Dick Grove

Press Releases are as Outdated as the Paper They’re Written On

10.31.11

It’s time for all of us in the public relations profession to fess up to very basic fact…press releases are a lousy inefficient means to garner the media’s attention.  And if you’re a company or an individual with little to no media profile…as are most…they’re worse than inefficient, they’re a stupid waste of time.

Let me be clear…I am not talking about disseminating information for purposes of self promotion or legal compliance.   What I am talking about is landing media coverage and in the process making a positive impression on the media, and possibly even a detailed news story for yourself or a client.   Real news coverage on the editorial side is a product of news, timeliness, verifiable facts, hard work, opportunity, and yes, luck…not PR puffery, long-winded descriptions of a company or its product attributes, industry jibber jabber, and last but not least, legalisms…i.e., the average corporate press release.

I’m not sure where exactly the origins of the misunderstandings came from, or how long there’s been a belief that press releases actually work. It’s probably been as long as the first press agent took pen to paper and stuck it in the local newspaper editor’s cubbyhole.  And it’s been propagated over the years by traditional PR practitioners and PR educators, not because they’re effective but because they’re easy and the time put against writing them is usually fully billable.  But unless the subject already is familiar to the media…a high profile company like Apple or IBM or tied to the latest and greatest “news cause de celeb”…they find the trash can, real or electronic, faster than you can say “delete.”  I once had a group VP of one of the big three PR firms brag to me that his New York staff was annually billing out $1.2 million on writing press releases alone for a client.  When I asked him if it was productive for the client…did it produce a million dollars in news coverage?… his answer, “who knows.”

Pay-for-performance PR firms understand the fallacy of the press release.  They know because their revenue stream depends solely on producing actual editorial news coverage for clients, not billable hours churning out releases.  Hours are expended all right, but against researching the individual target media and creating a credible pitch to an individual reporter, editor, blogger or producer.  The result, hopefully a billable client story, not billable hours or one more release finding the bottom of the wastebasket.

I’ve been accused over the years of being a press release bigot…of classifying all press releases as pointless and a waste of time.  Not true.  Some of my best friends are press releases…some do serve a very productive purpose.  A few key words here or there and they can do wonders for your SEO…or keep you straight with the compliance folks at the SEC…or make a nice addition to a salesperson’s portfolio…and lastly give corporate lawyers a place to deposit all of their “whereas’s” and “therefore’s” and disclaimers to their hearts content.  But it’s only when the press release gets uppity and tries to create real news that I have a problem.  Does that make me a press release bigot…or just a smart PR practitioner?

That’s my opinion…what’s yours?

Categories: About INK, Grove Report, pr marketing

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Dick Grove

Watching Public Relations Unwind…Hour by Hour

10.24.11

 The public relations profession is getting caught in its own “Catch-22.”

I received an email from a twenty-year pro in the PR business…a vice president of a major national PR agency…this week saying she was being taken off of one her favorite and most productive clients because the client needed to trim their budget slightly and her agency felt her hourly rate was too high to keep her on the account….duh?  What’s wrong with this picture?  More to the point, what continues to be wrong with the traditional PR agency world that it would rather diminish the service provided its clients than rethink an unfair and outmoded compensation structure?

It was Albert Einstein that defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

We in this profession are supposedly creative and strategic in our advice and counsel to our business clients; and yet we can’t after sixty plus years figure a better way to charge our clients than does a baby sitter or a day laborer.  Yes, I know…traditional PR pros charge considerably more than Mary Sue next door does for watching little Johnny on Friday nights, but the concept stays the same…the more the hours, the greater the pay.  (And I agree an argument could be made that Mary Sue’s responsibility is considerably greater than most high priced PR types hammering out never-to-be-used press releases…but that’s fodder for another blog.)

