18-12-2024
When you look at the most prominent lawsuits against companies for alleged irresponsible behaviour, you’ll see that communications related to lobbying have been excluded to date. Rights to free speech and political participation were believed to be too strong of a defence to overcome.
Yet this might now be changing.
Here what the lead attorney had to say about a recent landmark settlement in the US that implicated one of the big strategy consulting companies: “If a consulting firm conspires with a client to engage in criminal conduct, the fact that you’re an outside consultant will not protect you… we will cut through the slick PowerPoints and the consultant speak and hold you accountable.”
So words in the form of client advice can have consequences. Yet, does this also apply to lobbying advice?
This case revolved around McKinsey’s advice on how to best target marketing and engage stakeholders to maximize sales of OxyContin, a powerful and addictive opioid triggering perhaps the biggest contemporary public health crisis in the US. The consultant’s responsibility stemmed from helping a company that had been selling these products in full knowledge of their pernicious consequences.
On this point the parallel with, for instance, the climate crisis does not seem far-fetched. The latter involves the sale of carbon-intensive products, to which huge health damages can be attributed with increasing accuracy. Indeed, knowledge of these harmful effects has been widespread and known to the public and the affected companies themselves for some time.
Someone may counter that lobbying is very different from the in-house strategic consulting and marketing work that played a role in the OxyContin case.
But this overlooks the contemporary nature of lobbying. A significant portion of today’s lobbying activities are about issue advertising to the public, influencing ideas and agendas in advance, not just hanging out in the corridors of parliament.
What’s more, the client support provided by professional public affairs firms is not confined to operational level work on selling public policy positions.
Rather, it also includes higher level strategy advice on integrated corporate communications and brand building / protection, all activities that fall comfortably into the realm of (higher margin?) strategy advice consistent with the ambitions of full-service agencies to act as trusted C-level strategic advisor to make a difference.
The truth is that today the work by lobbyists carries a strong marketing and strategic consulting dimension, not too different from the types of culpable practices that motivated the indictment in the OxyContin case to hold strategy consultancies accountable for their advice to clients.
If you are in a lobbying firm that produces – in the acerbic language of the attorney reference above – those types of slick PowerPoints rife with advice on how to keep on playing up the harmlessness of the obviously harmful for the purpose of shaping both public opinion and public policy, well, you might get a bit nervous. After all, the double-glazed free speech and democracy protection to shelter behind might not be as strong as it has looked like for a long time. As a professional lobbying firm one might want to give these types of client presentations a more intense vetting.
A sounder approach still would be to think twice about taking on such high-risk clients in the first place. McKinsey is paying USD 650 million for that dubious privilege, and it is forced to do so in a jurisdiction famous for its particularly extensive protections of free speech and corporate entitlements.
Written by Dieter Zinnbauer