PR at Work 1 of 4: Advertising or PR

Have you read The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR? If not, click over to Amazon.com and get it. It’s a great book.

As a mid-sized marketer, I see the value in PR much more than I do in advertising. I think an ad for one of my company’s products or brand, opposite a page from Maxell or Verbatim looks a little odd. If anything they paid way less for their space, yet the cost was a much smaller percentage of their budget.

And besides, there is an inherent mistrust in advertising. Advertisers can say anything they want because they are paying for the ink. But PR on the other hand is above reproach. If a reporter or editor put it in the magazine, it must be true. It must be news.

Hopefully.

But, not always. Magazine and newspaper reporters have a set amount of space to fill. And they are always on the lookout for interesting, new things. And strangely, there is not always an influx of new and interesting things to write about. Frankly, those that take the time to send out news releases get attention.

At their best, editors and reporters will receive a release and use it as a reason to call for follow up, or request a sample for review, or put together a trend story. At their worst, editors will copy and paste the text of a news release directly into their publication. Either method gets your name in print, but savvy media consumers know the difference.

But even the worst case scenario helps you out in the Internet era of public relations. Each time your news release shows up on the web, Internet search engines see more value in it. And that makes your company and your web site show up higher in search engine results.

But to be most effective, you’re going to need to make a few changes to your news release style. Lose some of the news speak. Make it more like a blog. Go conversational and load it up with hyperlinks. Not too many; keep it to one every paragraph. Keep in mind you’re ultimately trying to appeal to a writer/editor, so keep everything pertinent. Link to your homepage, the web page of the featured product or service, try and tie the release to another more prominent company or trend, so you can link to their web sites. One neat effect of adding these hyperlinks is if your text gets copy/pasted, your links might follow and build more search engine juju.

But never forget you’re trying to appeal to a writer - reporter, editor, blogger, product evangelist, lonely teenager who spends too much time alone on the Internet - who in turn will share your news with their audience. So keep it human. Appeal to aspirations and fears.

Of course you can buy your way to the top of the Google results page, but those show up under the “Sponsored Links” header, and have less genuine appeal than organic search engine results. And people really do look at paid placements with a touch of cynicism

So, for my time and money, I’d rather send out samples and releases, and call and email; I want to get to those writers who might be interested in the news I have to offer. As long as you’re honest and have something interesting to talk about, they listen.

Over the next few days I’m going to throw out some thoughts in dealing with Consumer, Trade and Local PR. Because they are all different, and yet oh so alike. It can’t hurt to think of them as cousins who like the same stuff, but live in different neighborhoods.

The Display Dilemma

So, the flat-panel TV. All the kids are going to have one. Everybody from CNET to the Consumer Electronics Association is banking on the success of flat-panel TVs.

This trend got a big jump start with everybody on the show Cribs having one over the mantle. It’s not about just keeping up with the Jones’, it’s about keeping up with the Star Jones’. But that’s not the only influence.

Prices are finally getting into the Trading-Up ballpark. And more people are interested in the wide-screen action. And Congress finally voted and approved a hard date for ending analog television broadcasts (2/17/09). It’s widely thought ending analog TV broadcasting will create enough confusion in the general public there will be a rush to buy a new TV. (As much as I reassure by Cable-TV-subscribing Mother-in-law that she’ll be OK, she’s still freaking out about it.)

And with all of these new TVs, with new ways to show it and display it, the options go a little something like this.

- The Stand with which it came - All of these TVs come with some sort of a stand. This means you can pull it out of the box and set it up on the same old entertainment center you used for your CRT TV. (Yawn)

- Mount it… on the wall - Throw it up on the wall. This requires a wall-mount of some sort that’ll run you anywhere from $50-200 depending on bells and whistles. The problem that arises here is the cables. You can hide them by cutting some holes in your wall, which while being a pain, can look pretty slick.

- Stick your TV somewhere new - This is a cool option. And it applies more to your second or third TV. Stick it on the ceiling. The kitchen counter. A bookshelf. But keep in mind that most of you will need a satellite receiver or DVD player to get the most from even your secondary TVs. So following is a shameless plug for an Allsop product.


Our new TV Stands. They seriously make it easy to put an entertainment center in every room. And they do it without adding another piece of furniture or wall mounting.

As for me, I splurged on a 37-inch LCD TV at Costco. I am in love. My wife and I sometimes talk to the TV: greeting him or letting him know we will return soon. I dig my flat panel TV because it gives me and you more options in how to present the TV. Previously, a big TV became the centerpiece around which a room was arranged; because the TV was about the size of a Honda. With Flat Panels, you can take the focus off of the TV and let the room become more of a conversation area.

