Kaplinski in PR suicide

As little as six years ago the majority of press releases still came by post. On DM Week, we used to have huge piles of them typed up so we could edit them on our trendy orange macs. How archaic that now seems. These days they arrive in unprecedented numbers by email and I’ve often wondered, as an agent now responsible for quite a few of them, how this change in volume and format has affected their impact.

Unable to find any research on the area I recently conducted my own small survey of B2B journalists.  The results were surprising – at least to me. They show the average number received to be 35 a day (far less than I’d anticipated) of which 50% were considered irrelevant or poorly targeted (better than I’d thought actually). The main complaint (apart from targeting) turned out to be a lack of clear labelling.

On this basis even if your press releases are relevant and clearly labelled, you’re still competing with around 17 other emails a day for a journalist’s attention. These are not great odds.

Your chances lessen even more if you happen to email the likes of Five News’s editor David Kermode who in the latest issue of PR Week says this:

 “One of my biggest bugbears is when an email arrives in my inbox that is obviously PR crap – it gets immediately deleted. One sure-fire way of not getting my attention is a bog-standard email. What irritates me about PR is the blanket nature of it.”

So the effectiveness of emailed press releases seems to lie somewhere between ‘not very’ and ‘suicidal’.

Note to self, best call Natasha direct.