And if it wasn’t time before, it certainly is in today’s client world of restricted budgets, to stop doing the same thing over and over again…hour after hour…invoice after invoice.  There are lots of alternatives….pay-for-performance, performance bonuses, and incentive-based compensation programs.  Clients aren’t stupid and more than ever they are far more interested in the value of the service rendered and even in their own internal self preservation than loyalty to a traditional “name agency” or an outdated compensation model.  If a client has to trim their PR budget, do they really expect that their agency will eliminate the best and brightest…and the most experienced on their account…or rather the agency will do its best to creatively figure a way to keep service at a high level while working with them through a difficult time.  Whoa! That’s neither realistic nor fair…the traditional PR firms cry.  We have big-time overhead and salaries to cover and we can’t be expected to take a financial hit because of our clients.  Really?  Consider the alternative…the client ultimately leaves because of diminished service, that same high overhead must be pared (although sadly, this paring usually starts at the bottom) and new clients must be found and signed to take their place (all expensive in itself)…and new overhead (and salaries) must be added to service them.  And here we go again…over and over again.

Call it PR’s own stupid “Catch-22”…or as Albert would say, “Insanity.”

That’s my opinion…what’s yours?

Categories: Grove Report, pr marketing, pr news

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Dick Grove

Remembering the “Sixties”

10.16.11

I’ll take my hat off to that…what hat?

President KennedyI knew the sixties.  The sixties were friends of mine.  And you, “Mad Men”, “Playboy Club”, and “Pan Am” are not the sixties. Oh, you’ve got a bit of the surface feel for the era; and just enough of a few details to con those born after the great baby boom into believing they’re witnessing history as it was.  Or…is it history as a few Hollywood writers and producers believe it might have been.  History filtered by youth and stories handed down by the books and the entertainment media of that era and propagated by a few that did actually experience the decade in the workplace, but are either too lazy to dispute the modern rendition or have bought into it because it’s more glamorous than their personal reality.

Even the term “sixties” is a misnomer.  What is passed off as the sixties in today’s pop culture is mostly the latter part of the decade, much as we so often see presented as “fifties” is in reality from about 1957 through 1962…rock and roll, poodle skirts, etc.  But what’s a few years when you’re having fun and only remembering the good stuff.  But what’s with the hats? Did all the guys wear hats…no.  Did a few guys wear hats…a dorky few.  President Kennedy changed all that in 1961.  Almost overnight the men’s hat industry went flat.  Kennedy was cool to the young men of the era.  He hated wearing a hat.  Enough said.

What’s all this got to do with a blog on the media and the communications business today?  For starters, in the sixties I worked in a big New York ad agency, I flew on Pan Am, and yes, I even stopped by a key club in Chicago and elsewhere.  And I still have enough of my facilities to remember the experience in detail.  I can still feel the emotions, the excitement of being in advertising and public relations when, although not embryonic, were still in their infancy when ads were comp’ed on tissue and commercials were 60 seconds and shot on film and we charged our PR clients by the column inch.  Were they the good old days?  Not necessarily.  Was there a greater sense of individual effort and improvisation before computers, software, and special effects were invented to cover our ass, yes.  Were there great stories and emotions being played out all around us…big and small…absolutely….but none of us wore hats!

I loved the sixties experience but I don’t want to turn back the clock. I do miss the entrepreneurial nature of the work in those days, but I love my iPhone and my word processing software and the styles today way too much.  But is it asking too much to spend some of those production dollars on getting a few more details correct.  We smoked everywhere (including on Pam Am) but few if any of us drank in the office (we saved it for lunch) nor had hair over our collars, and not every woman wore heavy eye make up that curled upward in the corner of her eyes.

Is it asking too much to fix the details…at least until those of us that know better are dead?

 

 

 

 

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Dick Grove

Steve Jobs a Traditionalist?

10.09.11

Even the master of digital media may have enjoyed his morning paper…

 Steve JobsI’m not big on death.  It’s so damn final.  But perhaps it’s one good quality is that it forces us to review those lives that have ended with considerably more clarity than when the person was on their journey rather than at its conclusion.  So it is with the remarkable journey of Steve Jobs.  I, like millions of others, am in awe of his accomplishments but probably more so his determination to stubbornly do it his way.  Much of “his way” has been chronicled over the last few days since his passing. But a few I believe are worth repeating because they go against even what many continue to believe about Mr. Jobs, and are listed below.  My personal favorite has to do with a pet peeve of mine and it seems I share in oh such a small way with Mr. Jobs…the concern over traditional media’s demise…

Traditional media remains vital.
“I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers. I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever. Anything we can do to help newspapers find new ways of expression that will help them get paid, I am all for.”