So after the initial purchase came the display dilemma. First we looked around the living room, where our old (CRT) TV was. We have an 80-year old house with a big fireplace. Should we go Cribs-style and mount it over the Fireplace? How about a media wall and put it on the opposite wall? Either way we were letting the TV become the focal point of our living room, our reception room, our main living area.

No deals, we cleared out the home office we never use, and now have a fantabulous Media Room. The best place north of Seattle and south of the Colossus in Langley to watch a movie... or back episodes of the X-Files.

Pres. Bush? Meet nuance. Nuance? Our president.

Our president’s lack of interest in nuance and his reveling in “straight talk” appear to have come back to haunt him. Two things in recent days come to mind.

First, President Bush goes on TV on 5/15/06 to explain the immigration policy. “This is not amnesty, because…” In explaining why the 11 million illegal immigrants who are here, have been a valuable member of society since they got here should not be herded up and sent back he required some nuanced words. A little strange seeing this coming from him. This required more than three words, a few commas and even some propositions thrown in. Well, his co-horts in the House of Representatives aren’t having any of it, passing a bill requiring deportation. The Senate came along, passing a bill along his lines of Bush’s preference. The two bills are polar opposites. Who knows what will come of it.

Then on Friday, a British reporter asked Bush about what mistakes he has made. Remember, if you will, the last time this happened, Bush couldn’t come up with an answer. This time he was ready for the question. His first thought was to say that his using lines of great bravado, such as “Bring it on” and “dead or alive” were wrong. He went further saying he learned he needed to be more sophisticated in how he communicates. This is a far cry from the tough talk campaign language of his presidential campaigns.

Apparently, someone in the communications office has decided that appealing to the lowest common denominator is not the best way to govern a country. Life is complicated. Governing is complicated. Policy is complicated. It takes more than three-word phrases to explain it.

iPods make the world go 'round

So, we launched this great new product last week. We've been developing it for a while now, and really started showing at CES this year. It is taking on a really cool internet buzz. It's fun when these happen and traffic to your site jumps, people started insulting your stuff, but more people get it and start proselytizing for you. It's fun.

Check out the Splash Pack DriPod. It's a simple concept. It keeps your iPod protected in an airtight case. But it still shows off the player and lets you control the volume or click around your playlists.

And check out a couple of these links.

MacNN - Splash Pack DriPod keeps iPods dry
CNet - Waterproof iPod case makes a splash
iLounge - Allsop Splash Pack Dri Pod Protection from Water, Dust and Sand
Daily Mac - Allsop Dri Pod

It's fun when something catches.

Oh, Advertising. I Hate You... yet I'm strangely attracted...

I’ve had an unexplainable attachment to M&Ms for most of my life. I don’t remember the attachment initially, but as a child you could push me down on my diaper-covered toddler butt and I'd be fine, but taking away my little bag of M&Ms meant trouble. So I was surprised when Elliot threw down the Reese’s Pieces to coax E.T. out of the bushes. But in hindsight, it’s better to sacrifice your Reese’s Pieces. Save the M&Ms for yourself. Anyway, I gave a lot of thought to this subject. And Reese’s is probably happy about it. Because they paid Spielberg $20,000 to have their product featured in the movie, and their sales jumped 66% overnight. It’s one of the seminole moments in the marketing in movies. Along with Jaws being the first summer blockbuster. Another source of advertising revenue was found. Paid Placement.

As a marketer, I’ve bought magazine ad space. I’ve bought local newspaper ad space. I’ve even arranged for an on-location radio event for a warehouse sale at our headquarters.

But couple those things with my knowledge as a media consumer (ie. I read magazines and watch TV) and I am an expert in my mind.

And advertising is going through some growing pains. To a large degree, advertising dollars are a zero sum game. There are only so many dollars that will be spent on advertising. The dollars get shifted around from format to format. Old forms of advertising die. Types of companies that advertise change.

Take radio. It’s gone from a national advertising medium to a local and regional advertising medium. But it’s still viable for local businesses. TV is giving way to the Internet. The best commercials made for TV never get shown on network TV but become an Internet phenomenon. Ad words and banner placement based on the context of the searches made by browsers is giving way to behavioral advertising over time.

Internet business models have gone from “make money by selling stuff” to “build a killer app that people use and sell advertising to those who want to make money by selling stuff”. That’s a big part of what caused the dot com bubble to burst. There are only so many dollars in the online-ad well. Even still, I am amazed at how many successful companies are still popping up with this model. Though I hear we are on another bubble. And what are the chances that at some point we’ll see Google-Like ads appear somewhere on the screen during your favorite TV shows.

But here’s my product placement vent. When I was reading the Fog, I was amused and engaged when I read that a bottle Ragu was smashed over someone’s head. Because we had a jar of Ragu hanging out in the cupboard. But now, if this were pulled off in a movie, I’d immediately view this as product placement, done for a fee by the movie producers, and call all of my friends to bitch about it.

