Dirty Dell: A Lesson in How NOT To Do PR & Marketing

This is a very personal article for me, but I’m writing it for me above anyone else. Still, if you’re in the marketing or PR business, or have been wondering what’s happened to my work over the past year, this article might provide some answers that may also be of use in your line of work. It concerns the behaviour of Dell Australia – in particular that of their marketing teams and in-house PR.

Introduction

I was going to have a tl;dr but experience tells me people will just use it to cherry-pick out-of-context facts to throw at me. The following is long and will be further elongated with additional details, answers to questions and observations that people may subsequently have. But, I need to get it published so I can stop my mind dwelling on this incessantly and start rebuilding my life and career and so here goes…

I started High Performance Laptops in 2021 and over the following years, it became the primary focus of my livelihood. I had some early vendor support, but I’ve basically been bootstrapping a start-up ever since, working into the night, seven days a week.

The idea was to get out of everyone’s way and become the face of Australia’s unoccupied, online laptop niche, then hopefully get financial support from some of the several, major laptop manufacturers thereafter. All of the vendors, including Dell Australia, liked the idea and this is well documented. Dell Australia’s Head of PR, & Comms, Kirsty Matta, even said (June 2023 at the Sydney Fortress launch) that the company had, “Money to spend” and I should ask, (then) Head of Marketing, Peggy Arsenis, for support.

Then Late in 2023, I noticed that Dell USA had started advertising against my site’s name. I asked Dell Australia to get them to stop and Arsenis sent the following email:

Arsenis, Peggy P_Arsenis@dell.com
Wed, Dec 6, 2023, 2:13 PM

to me, Kirsty

Hi Nick

I have advised our Media agency that this US campaign is geo targeting ANZ and asked that this is reviewed.

Regards

Peggy Arsenis

Shortly afterwards, Dell Australia built their own High Performance Laptops webpage/microsite and spent significant money on Google Search ads, marketing it.

The Meeting

After some back and forth over the early months of 2024, both Arsenis and Matta scheduled a call on 4 April, with me. Kirsty Matta said,

As I said to you the other day, I thought it would take a couple of days for us to get some feedback to you because we wanted to work through all of your emails and do all of our due diligence, which is involved. Meeting with the marketing team with the media buying team with our legal team, with the IP team.

So, that’s why it’s taking a wee while because we, you know, we hear frustrations and we wanted to make sure that we went through absolutely everything before we came back to you. So, from all of those discussions, the view is that the marketing strategy that we’ve got at the moment is is right for our business and fair and compliant. You know sort of fair play in the marketplace. So, we would continue on as is.

Which I know is frustrating because it’s, you know, not what you probably wanted to hear. But having taken… legal and IP advice and looked at the mechanics of the marketing campaign, they they advised us that we, yeah we are, we’re operating in the correct way for our business. But also we are doing it in a fair and compliant way.

I listen back to this and am very impressed with how calm I actually am when being told that. I wonder if Kirsty Matta, Peggy Arsenis (and Dell Australia, by extension) will find me reporting their behaviour to the world, frustrating and probably not what they wanted to hear.

I responded…

The question really isn’t like whether they’re legally allowed to do it. It’s a case of, you know, the there’s very few laptop journalists in Australia and rather than get any support for my site, you’d rather spend money on undermining it? Now it’s not whether you can do it, it’s whether perhaps you should…

I knew full well what I was getting into when I wanted to start using a generic term as a brand, but Dell’s copying that and I would not care one iota if any of your massive… eight-figure budget came my way. If I had banners all over my site saying, ‘Buy Dell’s High Performance Laptops’ that would be completely fine.

No one’s paying me to do all this support for Dell [i.e. reviews, news and features]… I’m designed to run on the smell of an oily rag. [voice starts to crack] I do all my own dev work, marketing, SEO, the whole lot, publishing, writing, testing. I need a tiny tiny amount to get by. And you know, it’s not a great look if you’d rather spend money making your own brand rather than backing mine. Because, those [Dell’s] ads are pushing a generic term, as a brand, like I have. And so is the landing page. Now, I’d never win in a legal case for doing that. It’s totally your right to do it, but it’s like, why would you guys want to?

