To open MikeSouth.com’s new “Week in Review” retrospective, we would like to extend our sincere gratitude to a loyal reader: Erika Icon of The Rub PR, the most incompetent publicist in the adult business.
As last week’s post demonstrated, if typographical errors, grammatical errors, clichés and repetitive phrasing were crimes, Erika would be on death row.
However, Ms. Icon took note of her award for Worst Porn PR of the Week, and — no doubt fearing Ernest Hemingway’s ghostly vengeance — this week began eschewing excess conjunctions in favor of shorter sentences in her releases. (Well, for the most part. . . .)
Sadly, smaller hunks of dog shit are still dog shit. And so, this week’s returning champion is . . . Erika Icon of The Rub PR.
We pause to remind readers that this feature is not provided for entertainment value alone; it represents a service to the adult industry clients who are assuredly NOT getting their money’s worth when they pay for publicity services.
The returning champion
This week’s Worst PR was composed shat out by Erika for her client Lance Hart’s website, Sweet Femdom. For those unfamiliar with Hart, 40, he is, as Icon explains below, a male crossover performer.
Here’s the opening paragraph of the press release that actually Hart paid good money for. As per our custom, no alterations have been made; this is exactly how the press release went out to media.
Sweet Femdom is known for featuring top adult stars and fetish models—Alex Coal, Casey Calvert, and Mona Wales are kicking ass with new scenes directed by Lance Hart.
In “Mona Saves an Angel,” Mona Wales dances and saves slutty, fallen angels, like Lance Hart. She breaks out the Bible and then realizes only a strap-on is the only way to save his life. Once Mona fucks Lance and he could breathe again, he promises afterlife rewards and gives her some angel dick before ascending to heaven.
The first sentence lets readers know that they’re in for a mess. Unsure what to do after dropping one conjunction from the sentence, she replaces it with a “—“, and the result is even worse than her usual run-on sentences. It’s easy to understand why: she’s out of her element, like a whale out of water.
Then for no apparent reason, her PR switches to Bold text:
Alex Coal returns to Sweet Femdom in a cuckold scene as a hotwife in fishnets, socks, and sneakers. In “Cucked by Your Hot Wife – Alex Coal Part 1, she taunts you and them her hot date, Will Tile, arrives, she shows off his huge dick and taunts you about how small your is. Then, Alex worships Will’s massive cock while commenting on how it satisfies her more than yours ever did and how you will never fuck her again. It all ends with a creamy finish in Alex’s mouth and all over her tits.
Due to Icon’s complete lack of creative imagination, and via the magic of cut and paste, the next paragraph begins with the exact same phrasing (“so-and-so returns. . .”) before taking some confusing clauses for a quick ride to Conjunction City:
Casey Calvert returns in “Alien Abduction Part 2”. In the latest and final edition of this series, Casey holds Draven Navarro on her alien space ship. Once they reach her home planet, he’ll be their Earth Male Sex Slave. With a long ride ahead, she plays with him, and whips out a strap on and fucks him until he can’t take it anymore and has blue balls. Casey promises her will be used for all kinds of sex acts in the future, but smothers him with her ass, makes him give her oral, and milks every drop of come from him.
The perfunctory quotation (purportedly) from her client comes next, and of course it contains absolutely no insight regarding the client or the content on his site.
“Mona, Alex, and Casey are huge adult stars, but they are also very big in the fetish world, plus they’re a hoot to work with,” says Lance Hart. “They are all member favorites and these scenes are definite must-sees.”
Ms. Alex Coal, as delightful as she is, is hardly a “huge adult star”, but hey, puffery is the name of the game.
Next, Erika takes a trip to Cliché Town. It’s a location she knows almost as well as this one:
Sweet Femdom always hits the spot with cute girls doing mean things. With new content posted several times a week, you get the most bang for your buck. To join, go to [link omitted].
“Hits the spot” and “bang for your buck” in successive sentences. Wow.
Despite her obvious efforts to cut back on her use of the conjunction “and” in all her press releases this week, it seems that Erika was too lazy to take another look at her boilerplate “About . . .” sections. Consequently, they remain awful in a way that only our returning champion can accomplish.
ABOUT SWEET FEMDOM
Sweet Femdom is the home of cute girls doing mean things and usually to co-star, director, editor, and producer Lane Hart. Some of the biggest female performers in adult have done femdom scenes for the site including Charlotte Sartre, Ashley Fires, Riley Reyes, Lily Lane, Leigh Raven, and Mona Wales. These ladies enjoy using strap-ons, kneeing guys in the balls, facesitting, using their joysticks for pleasure and draining, and making them dress in women’s clothes. . . .