Sure: TV, movie, music and pc gaming producers and artists need to make money on their product. I get it and support it. If TiVO, disappearing CD sales, slacking box office receipts and online digital media theft are going to eat up their profit, go ahead and make it up on the front end. But remember that if it looks like advertising or smells like advertising, it will look untrustworthy and suspicious. Make your creative people be more creative.

No Cash, No Problem... Keep My Friend.

I totally did this once.

> A German woman left her friend as a deposit at a gas station because
> she did not have enough cash to pay for her petrol, police said Wednesday.

So, I was 16, driving over to a friend's place at 11 p.m. Right as I was driving past the only gas station for 10 miles in Hamburg, Mich., I felt the engine sputter. I turned around and made it back to the gas station on fumes. Then I realized I'd left my wallet at home.

After a little negotiation, I got $5 in gas and left my friend, Tony, there while I retrieved my wallet. By the time I made it back to the gas station, the attendent had Tony restocking the candy aisle.

Wikilicous... Wikirrific... Wikimusing...

I’m not going to say that I’m a fan of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”. That’s because I’m not a fan. But I have seen it a few times. And of the lifelines, the 50/50 is really for chumps. I mean, really. They say it’s random, but the producers get to pick which two potential answers go away. If I was in the position, “phone a friend” would be my first choice only because I know two of the strangely smartest people on the planet (Hey, Gavin… What’s up, Kevin…). But a close second would be “Ask the Audience”, where you get to see a percentage result of the audiences opinion of the question’s answer. By and large, the masses are going to lead you in the right direction.

This is where I get excited about the wiki phenomenon. If you’ve not heard of this, check out Wikipedia. I link to it all of the time from this very blog. It’s like an encyclopedia of sorts, on the Internet that gets contributions from everyday people, crazy obsessed maniacs and professional experts who want to show how smart they are. It’s a great reference because it gets constant bulls**t testing. Every post made is open to editing from other contributors. And the other contributors could be any of the billions of people on the Interent. Wikipedia gets updated by cyber-geeks who think they know more than that academic buried in the back of the library working for Britannica.

The premise of this and other wiki sites is that a new opinion, fact, noun, whatever, will get posted and experts from around the planet will log on and share what they know about it in as clinical terms as possible. Sure marketers have tried to co-op it, but managers of the web site and other “everyman editors” do a pretty good job of shutting those down.

The really great thing is that, in general, wiki sites are more up to date than you are. If you hear about some crazy buzz on some random movie coming out this summer - say… Oh, I don’t know… “Snakes On A Plane” - go look. At this time, the Wikipedia is ground zero for where a lot of buzz grows. Check out pastafarianism (Have you been touched by his noodley appendage?).

And aside from the Wikipedia, check out Amazon, ShopWiki and Wikitravel. These are sites that allow potential customers and past customers to share what they know. Different from Wikipedia, these sites are intended to be less clinical and more fan-club like. This is a pretty neat way to get information on a vacation site, or ironing board or music.

But Wikinet apps have their down side.

One I will call Wikibullies: I imagine these guys monopolizing conversations at dinner parties if they had any social skills. But with no social skills, they sniff out words, commas and anecdotes they feel are out of whack and change them. If you’re not contributing to a wiki of their interest, I doubt I’d know they exist, but Oh they exist. These are people who spend a little more time than me paying attention to their respective topics of interest. But changes to listings get tracked and if someone’s posting a bunch of crap, the site managers can shut you out.

Another, I’ll call wikiLittlemuch is an issue I have with Amazon’s use. Take a look at their product pages. There is so much below the fold. Now I’m a big fan of testing. And the Internet lets you test and test and test until you find things that work. But with so many options at the bottom of the product page, I’ve stopped paying attention.

And then there are the Wikipranksters. I read of some guy who changed a wkikpedia entry as a prank - not really a funny prank, unless it was an inside joke - claiming a new twist on the JFK assasination. But that topic is rife with conspiracy hounds already, so I wasn’t too surprised.

Take Wikinet sites with a grain of skepticism, but take advantage of them. It’s free, it’s informational, and even if it’s wrong it’s entertaining.

Another MP3 Player. News?

See the technology media try to get excited about another MP3 player.

I just read about the SanDisk e-something today.

iRiver relocated and wants to offer a better experience.

Sony’s set to joust with Apple? I do like the medieval touch, but it seems a stretch. (Full Disclosure: I owned a Sony/Nike MP3 player about 5 years ago. I think it was 64 megabytes. It had this crappy software for uploading music that crashed my computer two out of three times I used it. I ended up literally throwing the thing away in frustration.)

Creative flails.

