Posts Tagged ‘PR’

1) It takes 24 hrs for them to return my call/email. If it’s taking this long, either your account handler is too junior to know the answer, too busy on the 15 other accounts they ’service’ or off with stress because the agency financial structure demands they work 16 hours a day.

2) It takes a month to get a press release back. So who’s writing this stuff? Is it going up and down some bureaucratic chain of command at the agency, being amended for style not substance. When it does appear, is it lost in jargon with no discernible news hook?

3) I haven’t seen the account director since the pitch. All the IP and experience you saw in the pitch has been very busy with internal projects and has become merely a CC on hundreds of emails from the AM asking questions, questions, always with the questions.

4) You’re their smallest account. If you’re the smallest account at a large agency, they just don’t care enough about you. Doesn’t matter how well known the agency is, you won’t benefit from their award winning expertise. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog” said Keith Weed, new CMO of Unilever at Cannes last week, answering the question “do big agencies do the best work…or small agencies”.

Interesting too that he was saying it to Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP – one of the world’s largest comms groups (138,000 employees in over 2,400 offices in 107 countries) for whom Unilever is a major client.

Weed goes on to say that when working with a big agency, his aim is to make sure he has that agency’s best people on his account, implying that in a big agency, employees are a mixed bag.

While it’s feasible to demand the best staff if you’re Unilever with a budget of £5bn a year, if you’re looking for a PR agency and have say £60K a year to spend, the size and quality of the agency you’re dealing with become more mission critical factors. Read the rest of this entry »

At the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles, it was agreed, according to Gorkana that Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) – the  main PR measuring stick in use for decades has now been rejected by delegates from 33 countries.

Well we always knew it was a bit iffy, not least because the well known phrase ‘you can’t buy coverage like this’  is literally true – you can’t buy advertising in many of the editorial situations the PR industry gets clients onto, plus AVE massively undervalues the longtail benefits of positive coverage.

While Barcelona has put it’s foot down on AVE, the great and good of PR haven’t yet proposed an alternative. Offline they may continue to struggle but happily online we’re got plenty of options, here’s a few off the bat:

1) The number of new links to your site/blog – good for reputation, SEO and reach

2) The increase in the number of mentions on Google your brand gets.

3) Website grade – use one of the online tools to measure how well your website scores before and after a campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting statistic has been uncovered by Adam Clyne in his PR Week blog, that shows only 22% of PR Week’s Power 100 list actively use Twitter. Clyne suggests five possible reasons for this:

1. The PR Industry is out of touch – and has been slow to embrace social media.

2. Social media is not the remit of the PR industry and is the realm of digital agencies.

3. The top 100 is more likely to consist of ‘older’ practitioners and business leaders – whose expertise lie in traditional media and may not have time to Tweet – but their staff may be fully engaged in social media and their companies are running effective campaigns.

4. Twitter is not for everyone.

5. Twitter may not be that important.

My view is that 1 & 3 are the most accurate and related. The profile of most PR agency CEOs suggests Twitter is something their kids are more likely to use than they themselves.

I remember talking to the MD of a sizeable advertising agency a couple of years ago and he seemed almost quite proud to state that he wasn’t interested in Facebook, didn’t use it. The implication was that he considered himself too senior to have to worry about it. The same is probably true of many PR agency CEOs

You’re unlikely to hear a PR agent publically criticise a major news outlet, unless they’re feeling commercially suicidal that day, yet sensationally Matthew Freud has made a gloves-off attack on Fox News, the leading US TV news network owned – and this is where it gets even more surprising – by his father-in-law, Rupert Murdoch.

Agreeing to contribute his thoughts to a New York Times profile of Fox founder and boss Roger Ailes, Freud said: “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”

Commentators suspect that his comments don’t so much represent a spectacular gaffe by Freud as a tactical move to destabilise the station chief. Michael Wolff, a biographer of Murdoch said “Matthew Freud, a PR man of extraordinary craftiness, is not going to say anything off the cuff, certainly not that.” Read the rest of this entry »

A social media strategy meeting expertly lampooned, the advocates quaking as they fear the wrath of the old guard, referencing the Toyota Yaris Australia pitch where five agencies have been given $15,000 each to show what they can do with social media.

Based on a survey in August of 1500 businesses by Hubspot, those that blogged had 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages.

Most businesses accept, even if they don’t anticipate these sort of figures, that a blog will revolutionise their static corporate website, but trying to get momentum for that internally can be a trying business. Who’s going to write it, what will it look like, who’s going to build it.

Outsourcing the build and content provision makes sense from an operational standpoint, it requires the minimum of internal input and you benefit from the expertise of people who are 100% blog content and blog marketing focussed.

Hubspot say 55% more visitors, on average, anecdotally we’ve seen much, much more than that. How does 1000% more visitors sound (albeit from a low base). Read the rest of this entry »

Brands like Mastercard and Geek Squad are creating their own news content published direct to consumers via channels like YouTube, rather than pitching stories to traditional media, Advertising Age reports today.

The US advertising monitor cites the declining number of media outlets combined with the growth of quick fire customer engagement through online communities as drivers of a new approach to PR.

Mastercard,  for example has deliberately pursued a low tech video route, interviewing it’s executives on camcorders, editing on laptops and uploading to YouTube. Mastercard’s PR agent, Andrew Foote at Cohn and Wolfe says:

“They’re realizing they can comment on issues and get the points of view of their experts out there and on the record. Once the videos are up, the company will often tweet the links and follow up with reporters letting them know MasterCard commented on the topic.” Read the rest of this entry »

In a post on her blog on Thursday, Susan Moskwa, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst recommends proactively publishing “useful, positive information”  to gain control of your business (or personal) online reputation.

Moskwa’s comments come in the context of dealing with negative online publicity and in 2009, it’s still the case that most businesses only think of online reputation when something goes wrong. It’s the online equivalent of crisis PR.

Other companies are taking a more considered approach, combining elements of search and editorial planning to ensure that their online reputation matches their brand values. Read the rest of this entry »