There’s no support financially coming my way whatsoever from Dell and this is just hurting me further and it’s like… did I do something wrong?

Peggy Arsenis replied:

No, no, no, no, no, no. Can I can I just clarify, Nick, look, we’re in the market to let as many people know, [build] awareness, come to our site, consider our product, right? And we’re we’re competing with the other hardware vendors. And partners like you are very important to this industry because you educate customers, right? So, we have no intention whatsoever to compete with you or any other of the publications. What is happening here is we’re not using it as a brand.

This is a lie. As shown above, we’d been emailing each other since early December 2023. We’d been speaking about it since June 2023 as demonstrated above. This ad campaign and landing page only appeared subsequent to my website gaining prominence.

After some back and forth which involved Dell pretending that their ‘High Performance Laptops’ campaign was just one of many generic terms that they’d chosen to use with Google Search Ads. I replied,

If you search any laptop term, what’s coming up is “High Performance Laptops” for Dell. Like you say, you weren’t using it a year ago. And you, gotta remember, I was in digital marketing for several years. I set up campaigns like this. The reason these marketing guys have done this, is they’ve identified ‘high performance laptops’ as a really good generic term to go for… because I popularised it.

And it is being used as a brand by Dell… all your other generic search terms aren’t brands, only ‘high performance laptops’ is. And the way that that ad is structured, it says, ‘high performance laptops.’ [But, it’s going for it. Now, I would not care at all, if there was any support. You’ve said I’m a partner of yours. I’m not. I I don’t get any money from you. It’s it’s more like I’m a kind of slave. And now I’m being undermined even more.

Matta replied:

That’s, where I want to sort of jump in. You know, like when you and I were talking about Dell, there’s many, many budget lines at Dell. Peggy has one of them, and that comes down from the US team and it comes with very, very proscriptive. We’ve got super-duper prescriptive rules and regulations on how we can use our budget. So, Peggy’s in particular is incredibly proscriptive.

I replied:

Surely you can support its trade industry [publication]… How many laptop specialists in Australia, are there? Maybe two, three? I can’t believe that Dell doesn’t support that, especially when I’ve been told by you guys that tell that your budgets are like eight figures. I’d be happy with two grand a month. That would go a huge way for me, and you can do what you want with ‘high performance laptops’ then…

You keep talking about constraints, though. I mean, the thing is, I can’t believe they have got constraints about supporting the trade media through advertising.

Matta responded:

Well, there are. There are percentages that you can spend on advertising, awareness on lead generation. It’s very prescriptive and so, if the business for a particular quarter has to achieve a particular outcome and when they look at the mix of the vehicles that they can use, you know, awareness might mean one thing for one campaign for one quarter, to one team and that small percentage of awareness for another team could mean something completely different.

I replied:

Kirsty, you can’t say that while you’re you’re spending money on a campaign saying you’re pushing the term, ‘high performance laptops.’ If you’ve got money to push the term, ‘high performance laptops’ then hey, I know a site that’s great fit for you guys. But, I get nothing. If the industry doesn’t support its trade media, then you don’t get trade media. And, I’ve been in this for three years now, I’ve dealt with media buying agencies for 20 years. They do not deal with trade media, they don’t care about editorial they give money to their mates and to Zuckerberg and to Google because it’s easier and that’s what they do.

They do not talk to anyone who is not a full-time advertiser. And the best I ever get out of them is when a marketing manager says, ‘Oh, go and support them’ and I get three months and then it ends regardless of the [success]. I’ve had campaigns in digital mags that got 40 per cent click through rates and they’re like, ‘Oh, no, we’re we’re going in another direction.’ I’ve heard it all before. I’m not asking for much. The net thing here is that, it’s not whether you could on this, it’s whether you should. Chuck us a bone here. I really don’t need much. It’s almost petty cash to the budgets you guys are dealing with. It’s certainly allowable.

