Media Events: How to Make Them Work for You
(part C)
by
Charles Lamson
The High Price of News Leaks
Frequently, employees are a major cause of news leaks. Sometimes they are salespeople hoping to impress customers by offering advance information about a new product, forgetting that they may be flirting with an antitrust violation by preannouncing a product. Or they are staff managers carelessly chatting about their work. Indeed, Business Week explained how a major article on personal computers came to be written by quoting a reporter as saying, "I heard intimations at a lunch, at a cocktail party, and again from a research expert while I was in a grocery store about a major product announcement coming."Said publisher James R. Pierce candidly: "Using these bits of information as a wedge, [we] got interviews with [the company's] executives."
There is a very basic reason to keep a tight lid on new product information until the announcement day: You likely cannot afford to alienate the news media and lose the free---and probably positive---publicity they will give you. Except in rare cases, journalists will not cover the announcement of a new product as a major news event if the story has leaked out in dribs and drabs. They understand the necessity for a trial location or two. But any more widespread knowledge and reporters tend to say too many of their readers or viewers already know the story to make it news, and they send you off to the very expensive advertising section. As the old saying goes, "Loose lips sink ships."
Editors also frequently refuse to carry a story on a new product on their pages or programs if your company has a paid ad running. Their feeling is that if your company had time to produce and place an advertisement, the product is no longer "hard news" to their readers and viewers and the publication is being used to provide free advertising. It is thus an important part of the media relations person's responsibility to ensure your news conference precedes any advertising by at least a day or two.
Integrated Marketing Communications
The poster ads for the new Volkswagon Beetle will go down in advertising history: "Less flower, more power," and "If you sold your soul in the 80s, here's your chance to buy it back." But it was not advertising that launched the new Love Bug. Rather, it was public relations, according to PR Week.
The Beetle was introduced at the North American Auto Show in January 1999 with a satellite media tour. Volkwagon and Ruder Finn generated more than 900 national and local television segments about the Beetle in the first week alone. The publicity kept rolling in when the new Beetle was delivered. It made news by stopping traffic whenever it appeared, and customers responded by heading for their car dealers to buy. Said Rudder Finn creative director Michael Schubert, "We arranged it so that the car was seen in high-profile, high-traffic situations like Times Square in New York and Rodeo Drive in L.A."
By the time the advertising started in April, there was 65 percent awareness among the general public. And when a wiring problem caused VW to recall 10,000 Beetles it had sold, owners who took their cars in for repairs got a loaner or a free taxi, a car wash, a tank of gas and a bouquet of flowers for their trouble---"Nice PR touches that embellished the Beetle's image and defused a potential crisis," as PR Week put it. The launch of the Beetle is just the latest in the growing line of companies and brands where PR has become central to the marketing program." In fact, in an editorial titled, "Packaged PR Is Key to Branding," PR Week opined: "The success of strongly branded operations like Starbucks, Amazon.com, Virgin, and The Body Shop [is] predicated on public relations and not advertising."
The softening of the traditional boundaries between marketing, advertising and PR is a natural response to the economic and competitive imperatives facing companies and clients. Organizational silos are out and teamwork is in. CEOs have little interest in what function traditionally had responsibility for a given task. Rather, they want the brightest and most creative minds addressing business challenges no matter where they reside in the organizational chart. Communicating priority messages cost-effectively to journalists, customers, shareholders, employees and other target publics is necessary to an organization's survival. Integrated marketing communications is an effective way to do that.
Said Thomas L. Harris, author of The Marketers Guide to Public Relations, "It is this need to get more bang for their bucks that has driven the growth of marketing public relations and the move to integrated marketing. The leave-it-all-to-advertising mindset is giving way to more targeted, more diverse ways to sell goods and services, maintain customer confidence and build brand equity."
To create an effective integrated marketing communications program and avoid a cheerleading approach to promotions, get all the key functions together to decide in your priority messages and key selling points. Step back and look at the new product or service as a journalist would. Forget ego. Ask, what really is news? What is new or unique? What aspect of the product or service would have the most interest for the media's readers, viewers or listeners? Look for a human side as well as a business side to the story. Your role as a strategist and counselor means thinking through and guiding the entire publicity program, not just writing a news release.
In fact, Harris sees a long list of ways PR adds value to integrated marketing communications programs, including reinforcing brand position, building marketplace excitement before advertising breaks, making advertising news where there is no product news, reviving brand excitement, and building personal relationships with customers. "The opposing opportunity is there if the talent is there to make it happen," in Harris' view.
*SOURCE: ON DEADLINE: MANAGING MEDIA RELATIONS 4TH ED., 2006, CAROLE M. HOWARD AND WILMA K. MATHEWS, PGS. 146-148*
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