How Bob Evans Enables PR Placements as Real Looking Articles for SAP
Executive Summary
- Bob Evans runs a PR firm that publishes fake articles for SAP, Oracle, and IBM.
- This article describes how he seeds articles into various media sites to make them appear authentic.
Introduction
Bob Evans has published several articles in cloud wars.co that promoted the benefits of the Qualtrics acquisition. We review what Bob Evans does and how he makes money to distribute press releases.
Our References for This Article
If you want to see our references for this article and related Brightwork articles, see this link.
Bob Evans and Evans Strategic Communication
Bob Evans runs a PR firm. PR means that you are open to business to influence the media for money. PR firms don’t care what is true. They push any narrative they are paid to push. For instance, Harvey Weinstein had many of the biggest PR firms on the Weinstein Company payroll, and they are the dirtiest underbelly of the media system.
Qualtrics was a ridiculously overpriced acquisition, which we covered in this article. Does SAP’s Qualtrics Acquisition Make Any Sense? However, since its acquisition, Bill McDermott has faced criticism because the price was so illogical. This seems like almost a direct Bill McDermott motivated placement.
The way it works is as follows.
- SAP told Bob Evans what they wanted the article to say. When you work with any marketing department, they tell you either telling you what to write or changing your material until it is precisely what they want it to say.
- Bob Evans PR firm Evans Strategic Communications then paid to place the article in cloud wars.co. This would have cost very little as cloudwars.co has a small site volume. Bob Evans’ favorite distribution point for PR releases is Forbes, which will allow you to publish anything for money, mainly since a China-based company purchased them in 2017. We analyzed another paid placement by Bob Evans in this article, How Accurate Was Forbes on AWS IBM Microsoft and Google in The Cloud. This article was completely false from top to bottom. But again, you don’t hire a PR firm to say true things. PR firms are in the disinformation business. The budget was not there for a Forbes placement this time.
- The media source, Forbes or Cloudwars, then violates their readers’ trust by not declaring that they were paid to publish the placement.
- Then SAP can refer to this article as evidence that “the market is acknowledging SAP’s strategy with Qualtrics.” SAP has routinely referred to a Forrester study that lauded SAP’s translytical database,” but again, without mentioning that SAP paid Forrester to write that study. https://www.brightworkresearch.com/what-is-a-transanlytical-database/ And SAP quoted that study in a quarterly call to Wall Street using it as evidence of their progress.
Notice the primary thrust of the article, that Qualtrics will eventually be considered a high-value acquisition. This is precisely what McDermott needs the marketplace to think because the general impression is that SAP completely overpaid.
What is Cloudwars?
I started reading Cloudwars, which I had never heard of. I noticed three sorts of over-the-top pro-SAP/Qualtrics acquisition articles, all written by Bob Evans. Then I saw other articles clearly written for Microsoft. At the bottom of the site, it states, “Evans Strategic Communications.” So this is just the website for the PR firm. There is no go-between. Vendors pay the PR firm, and the PR firms publish the articles on this site called Cloudwars. Then need to get these same articles published on websites with reach, which is where Forbes or other high volume sites come into play.
Conclusion
The issue is that if you want to make money in media, you have almost no choice but to sell your media presence to industry sources. This is what, in part, allows the most significant entities to rig the system in their favor, drastically reducing the competitiveness of the overall market. Only a very few media sources in IT have been able to resist this model.