If you look at the support, you called it a partnership. If you look on the, “What I’ve delivered for Dell versus what Dell’s delivered for me,” it’s pretty one way traffic. One column’s entirely empty. What I’m asking for is, a fraction of a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of like 1 per cent of the budget that is just being dumped on Google, for the same aim that I would deliver myself.

Google has made some changes in the last couple of weeks which I’m dealing with, but you know I’ve been Number 1 for three years and people clicking on that could have seen Dell’s banners everywhere. But instead you’re giving money to Google search ads instead of me, which is undermining my site, whether it’s legal to or not. But, I wouldn’t care if I had some financial support. But, it’s like you’re spending money against me, rather than supporting me and that that’s that’s even worse than nothing, if you see what I mean.

The whole tech publishing and trade media industry might gain some insight into the marketing strategy of both Dell and its Media Buying Agency, EssenceMediaCom, with Arsenis’ response:

When we put the plans together, we have certain KPIs we’re trying to meet. Search is an important function. It is the number one thing everyone will prioritise because it does deliver. It is a vehicle that delivers awareness, demand, conversion, you know, and we’re not getting away from that. We invest in Google because it it does work right cause search does work and we want to be in front of mind, in front of potential customers or people who are in market. And I saw many other vendors are spending against that term [Ed: This is not entirely true – and other brands support my sites without undermining them]. So, it’s not just Dell. When we sit back and we plan with our agency, we say every quarter here are the KPIs, here’s our target audience and they’ll come back to us with the media recommendation and we have many other vehicles that we run that through to validate whether does that make sense or not or will that deliver what we’re ultimately looking to do.

And at this point in time, we’re not investing in any. Trade publication. So it’s not as if we’re singling anybody out and, I think what you’re saying is, well, invest in me, but then where does that leave the strategy then?

I’ll be focusing on that response in future articles. The notion that Marketing and PR managers are relying upon the god-awful media buying agencies – who, as I mentioned above – don’t work with independent/trade media and small publishers, without telling them not to undermine editorial partners, needs to be addressed.

I think it’s fair to say that these marketing types don’t see any problem with undermining trade media partners, publishers and journalists. Furthermore, they’re psychopathic enough not to care about our wellbeing over the opportunity to make lazily make a tiny amount of profit at our expense.

So, let me rephrase what I said above… they don’t see any issues with undermining trade media partners, publishers and journalists, yet.

I replied:

Peggy, I’ve set up these terms. I know all the justifications you’re saying, but the simple fact is, of all the laptop related terms out there, you’ve chosen my brand to make your own brand.

I’ll deal with the subsequent back-and-forth later. But, what follows is Peggy saying that High Performance Laptops is just a generic search term, like Dell hasn’t been dealing directly with me for over a year, knowing that it’s more than that. For those who don’t know… many trade publications titles can be deemed descriptive and generic. And, it doesn’t change the fact that, whatever laptop-related search term you searched for back then, it was only Dell’s High Performance Laptops ads and landing page that you saw. Anyway, after repeated gaslighting, and back-and-forth, Matta responded,

Nick, I think I think we all need to just take a breath for a second and just let let’s take the high performance phrase off the table because it’s not gonna change. It is legally IP compliant, everything is compliant. We absolutely hear the frustration, one hundred per cent 100 per cent but going round and round and round, we are not. Nothing is going to change around that part of the conversation. But, what I am hearing is the financial stress and the request for financial help from Dell [Ed: That’s not how I put it at all, but whatever]. Now, that doesn’t have to come just from Peggy. Peggy’s not the only person in Dell who holds budget.

