liberty mutual dredges up the paul tilley story

Just when you thought that Paul Tilley and the “Chicago Incident” had moved on, along comes a corporation (a month later!) trying to use Tilley’s death and the ensuing kerfuffle to its advantage. Disgusting.

And even worse because they do it under the guise of “responsibility.”

Liberty Mutual has a website that showcases how they are super-duper responsible in the world around them. To quote from their site:

We believe that the more people think and talk about responsibility, and even debate what it means, the more it can affect how we live our daily lives.

This is airy nonsense, especially because this talking about responsibility includes dredging up a man’s death a month after it happened (and was covered in the New York Times, you couldn’t miss it) and using it on your corporate site as a way to drive traffic and interest in your sales-driving project.Liberty Mutual’s desperate cry for relevance and eyeballs is simple transparent greed wrapped in righteous language about responsibility.

Responsibility is leaving the man alone. Responsibility is not using a man’s death to sell things. Responsibility is not blaming blog/bloggers for a death just so you can drive traffic to your website.

And perhaps, in this small way, together, we can make the world just a little better.

The world would be a little better if this site apologized publicly and just let it die. There is no excuse for a company to use this situation for their own financial benefit.

Unless they were being irresponsible, of course.

My thoughts on Mr Tilley’s tragic end are here and they haven’t changed. Nor has my position on those who would try to pin his death on a simple blog post.

To quote Tribble Ad Agency, who broke the story, on the subject: ” It’s wrong to blame a news outlet for what happens by reporting the news – it sets a bad precedent .. next time something happens that deserves to be reporting, we will have all the news outlets sweep it under a rug. From now on only happy news is allowed to be reported.”

paul tilley dead of apparent suicide

Paul Tilley, ECD of DDB in Chicago, is reported dead at age 40 of an apparent suicide. Tilley apparently jumped from the roof of Chicago’s Fairmont Hotel at around 6:25pm on Friday night and, though Chicago authorities have not yet identified the cause of death as suicide, the word on the street is that it was.

The thoughts of the Daily (Ad) Biz go out to Mr Tilley’s family, with special thoughts and prayers to his wife and two daughters. Any premature death is a tragedy, especially an apparent suicide and particularly in this case as it robs a family of its husband and father.

The Daily (Ad) Biz did not know and has not posted about Mr Tilley, but a death like this of a man so high up in the industry will surely open the door to condemnation of any number of assumed reasons behind his death, even though suicide, by its very nature, is an unreasonable act. We cannot know what drove him to jump on Friday, but we can do our best to direct the inevitable inquisition into the right direction.

Agency Spy, who has posted about Mr Tilley recently, is dealing with commenters who would pin some, if not all, of the blame on those blog postings. This is asinine and dangerously misguided.

This isn’t about blogs. This is about the personal demons and struggles of one man.

Blogs bring transparency to the industry and, while that is not always pleasant to those who would prefer to operate without it, it is, on the whole, a good thing. Those intra-agency e-mails that make it out onto the blogosphere are nothing more than the leaks from government agencies that you might read about in the papers that give citizens an idea of what is really going on in their country. Having a mechanism for uncovering the politics and bad work environments and other issues of the industry only helps those who are in it. Information is a good thing.

Of course, blogs can be deliciously nasty and it is understandable that those who are on the receiving end of a negative post may not like either the post or the fact that it often comes from an anonymous blogger. But most of the people featured by name, for good or for bad reasons, in blog posts are at the top of the industry heap. The Maurice Levy’s, the David Droga’s, the Bob Garfield’s and, yes, the Paul Tilley’s have made it in the industry to the point that they are public figures. Criticism dogs public figures when they do criticizable things.

And if the criticism from those anonymous bloggers is unfair, the comments section is there to let said bloggers know about it.

One needs only to look at the posts about Kansas City agency VML to see how the comments section allows those who disagree with a post to give their opinion and to level the playing field. Blogs are a conversation, a two-way street and when engaged correctly they are a great tool for the industry (even with the acid tongue of some bloggers).

The death of Paul Tilley is a tragedy. But it is not a tragedy that involves blogs like AdScam or Agency Spy or any other that comments on the public figures in the ad industry. Mr Tilley did criticizable things and was criticizes for them. Sort of like politicians are. And sports stars. And business leaders. And other public figures.

Criticism happens. To blame Mr Tilley’s death on mere criticism is to demean the man and his character and to give too much power to blogs that, while not un-influential in their way, certainly do not have the power to drive a man to his death.

The focus of the questions surrounding this terrible situation should be firmly about Paul and his family; namely, what can we as an industry do to help them through this and what can we do as an industry to give support to people like Paul who are in high-pressure environments and struggling under the strain.