I’m all for competition, so I’m a little torn over the attempts at excitement over a new commodity player from one of the guys fighting over 1/5 of the market. There are a few people/companies talking about the next step in MP3 players, namely that it won’t be just a music or video playback device, but when will the rest of the media catch up?

Phone, video, PDA, dictation machine, GPS, heart rate monitor and more in some crazy as yet to be determined/announced configuration? Though I am concerned about too much convergence and multitasking.

Five years ago, we had like 20 printers in our building. A few laser printers and lots of ink jet printers. We had five fax machines and four copy machines. It seemed they were all over the place. In 2004 we got this massive Savin Printer/Scanner/Fax/Copier. We thought it’d be great that all of those functions are now in this one machine, saving us money and space and work and adding ten years onto the life of every employee.

But here’s the problem. The other printers are gone... The other copiers are gone. We have two fax machines in the office. When one person wants to print 10 copies of a 50 page presentation, in color, and three people want to make two photo copies and one person want to scan a press clipping (that’s me…) The system breaks down. And imagine for a moment, what happens when the machine breaks, which it does about once a month. It's chaos.

I complain, but I like the machine. There is usually not a problem, but there are problems.

So right now, I carry around my wallet, my keys, my phone and my iPod. When I travel I add my Powerbook and digital camera to the mix. I can see a time when a few of those things "converge". But am I looking to Creative or Zen to make it happen? I’m banking on Apple and here’s why.

1. I’m pulling for a lifestyle unit, that’ll change the number of things I carry around in my everyday life.
2. Style: At the very least, it won’t be an eyesore.
3. Usability: From a one-button mouse, to OS X, to the iPod’s scrolling clickwheel. I have faith.
4. Content: Music, videos, text. If it’s not coming from Disney, NBC, Fox or Dreamworks, it’ll be coming from some of the most creative independent minds around: Other Apple people.
5. Friendly Features: The lifeblood of Apple.
6. 80% market share is incredible. Apple killed the iPod Mini in favor of the Nano, proving that when it’s time, all good things can get better. For example, while everybody else is talking about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs, Apple is talking about skipping the disc altogether. Forget how good the current system is. Let’s talk about how we make a new better system.
7. And finally, I’m a Machead. Sue me.

Don't Believe the Hype

So I've been saying that Blue Ray DVD Technology is a tough sell and nothing at all like the Beta/VHS Wars of the 70s.

Check me out. Today, Reuters is saying Tepid interest seen for next-generation DVDs in 2006.

> "We were quite surprised to see that a very small number of those die-hard
> DVD fans envisioned moving into the high-definition format this year," Levy
> said. "With all the talk and excitement around high-definition DVD they are
> still a long way away from moving into that format."

And these are the hardcore DVD buyers and renters they are talking about. The article clarifies that the adoption rate will be way smaller among the general population.

I'm thinking the biggest use of the Blue Ray technology will be archiving and data storage at the home and office. As far as movie distribution goes, I'm looking to downloading and iTunes-like services taking over from the current DVD technology, rather than a new shiny disc format.

Accidents are a Bad Idea

I think, in general, we can mostly agree on this. Accidents are a bad idea.

So how about this advertising campaign I’ve been seeing from Volkswagen. These commercials start out with a multi-racial assortment of people chatting in a car, being all cute or funny, and then - you see it develop - a car pulls out of nowhere and a startling car wreck happens before your eyes. The next image is of the passengers standing outside the car wreckage - shaken, but not visibly injured.

I own a ’97 Jetta Trek. I love it. I’m shopping for a new car to replace my other car, a 22-year-old Japanese import, and was thinking about another Jetta. But these commercials make me think twice about it. Obviously, VW’s goal is to demonstrate how safe their car is, what with the commercial’s slogan being “Safe Happens”. But I’ve never been a fan of auto makers showing their cars getting demolished in commercials, even in crash testing. I like the Porche one where their engineers can’t bear to watch their masterpieces get crash tested. Or even the passengers who were saved by an air bag. It was emotional and memorable, but in a way that bothered me less (maybe, because ostensibly they weren’t actors). But showing real world wrecks, simulated or not, is different.

Here's what VW has to say in a USA Today article today: "There are mixed reviews but no matter what, the ads make you think that you can be driving along and you can't control what's happening," says Karen Marderosian, director of marketing for Volkswagen of America.

Talk about the safety rating. Let Consumer Reports give its ranking. Go ahead show me the safety features, but show me them in a sanitized form where I could never possibly believe that I will ever actually need them. I want to know I’m safe, but I don’t want to think about the situations in which I might actually need that side curtain airbag to keep my head from shattering the side window.

Here’s a test: come up with some commercials that show airbags deploy in a sudden and extreme yet comical series of situations. Slogan: “Always there” or “Just in case”.