[D8 conference, via All Things Digital <http://allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/> , June 2010]

 

But the remaining nine are equally worth noting…

Conformity is boring.
“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

[from Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, 1987, via The Wall Street Journal <http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/08/24/steve-jobss-best-quotes/> ]

Sweat the small stuff.
“This is what customers pay us for—to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.”

[via Fortune <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/01/24/272277/> , January 2000]

Sometimes, focus groups aren’t the answer.
“For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

[via Businessweek <http://www.businessweek.com/archives/1998/b3579156.arc.htm> , May 1998]

What it means to be a creative person.                                          “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

[via Wired <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html> , February 1996]

Can you say this about your workplace?
“We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.”

[via Playboy <http://www.scribd.com/doc/43945579/Playboy-Interview-With-Steve-Jobs> , February 1985]

The importance of strong managers and coaches.
“What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.”

[via Businessweek <http://www.businessweek.com/archives/1998/b3579156.arc.htm> , May 1998]

Take note, small business owners.
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”

[via Fortune <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/11/09/250834/index.htm> , November 1998]

Don’t. Settle.
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

[Stanford commencement speech <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA&feature=player_embedded> , June 2005]

Words to live by.
“Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

[Stanford commencement speech <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA&feature=player_embedded> , June 2005]

 

“Some men see things as they are and say, why?  Others see things that never were and say, why not?”  George Bernard Shaw

 

That’s my opinion…what’s yours?

 

Categories: Grove Report, pr marketing, pr news

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Dick Grove

Running in Place For Ten Years

09.12.11

Time to move on…

I fully recognize that having experienced the tragic events of 9/11 from the relative safety and insulation of the Heartland, some 1300 miles from where those crazy bastards tore into the sides of those buildings and destroyed the lives of nearly three thousand families, makes me less empathetic to the grieving that those in the northeast continue to endure.  Those families and their descendents deserve their time of remembrance and reflection of what was and what could have been…of loves lost and futures never to be fulfilled…of the random senselessness of religious and political fanaticism and it’s brutal consequences on those that never chose to be involved.

However, hopefully this same insulated distance, and an understanding of the mass media gives some needed perspective to how we propagate tragedy in this modern world to serve not those directly harmed, but our own needs to further personal, business, and political agendas.  Anniversaries of tragic events are important as benchmarks of remembrances and recognition of hopefully how far we have come since.  But we’ve used the excuse of the tragedies of 9/11 to jump the boundaries of civil discourse, civil rights, and feign a tough guy patriotic stance (“these colors don’t run, etc. etc.”) all duly reported by the fawning 24/7 news cycle of cable TV pundits under catchy twenty-minute promos.  Worse, we’ve used the tragedies to start two never-ending wars that have obliterated twice as many lives and families as were lost in the reasons given for them.

I did not lose any family or friends in the events of 9/11, but I lost many friends of friends and of course the certainty of America’s innocence and protection from catastrophic attack.  And it took some time to have that indelible memory of those towers of human beings collapsing within their own debris fade into my every day activity of living.  But fade it has and I choose not to bring it back to the forefront of my mind by watching endless hours of made for television tributes, politicians vying for face time to pontificate and justify, and or view a piece of ground where so many died so horribly only to be fought over greedily by the real estate speculators, politicians and artisans pushing their own self interests.

Yes, it is the tenth anniversary of a very dark and terrible day in our history…and it will live in infamy along with other markedly terrible days…and no, it will never be forgotten.  It is assuredly forever frozen in time.  But isn’t it time to move on and make it not a day of national garish and goulash anguish, but simply a reflection of the best of what the nation stands for…its resilience to the intolerance and fanaticism.

That’s my opinion…what’s yours?

Categories: Grove Report

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