We can’t sit here and demand that Peggy spends her budget a certain way. It’s down to her and her team to decide what’s right for her part of the business. So, what I would propose is that we look at all the different parts of the Dell business. And the different types of value you can get from different teams. Now Peggy’s got a strategy right now which is not going to help you. That’s not to say that in quarter two or quarter three things won’t change. So, the fact that you guys have got a dialogue and a relationship: if it changes and she’s got more money for awareness or, you know, a relationship with a publisher, that might be something we can come back to later in the year.

For any PR or marketing people reading this, know that journalists brains are hardwired into disdainfully ignoring corporate marketing management double-speak. The only reason I didn’t address it above, is because I was trying very, very hard to maintain a working relationship with Dell. But know this, if you or your client ever talks like this at a journalist, the journo might be smiling and nodding at you, but their thoughts are somewhere else, entirely.

Matta continued:

From a communication standpoint, you know, we are providing you devices, so that you can write reviews so that you’re adding value to your readers. You know, we’re trying to make sure we invite you to events.

Even I couldn’t hold back at that one. Again, any PR and Marketing people reading this, never, ever, ever say such a thing to a journalist. Especially one that’s been in the industry for 20-odd years. It’s probably the most insulting thing you could ever say to them.

You can see how Matta led up to it, but this is the epitome of believing your own bullsh*t. For those who don’t know (including Matta, perhaps), product reviews and coverage of events – unless there’s direct or indirect payment to the journalist or their publisher – benefits PR and the vendor dramatically more than the journalist. We can’t live off, ‘Adding value to your readers.’ This is the sort of thing you MIGHT get away with when talking to an up-and-coming influencer. For a journalist, it’s the most basic of expectations. None of us feel supported or blessed for review samples and event invites. Does anyone else in PR or Marketing actually think that? Bleeeuuuurrrgggh.

Anyhow, if you thought I’d lose my rag at all this, you’d be wrong. I continued to write favourably about Dell in an effort to maintain the relationship. Still, listening back to the conversation, it’s even worse than I remember and I’ll be revisiting it down the line. My takeaway from it now, though, is what I’ve suspected all along. Dell Australia merely pays lip service to journalists, despite calling them ‘valuable partners,’ and, in reality, takes them for granted at best and exploits them at worst. They don’t owe any of us a living, but as I mentioned above, doing nothing would have been better than undermining all that I’d worked for.

It’s my belief that both Dell Australia and the Media Buying agencies need to stop ignoring and taking their trade media for granted. Right now, they don’t see any downside doing so. It will be my mission to change that and make the actions of Dell Australia’s Peggy Arsenis, Kirsty Matta, along with EssenceMediaCom, regarded as a case study.

Vegas

By now I was becoming incredibly stressed out. Simply looking at my site triggered anxiety attacks and I was struggling to get any work done. Google’s actions certainly weren’t helping, but it was Dell that consumed my mind. But, I pushed forwards. A few weeks later, on May 20, I was in Las Vegas at Dell’s Partner conference. I set-up to enthusiastically live-blog Michael Dell’s keynote, but he didn’t really say much and the appalling internet was so bad that I couldn’t add any media to it either.

The relatively short event was nothing like the recent keynotes I’d been to with Nvidia, Intel and AMD. It largely consisted of him inviting other partner CEO’s on stage and them back-slapping each other. After that, I was informed that Dell’s PR teams in Australia had been discussing me with those in Asia and the USA and were concerned I was upset after what Matta and Arsenis had said weeks before. I assured them I didn’t and subsequently published this positive article. Still, the next day all my interviews were cancelled.

So, there I was, on my own, overseas at an opulent conference in Las Vegas that had cost Dell many tens of millions of dollars (quite possibly over a hundred million), that had a live performance from Jerry Seinfeld (US$750K – $999K fee) and a talk by Neil De Grass Tyson (US$150K to $US$300K) at a cost of around a million dollars, and all the while they’d hijacked my site over a few thousand dollars and besmirched my journalistic integrity across three continents.

I’d done absolutely nothing wrong but, instead of supporting me, all the work I’d done on building my site and my brand, Dell had formally discussed what I’d created with ‘multiple stakeholders’ and chosen to hijack my brand, intentionally screw me over and badmouth me to third-party PR agencies across three different contents, instead.