From the first sentence we’re back in Conjunction City, but something else stands out: Icon is bragging about Lance having hired false rape accuser Leigh Raven. Now there’s a selling point!
The next “About…” section in Erika’s PR begins:
ABOUT LANCE HART
Lance Hart is one of the most prolific adult stars—he can master role, and has done it all from gay, straight, fetish, bi, trans and everything in between. His first scene was for Sean Cody, and he went on to become one of their top contracted models. After that, he started his own fetish studio and produced clips, and eventually went on to found his current studios, Man Up Films and Sweet Femdom.any
The paragraph starts with a grammatical error (“he can master role”) and it ends with a typographical error (“Sweet Femdom.any”). Amazing.
Then, in lieu of an effective grammatical transition, Icon switches back to bold text for another journey to Conjunction City:
Lance has received countless nominations from AVN, XBIZ, TEAs, Fetish Awards, Pornhub Awards, AltPornAwards, Str8UpGayPorn Awards, Urban X Awards, and the Grabbys. He’s won Male Performer of the Year from the Fetish Awards three years in a row and Favorite Male Fetish Webcam Performer, as well as Best Male Performer from the AltPorn Awards and TEA Awards, GayVN Awards and AVN Awards for his scene work, and XBIZ Cam Award’s Best Male Clip Artist.
Again our returning champion switches back to regular text for this gem:
Before entering adult, Lance did a wide array of jobs that included a wide array of jobs from street performer in New Orleans to Senior Sales Executive for Cogent Communications. With over 10 years in adult, he’s here to stay.
LMFAO Lance’s wide array of jobs included a wide array of jobs. Erika Icon’s clichés include clichés of their own!
And the kicker in the last sentence sounds a bit more like a threat than a boast.
Great Hemingway’s Ghost please make it STOP!
6 Responses
This wasn’t as bad as last week’s submission but Erika needs to lay off of the double scotches and do her job while sober! I have drunkenly wrote some fucked up shit over the years but I could be drunk/high as hell and do a better job! Also, I usually have enough intelligence to proofread my documents and catch most (unfortunately not all) of my stupid mistakes. Erika has been doing this for over ten years and I have seen some of her PR writing over the years, I don’t recall any of her past work having this many grammatical errors and being of such poor quality until very recently. With her current work, I would rather have Daffy Duck do my PR than Erika (for the record if I were in a position to need adult film industry PR I would probably hire Kelli Roberts although I have to admit that fellow publicist James Bartholet seems to be fun to party with). Erika also wrote for this site for a short time, I don’t recall any of her articles looking anything like what has been in the two worst PR articles submitted as of late.
As for Erika’s mental condition, has anyone smelled booze on her or seen her high as a kite lately? One or both of those would be the most likely explanation for her poor work as of late.
Or get blasted AFTER you are finished with your work.
Erika’s not high; she doesn’t have that excuse (unless you count a sugar rush, of course). She’s just an awful, lazy writer.
Icon has been up in arms about our previous ‘Worst PR’ post all week. She tried her best to write acceptable PRs and failed again. Laziness.
Her earlier work was also bad, but her limited imagination and intellect has led her to run out of ways to write a readable release. I would say that maybe she did better when she was young and hungry, but Erika is always hungry, so…
Wow! Erika has a lackadaisical attitude about her work, then. I don’t expect her to be a PR person very much longer with the poor job she is currently doing. Maybe Kelli can write an article touting her services and get a few more clients, people like Lance Hart and Sarah Vandella need and deserve better PR agents. It boggles my mind that a professional PR agent would be able to let the kind of work featured in the two Worst PR of the Week articles even leave her office! I could do a better job and I was an accounting and taxation professor, not a writer (other than scholarly articles) or a PR agent. Erika is supposedly a professional PR agent and should know what the fuck she is doing. I did edit a small newspaper for a while but that just means I can edit grammar and verify that an article’s content is factual, it doesn’t mean that I can write quality press releases.
Off subject but thanks to PornReporter for showing the logo of Cravings Buffet. I took a look at their website (for everyone else reading it is in the Mirage Casino), it looks like an excellent (although a bit expensive) place to eat. I will have to remember to stop in there the next time I am in Las Vegas. Our buffets here in Michigan are good but the selection is limited and mostly Asian-inspired (I like Asian food but Cravings wide selection of just about everything makes my mouth water).
You’re welcome! I dined there during the last AVN Expo, and it was so good I took a photo of the sign for future reference.