PR Catastrophe

Nobody has time to issue a press release about it but the property/casualty insurance industry is in the middle of a public relations catastrophe. The industry’s PR machine just can’t seem to get people buzzing about insurance. P/C PR pros have not manufactured a crisis or successfully inserted the industry into a tantalizing scandal for a long time. With the exception of Hurricane Katrina, the P/C insurance industry has been missing in action from most of the major news stories of the past decade.

The industry nearly caught a break with the bailout of AIG — but almost immediately the media realized it was the financial product division of AIG and not the P/C segment that screwed up.

The healthcare debate? No P/C pulse. All the attention went to health insurers and death panels — despite the fact individual mandates have been around in auto insurance since Henry Ford.

At the start of the BP Gulf Coast oil disaster there was some gushing about federal liability limits but that dried up quickly.

Financial crisis? Other than that short-lived AIG connection, the P/C industry gets absolutely none of the systemic credit. Too big to fail? We wish!

The industry has also whiffed on opportunities presented by the recession. While the media can’t get enough on Detroit automakers, home foreclosures, or school teacher layoffs, it has barely noticed the P/C industry, which just hums along paying claims, creating jobs, obeying laws. Borrrrreeeeeng!!!

Wikileaks never leaked any insurance documents, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. never tapped any insurance phone lines.

But the final straw was that during the summer’s dramatic debt ceiling showdown, there was not one hint of P/C insurance. No promise of a tax on property insurance. No credible threat to pull the plug on the flood program. Neither Rush Limbaugh nor John Stewart interviewed a single P/C executive or CSR.

This industry has to beg and bribe for publicity while big banks, Wall Street brokers, oil companies and Donald Trump get all the free publicity they want. Sure, we get the occasional floods or wildfires but those are local events and firefighters and FEMA quickly grab the spotlight. Part of the problem is state regulation. State regulators happen to be darn effective at resolving problems before they grow into national crises. Too effective.

Look what bad news (injuries, poor reviews, firings, financial woes) did for the musical Spiderman — it’s making money on Broadway now. This industry deserves its own, headline-hogging scandal. When is it our turn to be center stage?

Disclaimer: This is Insurance Journal’s Satire Issue. The content is fake. Honestly. This isn’t real news. Fortunately. Even the names are made up. Totally. We hope you have fun. Seriously. If you have complaints, please send them to editor@pc180.com. Confidentially.

Topics Catastrophe Market Property Casualty