternoon my eyeballs are vibrating like tuning forks. Finally going to sleep after one of these days is the purest bliss. It’s like rediscovering the whole idea of a bed. It’s so soft and welcoming and flat!

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The hotel in Amsterdam was joined to the airport by a long corridor, which was convenient for everyone flying in for our event. But I stayed in a room with an inward-facing “atrium view” and for three days I saw little unfiltered daylight. This creates a space-station vibe that is bad for your body clock. Who cares what time it is when you’re unshackled from Earth’s natural rhythms like a Morlock?

After a long-haul flight, the thing I want most is a shower to remove the film of plane-sweat and the lingering scent of disposable upholstery and economy class ravioli. The hot shower is one of the crowning creations of industrial civilization, something so pure and good it seems impossible that you could fuck it up. Unfortunately, some malignant tinkerer invented the “rain” style shower head, the kind mounted in the ceiling directly above you.

I assume hotels install rain showers out of sadism. The shower cubicle is inevitably designed so you have to stand directly under the shower head to use the valves. These will be elaborate, like the controls of a steam locomotive, and nothing will be labeled. Just a collection of unmarked brass cranks and levers. I guess wrong 100% of the time and get blasted from above by the initial rush of cold water. What’s wrong with on/off, hot/cold? If I wanted horrifying Victorian plumbing, I’d live in London.1

Then it was on to Taipei, a brutal 18-hour travel day. I had a three-hour layover in Munich, so I tried to talk my way into a Star Alliance lounge on the back of my outrageously expensive airline-affiliated credit card. According to my inexpert reading of the alchemical matrix on the credit card’s website, this should have worked, but the woman at the counter wasn’t having it. There is no walk of shame longer than the one after you’ve been tossed from the rope-line of a middlebrow airport lounge by a woman with a German accent. No cheese cubes for you!

Flying from Europe to Taiwan is weird now due to the need to wind around various war zones and hot spots. The flight path looked like the pilots were slightly drunk and having trouble flying in a straight line. The world is troubled and unstable and everywhere there is strife and tension. If only there were something—some kind of Forum—where leaders from government, business and civil society could come together to discuss meaningful solutions and collaborate to make the world a better place…

Hold that thought.

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Let’s talk about your severance…

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The Ticking Spine Bomb

Posted on May 17, 2025 by Will Moss

My lower back counts me down to mortality

I threw my back out. It happened as I was out for a pre-dawn run. One moment I was a gliding athletic superman, the picture of health. The next, blam!, I was hobbled and shuffling, one hand on my spine and one foot in the grave. After a few minutes I was able to gingerly jog home. For the next couple of weeks my exercise routine was limited to walks and stretching.

Among the things that my brothers and I inherited from our father is that we’re tall and we all have janky backs. I woke up with my first sore back on my thirtieth birthday. At the time, I thought, so much for my youth. That was 27 years ago.

My back episodes are often multi-step disasters. There is a priming incident—I think of it as pulling the pin on a grenade—with a random delay of 0 seconds to three weeks until the actual explosion.

This time, there were two possible priming incidents. The first was a hike on my last trip to Taiwan. The path between Tiger Mountain and Elephant Mountain in Taipei is mostly stone stairs up and down. It was belting rain and the path was slippery and during a descent I slipped on the edge of a step and landed on the next step down. It was just a few centimeters, but my knee was locked and I felt the shockwave go through my hips and into my lower back with a flash of pain. I thought, gonna pay for that later.

The second possible priming incident was the trip home, later that week.

If you gathered the world’s greatest scientists and asked them to create a device to destroy the human spine with maximum efficiency, they would create a baggage carousel. Consider: after twelve hours of enforced immobility in a seat with an interstellar void where lumbar support should be, you will have to drag an awkwardly shaped, 23-kilogram bag off a moving belt and over the lip of the carousel. This will require you to bend from the waist in exactly the way you are warned to never do when lifting heavy objects. If you’re unlucky and your bag is on the inside of the belt, god help you.

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The Endless PR Stunt

Posted on May 4, 2025 by Will Moss

America’s superstar pro-natalist couple hacks the media

Have you heard about Malcolm and Simone Collins? They’re the American couple that have made themselves the poster-family for the “pro-natal” movement, which is an actual thing we have in the U.S. now. If you haven’t heard about them, congratulations! And I am so sorry to break your streak. But they’ve been profiled repeatedly and I know about them, so now you have to know about them, too. They look like this:

A photograph of Simone and Malcolm Collins, seated, in front of a reflective window. Simone is on the left, dressed in a white bonnet with long drawstrings hanging down to her elbow level. She is wearing a black skirt over a white blouse with a ruffled neckline and puffy sleeves that end in ruffled cuffs, and her signature, chunky, black, round-framed glasses. Her hands are folded in her lap and she is looking down and to the right, in front of Malcolm. A toddler’s head is visible peeking from behind her left shoulder. Her overall presentation reflects her “techno puritan” aesthetic. Malcolm is dressed in a black leather jacket, black collared shirt and jeans, and square-rimmed black glasses, and is gesturing while speaking to camera for an interview.

They are often pictured with more of their many children. Simone’s rural-trad presentation notwithstanding, this is a couple that famously met on Reddit a decade or so ago and that has been terminally online for years. They have strong “people you would sidle away from at a party” energy.

Regrettably, the Collinses are fascinating both because of their cause (I have previously written about government pro-natal campaigns) and because of how successful they have been at getting themselves and the cause profiled. The current arc of coverage started in January and picked up speed through April, and I have read it so you don’t have to:1

There are many more from last year and the year before. They may be decent at having kids (four plus one on the way), but they are undisputed world champions at getting into the press.

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Airshow!

Posted on April 27, 2025 by Will Moss

Family fun at America’s answer to the military parade

We were living in Beijing in 2009 when the Party celebrated the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic. The main event was a giant military parade that would roll down Chang’an Avenue and past the Party dignitaries assembled on top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which definitely sounds like a place to review a bunch of weapons.1

Our apartment was east of downtown, along the same boulevard that becomes Chang’an Ave. A rail spur that normally delivered trainloads of coal to the huge power station next door made it a good place to stage the armored vehicles participating in the parade. It was also a good place to breathe a lot of coal soot and heavy metals, but that was Beijing in those days.

The day of the parade dress rehearsal, I put my toddler son on my shoulders and we stood with our neighbors and watched hundreds of tanks roll down the street2 in front of our compound. Tanks on Chang’an Ave is a historically complicated image, but it was also undeniably cool. My son was raptured on a cloud of diesel fumes.

After the rehearsal, I was excited to watch the actual parade in person. We would all line the streets and cheer for the might of China!

We would do no such thing. In the best authoritarian tradition, there would be no disorderly public crowds along the route. Only carefully selected groups in carefully selected areas. I, a politically unreliable foreign dork, would have to watch on TV with the masses. Like everyone else who lived along the parade route, we were restricted to our compound during the day of the main event.

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