This was finally it for me and, surrounded by an extravagantly expensive event, I finally completely cracked. I informed Dell’s PR team what I thought of Dell Australia’s personnel using unambiguous invective that somewhat-rhymed with coastal clucking twit shunts.

The fallout

Whatever excuses people might want to make for Dell, this has all caused me an existential crisis which has led to me being unable to work properly for several months owing to severe stress, anxiety and depression. Thanks to Google (and Reddit) – more on this at another time – it was already the most challenging time for independent journalists and publishers – and Dell Australia knew it because we’d discussed it.

Whatever way you want to spin it, Dell knew what effect their actions were having on me – and that I was one of only a handful of media directly supporting their laptop business in Australia – because we’d discussed it for many months. It stressed me out over Christmas 2023 and by May 2024 I was a basket case. I’ve since been increasingly driven to distraction almost all day, every day and every night for most of the past year with thoughts on what Dell was doing to me, to the point where even looking at my website gave me an anxiety attack and getting work done (including hitting my freelance deadlines) was becoming problematic. I was at rick of losing everything.

At one point, I was so distracted, I almost ran over my young daughter with my car. Another time, a lump developed in my throat and my thoughts were literally, “Hopefully, it’s cancer so I won’t have to feel like this anymore.”

Fortunately(?!), this wasn’t my first (second, third or fourth) rodeo regarding work-related mental health (hire me if you need a conference speaker on this topic), and a background of extensive counselling and pro-active medical monitoring, helped me realise that months of depression had led my brain to become used to having low serotonin and that antidepressants would stop it ‘draining away’ and rise back to normal levels. A quick, course of old, expired, pills saw me start to bounce from an all-time low.

I earned $22K last year – a pitiful amount that’s just a little less than the previous year which had also been dominated by huge, start-up expenses. That’s much less than an entry-level PR professional. I typically work (or at least try to work) seven days a week, often finishing very late at night, trying to build my business.

I almost lost all my freelance work because I couldn’t do it on time due to being driven to distraction about what Dell Australia had done to me and them making me think… what was the point of trying anymore? The latter was particularly problematic as I’d set-out my store at the very bottom rung of the publishing food chain where I wouldn’t bother anyone or get attacked. Now, where was there left to go?

I’ve been unable to do my own regular, day-to-day work, including being unable to address what Google had done to my industry in March (more on this another time). There was even the potential (but impossible-to-prove) issue that Dell’s ad-spend against my site had changed the nature of the search term (in Google’s eyes) from editorial to commercial and that it might never be able to recover from that. I might not anyway, but this certainly didn’t help.

I note now, that Dell Australia has recently started to advertise their ‘High Performance Laptops’ heavily against my current, best-performing, laptop-related pages. Doing so runs the risk of transforming those editorial search terms into a shopping term and that’s what’s pushed me into finally publishing this article, which I’ve been writing in my head, constantly, for almost a year.

Trying to learn lessons

One of the biggest problems this had caused me, was an existential crisis regarding my industry. I now couldn’t help wondering, how many other people in the marketing and PR industries also viewed me as an exploitable mug that did free work for them without needing to be paid beyond the odd drink and nibbles?

Plenty of other journalists had been telling me this was the reality for a very long time, but I’ve always stuck up for the PR industry more than most journalists. Journalism isn’t my first career and I always have appreciated the free, on-tap support they (mostly) give journalists whenever called upon. Other industries don’t get that.

Now, I’ve become very suspicious of (almost) any PR request I get. I also think about which companies, that I routinely write about, don’t actually support me, ever? I’ve worked with the PR and marketing industry for over 20 years and built many friendships along the way. Our industries are littered with relationships and marriages, we’re so tight.

