This piece is another installment in my September PR Master Class series.
Building on yesterday’s post on having your executives pitch the media instead of 20-something PR kids…
If your executives pitched the media:
- The media would be impressed.
- The media would be relieved.
- The media would be grateful.
- The pitch would be more meaningful.
- Because of who your executives are, they would be building relationships and trust with the media instead of blasting them with press releases.
- Your company would get better quality coverage.
- Your company would get more frequent coverage.
- As such awareness would grow.
- Sales would grow.
- So would profits, because this coverage essentially costs nothing.
- It would actually take far less of your executives’ time (five minutes per day) than it takes your PR youth.
- Your company would be unique and memorable. Think a lot of other companies are doing this?
The upside is endless.
What’s stopping you?
Hi Alex, Bill from Twitter –
As an editor I certainly agree it’s nice to hear from the source – speaking to who’s in charge will mean the story is more focused and the subject more knowledgeable. I’d of course encourage execs who want to be active in PR to do so but to take care to follow the protocols followed by the 20-somethings. Researching a publication, knowing the departments, and understanding the editorial calendar are all crucial to gaining publication. If your pitch doesn’t fit my publication, I don’t care who does the pitching regardless of age!
Hey Alex –
This is an interesting concept and I’m very much of the school of thought that PR pros should put the talent in front of the journos as early as possible, but the thought of putting an exec on to pitch strikes a bit of fear in me because of every time I’ve heard an exec:
* Mix up publications and/or writers (e.g. telling Reporter A that he liked the story he wrote for Publication B)
* Realize they were talking to someone who pissed them off years ago
* Miss a call … and be MIA for hours
* Not answer the question asked but rather stay too much on ‘messaging’
* etc.
Or…heard a journo
* Obviously demonstrate he hasn’t read up on his own beat or the materials provided earlier
* Tell me (so I guess he’d have no problem telling my client) their product/company was pretty bad (in so many words) and be unnecessarily rude about it [And while I’ve conveyed this info to the client, framing it properly, since we all know the execs have had the Kool Aid is pretty vital]
* Miss a call
* Has changed beats recently or other staff cuts means they won’t have the time to cover the story where a week earlier they would’ve…
At the end of the day, imho it’s essentially our job to set the table for journo and exec so that when they sit down they can enjoy the meal (and stay around to pick up the crumbs), not send them off with a picnic basket to the park. While the later may be great if it works out and there’s chemistry there’s far too much potential for ants to get in the dessert.
This is a nice concept, Alex. But it practice, it would almost never work, for the simple fact that most execs can barely find time to even commit to meetings with media, much less the time to pitch them or understand the history of a journalist’s coverage and preferences.
Moreover, most execs view media coverage as akin to sales and marketing collateral: and they approach it similarly, thinking that an article should contain everything they would want to tell their customers and prospect directly (even though most of that isn’t newsworthy). I can’t count the times an exec has thought something that is vital to sales or marketing should be pitched to a journalist, who wouldn’t care less about it. A seasoned and savvy PR pro understands that media is a filter to ones intended audience and that PR should serve both the company and the media outlet. I strive to do that every time I set up a meeting or get an exec on the phone. You would be listening to far more sales pitches or competitor tit-for-tat if execs were left to their own devices here. There’s also greater risk of the “un-managed” exec getting hung out to dry if they said something unintended that appeared in an article.
Long story short, this could never work. But one thing is clear, the PR agency habit of assigning media outreach to the youngest + least experienced workers does the discipline no favors.