Link your PR and advertising strategies to the news


News occurs all of the time, and numerous PR firms concentrate on creating it rather than on latching onto it. Nevertheless, you will find only so many news stories that can come from a firm-and really extremely few that are all that riveting for the average audience. On the other hand, though, there may be numerous news stories out there that have a bearing on your industry and on which you can comment for the news.

Amnesty International produced good use of the 1999 go to of Jiang Zemin to Britain. Clearly the news media had been eager to report the go to, so a week before the arrival of the Chinese President, Amnesty issued a press release detailing China's human rights violations and offering to provide a spokesperson during the go to.

This moved human rights onto the news agenda, and also provided the press having a more newsworthy scenario-simply showing the President meeting the Prime Minister or the Queen is one thing, but having a controversy and, more importantly, having a couple of pointed questions to ask him was invaluable.

During the visit Amnesty's head of press, Richard Bunting, appeared on Channel 5 News, BBC's Newsnight, along with a reside in-studio debate about human rights in China. During the President's visit, protesters appeared wherever he made a public appearance: the Metropolitan Police's efforts to protect him from embarrassing encounters backfired in PR terms because it produced even more possibilities for TV news crews to gather dramatic footage of the apparent suppression of peaceful protest in Britain.

Of course! All firms link their PR and their advertising, surely? Not to mention their other communications-sales promotions, private selling, websites, and so on., etc., etc.

However, most firms only make these links in a superficial way, maybe using the advertising to refer to a particularly successful PR campaign, or creating a PR campaign based around a specific advertisement. Really slick businesses will create an integrated campaign based on a combination of communication strategies, each one boosting the other.

When Sega introduced its Mega-CD games console, the company knew that it had a promotional mountain to climb. The target audience for the product was the marketing-savvy, worldly-wise, cynical, seen-it-all-before teenage marketplace. To reach these individuals, Sega would have to do something seriously spectacular-so it ran a combined ad and PR campaign created to intrigue the audience.

First, the business ran ads for fictitious products (a cat food billed as "Good enough to eat!" showing the cat's owner eating the cat food, along with a washing powder called Ecco). The spoof ads ran for some weeks, but would then be "hijacked" by "pirate" TV transmitters promoting the Sega product. Billboard ads were subjected to the exact same treatment-the corners would apparently be torn off to reveal the Sega ad beneath.

The piracy theme of the ads appealed to the anarchic tendencies of teenagers, but more importantly the spoof caught the imagination of the media and sparked a flurry of editorial coverage commenting on the cleverness of the campaign.

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This article was sent to us by: Elaine Rothfield at 01242011

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