Now, here I was, looking on people I considered close friends with suspicion – even when I knew, full well, they were genuine friends and/or colleagues. This is a major factor in the fallout for me now resenting Dell Australia’s, Matta’s and Arsenis’ greed and de facto contempt for me, my work and my industry – they’ve tarnished my relationship with everyone else, too.

I thought so differently back in February when I was interviewed on Influencing Insider when I was asked about how I liked to work with PR and go to as many events as possible.

In recent months I’ve slowly been turning a corner, but even a recent mention of the situation by a very good friend, triggered a relapse that had me lying down for a few hours when on a deadline.

Things have finally started to pick-up in recent months. SMBtech is likely Australia’s fastest-growing technology website and Google seems to like it (for now), but I live under constant threat of it being attacked by the likes of Dell and Google, so I have to be incredibly careful with the content balance, advertising and commercialisation methods I use on it. It’s enormously stressful.

But, my mind has started to improve and I’m getting work done at something like 75 per cent capacity. I’ve got several months’ work to catch-up on (as many PR people will attest to – sorry about that) and several months’ worth of updates to make on the publishing sea-change and it’s effect on my publishing model, but I’m making process.

I also discovered that Peggy Arsenis got binned by Dell right before her long-service leave. I’ve no sympathy, she’ll be living the Life of Riley with her millions of dollars and spare time. I’ll be very keen to see if another tech company thinks she’ll make a good hire. Very keen. Kirsty Matta has changed role but is still employed by Dell.

The hostile advertising did stop – for a while. I figured it was partly caused by me being unable to work on High Performance Laptops and the subsequent interest dip in the search term but also because a handful of other journalists had told me they’d stopped supporting Dell because of what they’d done to me. Also, I’ve been told that much of the skulduggery was approved by and pushed for by Dell International rather than Dell Australia – I’ll be looking to confirm that as I’m not convinced.

However, now this is happening…

What happens next?

I’ve been a shell of a person in 2024. I’ve smoked my own weight in cigarettes, put on weight, lost it and regained it, and I still frequently need to drink alcohol just to sleep. I’m horribly out of shape, but slowly getting better. I want this to be out of my head and over, but still, simply being asked about Dell is enough to need a lie-down for a few hours because it triggers anxiety attacks. I want to be able to work with Dell again, but Dell Australia has taken absolutely no responsibility for what it’s done to me over the past 12 months and it sees no reason not to carry on.

Consequently, my ineffective position of acquiescence and being nice will transpose into one of retaliation. I will be personally boycotting any promotion of Dell (and Alienware) products and invite anyone reading this to do so, too. I realise not everyone will be able to do that and that others will want to support Dell even more, just because of what they’ve done to me – ours is a very much frenemy industry and that nature often gets exploited by some major organisations. Even though I’m largely doing this for our industry, recent experience reminded me that tech journos can very much be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

I also reserve the right to petulantly refer to Dell as Dull, from time to time.

I’m also constantly on edge that my next successful project might get hijacked by another greedy, lazy vendor. For instance, SMBtech could also be considered a bit of a generic term – very many niche/trade publications are and always have been. How long before some other marketing p.o.s. takes a liking to it? Marketing guru (and nice guy) Neil Patel endorses the act of Parasitic SEO, but I don’t think he had this ‘Goliath dumping on David’ situation in mind. I’m going to see if I can convince him to add a caveat of when NOT to use this marketing strategy, in case it backfires horribly… hopefully with Dell Australia being the case study.

Indeed, heed what’s about to happen to Dell Australia. I intend to make it an example to any marketing and PR people out there – why you don’t sh*t all over the trade journalists – aka partners – that you should be supporting. I’ve got nothing to lose at this point and I refuse to go on with this torturing my mind and affecting everything in my life.

I understand that people that I care about will be hurt along the way and that this could (or rather, is likely to) end badly for many people involved. But, one way or another, I refuse to live like this any more and I will continue down this line until Dell Australia has acknowledged what it’s done to me, apologised, atoned for its actions and made amends for what it has done to my life and my livelihood.

Last Updated on December 4, 2024 by Nick Ross