Joe Dellosa on Advertising: FedEx's “Brown Bailout” attack ads are ...

First things first: I don’t have a dog in this fight between FedEx and UPS over labor regulations. I don’t work for, own stock in, or have financial interests in either company, and I’m not in a labor union. In short, this isn’t personal, and frankly, I don’t care too much about the inner workings of the courier industry. I mention the agency because insurance giant AIG hired Burson-Marsteller to improve AIG’s public image after it had received a bailout (a real one) in 2008. There’s some measure of irony in Burson-Marsteller being tasked with trying to build up a company that received a bailout and trying to attack another by accusing it of doing the same, all in the space of a couple of years. It’s not an enviable job. Lane said none of the people offering testimonials were paid for their participation; I called Guoqing Zhang , a University of Virginia PhD student who offered a testimonial, to verify this. He confirmed that he wasn’t paid (jokingly saying he wouldn’t mind if FedEx did), and said he recorded the video as a favor to a friend who worked at a PR agency. He also said he wasn’t familiar with the UPS/FedEx dispute, nor did he know it was over unionizing rules; all he thought he knew was that there was legislation that would prevent FedEx from shipping packages overnight, which would impede his research. I don’t list these definitions to be pedantic, or to even insinuate that every business dictionary in existence will offer definitions exactly like these. (For instance, another AllBusiness.com entry defines “ bailing out ” in terms closer to Merriam-Webster’s.) Rather, this serves to illustrate that, while broad definitions of “bailout” may exist, the word is used and understood—by the mainstream media, by the general public—to refer to a specific action involving giving financial capital to a company so that it doesn’t go bankrupt . So if you’re having an economic discussion in this political climate, what would be the intellectually honest thing to do: Would it be to use the word “stimulus” as it’s understood in this context? Or would it be to use the word in a nonsensically broad manner while waving around a dictionary, and then accuse people who call you out on it of trying to pick a fight with Daniel Webster ?

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