Author: Mark Tyler
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.
It’s good to hear I’m not the only one who thinks Labour’s spin doctors are letting the PR side down. No less than Colin Byrne, Weber Shandwick’s chief and former Labour party chief press adviser says in PR Week today, “there’s no way these mistakes would have happened when Alistair Campbell was there.” He also compliments Conservative comms chief Andy Coulson for outmanouevering his opposite number.
Meanwhile, the client, no doubt fed up with the state of his public image, has escaped online, bypassing journalists altogether to commune direct with the electorate on You Tube. Good idea this, especially as press relations don’t seem to be improving much under the charge of Labour’s special press adviser whose approach is, according to Byrne, “just phoning up people and shouting at them.”
Perhaps with enough personal phone calls and vodcasts The PM can cut out the troublesome middlemen altogether. Might be easier to employ an effective PR though.
Former Sun editor Stuart Higgins who was appointed Andy Murray’s PR adviser in March must have enjoyed the transition of his enfant terrible into centre court favourite last night more than most.
Just three months ago, Murray’s no show at the Davis cup tie against Argentina , the subsequent spat with his brother and a reputation for surliness with the press meant that despite his undoubted talent and the two ATP titles he’d already won in 2008, he was not exactly a favourite within UK tennis or with the British public.
I got into a bit of a spat myself at his last Wimbledon in 2006 when I suggested to a Scottish friend that Murray could do with a bit of PR advice. She felt that one of his most attractive qualities was that he wasn’t concerned about impressing the media and just wanted to play tennis. I can see that side of the argument – McEnroe was one of my favourites – and it would be boring if every tennis player was perfect on and off court. In any case, that’s Federer’s job.
But there’s a balance to be struck. Higgins has clearly given Murray media training and that is making a big difference to the reception he’s getting from the UK press this year. Whilst you’d never want him to turn into some hideous smiling media bunny, you also don’t want him to be given a kicking off court due to a natural reticence – or Scottish dourness – that can look surly to those not familiar with it. Higgins seems to have helped Murray find the right balance.
Whilst he’s improving with the off court stuff, his public image will principally be fashioned on the tennis court and for the most part in just two weeks every year at Wimbledon. Based on last night’s extraordinary performance, he no longer has much to fear in either respect
Two weeks ago, Sotheby’s International Realty’s public relations officer in South Africa – Maurice Levin was fired three months into the job for publicising an internal memo from owner Lew Geffen which urged franchise holders to persuade luxury house owners to reduce their prices by 25% due to an anticipated 40% decline in house prices.
Levin apparently turned the memo into a press release and the first thing Geffen knew about it was a phonecall from Levin revealing the good news that he’d arranged a radio interview to discuss the impending property meltdown. The owner hung up on him, presumably in a hurry to speak to Personnel. More surprising though is that two weeks after the firing, Mr Levin still doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong.
He’s even been using his PR skills to get press interviews in which he has criticised his former boss for not sticking with the comments in his internal memo. Showing the sort of PR insight that secured his exit, Levin explains that there was a difference between what the chairman would say in private and what he was prepared to say publicly:
“Clearly what he tells his franchise holders – who cough up millions to carry the company name – is not what he tells the general public, otherwise he’d not have been perturbed by the media’s possession of the document.” Levin says.
Clearly he was in the job three months too long.
Not enough regional stories are finding their way to national news according to Mark Thompson speaking in Wales this week. The BBC chief suggests the blame lies with regional networks holding on to the best stories – and why wouldn’t they?
I wonder though if he thought as far as where the stories the regions get come from. In my experience it is far easier for PR agents to pitch stories and build relationships with regional broadcast journalists than with the national network. I can pick up the phone to or email regional broadcast journalists with no problem at all, but try phoning up Kate Silverton or Jeremy Paxman and see how far you get.
Of course you wouldn’t really expect to get through to the anchors but maybe a designated underling or researcher. But no, when you phone the main BBC news office, you’re requested to send your release to a general email address, with no specific journalist name to follow up with. Effectively you’re dropping it into the great BBC black hole of news and hoping it gets noticed.
Over time, you build up contacts, but it’s a haphazard process. If the BBC published a list of news journalists and their sectors for PR agents to talk to, in the same way print publishers do, they’d get a great many more regional stories and better targeted ones too.
I feel compelled to resign on a point of principle. Political spin doctors used to have some influence in British politics, but lately, the gaffs just keep coming, including last week, surely the biggest howler by a leading conservative since Michael Portillo started installing those phone lines or William Haig wore a baseball cap.
It’s no wonder the Lib Dem comms chief Jonny Oates has given up and gone back to his agency, Labour’s PR guru since January, Stephen Carter is surely not far behind. Barring a couple of minor incidents David Cameron has progressed relatively unscathed, but then he was a PR man before he was an MP. Gordon Brown is about as far from a PR as you can get, which was once touted as his strength but is now leaving him defenceless in the face of a media kicking (decent of Mr Davis to divert some of the blows though).
Resignations used to be the last chance for politicians to slip away with their reputations intact, but Mr Davis presumably thought he could step out, then step back in again via a by-election, performing some sort of resignation hokey cokey and emerge with his reputation enhanced. The media were baffled, then scathing, Cameron said it was ‘a brave move’ which is code in any walk of life for foolhardy. I assume at no time did he run it past a PR adviser.
So I’m going to resign and then re-hire myself ten minutes later – it’s a small, selfless act which I hope will show everyone that I will not stand for this appalling decline in the influence of political spin doctors anymore. Bring back Campbell, bring back Mandelson – all is forgiven.
