View all news articles >>

Inside.com - August 8, 2000

Inside Dope

It's a P.R. gimmick, we know -- but we bit anyway. After all, it's hard for a journalist to resist an Internet site called Whack-A-Flack, whose stated purposed is to "provide the press with a fun outlet to vent their opinions" by lobbing paper airplanes (supposedly fashioned out of vapid press releases) at "PR flacks who briefly poke their heads up from cubicles like smiling gophers." The Web-based video game, created by online marketing company e-tractions, offers up a rogues' gallery of annoying P.R. archetypes for the media's whacking pleasure, including the overeager neophyte, the loquacious gossip and the do-nothing chain smoker. Players choose from a list of 20 real-life P.R. agencies (including e-tractions' own agency, Boston-based Sterling Hager) and then -- to the tune of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" -- the flack-whacking fun begins. "You gotta have a hook," explains Mike Gauthier, CEO of e-tractions, who says Whack-a-Flack was designed to demonstrate his firm's customizable marketing platform, but in a way that would spread "virally" through the media business. (He says traffic has doubled every day since the Web site launched on Monday.) At the end of the month, e-tractions will demonstrate its data-gathering prowess by revealing which P.R. firms got whacked the most and who did the whacking. "I don't mind my friends calling me a flack, if it's good-natured," says Parry Headrick of Sterling Hager, which helped e-tractions to create the site. "We know the media complains about getting blipped with e-mail press releases all the time," he says. "So we thought, okay, fine, take your best shot."