PR pro repeats her message 27 times during TV interview

That’s obvious, right?

But what happens if you’re in the heat of an interview and your messages are no longer sufficient to help you answer the questions credibly?

Should you stick with your talking points anyway, or should you make a quick decision to abandon your talking points to answer the question while maintaining your credibility with the audience?

Hopefully that’s a false choice. As you’ll see in the video below, most of these questions could and should have been anticipated and prepared for prior to the interview.

A sharp reader sent me this interview about a Canadian oil pipeline which appeared on Canada’s CBC earlier this month. The two guests were John Bennett, the executive director of Canada’s Sierra Club, and Kathryn Marshall, a public relations representative with a small nonprofit called Ethical Oil.

(It’s a long clip, but worth watching as a great example of what not to do in an interview.)