The media, and especially tv companies, are always on the lookout for great, interesting ideas for documentaries. They need shows with strong human interest, and preferably ideas that are unusual takes on topical subjects.
Any TV show has to be of interest to as wide an audience as possible, of course: humor, human interest, tragedy, or topicality are clear factors in the interest worth of a documentary. Bringing these elements to bear isn't usually simple. Also, TV documentary makers are not going to produce a half-hour- or hour-long plug for the business and its products, so any expectation that they'll do so is doomed to disappointment.
A company specializing in recruiting Australian teachers contacted a TV company with an idea for a documentary. The documentary makers had been offered the opportunity to follow two Australian teachers as they experienced working in Britain: the show highlighted the differences in between teaching in Australia and teaching in Britain, the discipline problems in British schools, the much greater level of bureaucracy in Britain, and the difficulties the Australians skilled in fitting into life in a new country.
As a fly-on-the-wall documentary the show was a great success: it had human interest (people being placed in a difficult and challenging situation), personal interest for the audience (seeing what really happens in schools, and how it might be different elsewhere), and components of humor and tragedy as the Australians met with triumph and disaster. An extra advantage for the TV business was that the show might be sold for broadcast in Australia.
Needless to say, the recruitment business got extremely few mentions during the show, but any interested parties would have had small difficulty in recognizing the firm, and since the show was broadcast in Australia as well as Britain it went out to precisely the right target audiences.
A large quantity of PR is conducted through press releases-so much so that some individuals think PR stands for "press release." Nevertheless, it's perfectly feasible to write a much longer piece if there's something useful for you to say.
As always, a feature can't be merely a long advertisement for your brand or company. It should be something that is of common interest to a large quantity of people, and you cannot merely plug your personal services.
A firm of lawyers in London was looking to increase its conveyancing business, so one of the partners wrote an article on methods of cutting the price of moving house. The article examined every aspect of moving-legal fees, estate agents' fees, removals costs, insurance, and surveying expenses, and explained how to make savings in each area.
The article was published many times throughout Britain, and although the firm was not straight plugging its own services the article was always clearly identified as having been written by one of the firm's partners. Every time it appeared, the firm got more inquiries for conveyancing, although the article was frequently cut or even edited heavily by the periodicals it appeared in.
Articles like this can run and run, and will usually make the writer appear like an expert-they also create a feeling of trust, since the writer is clearly trusting the readers with some useful information, and perhaps cutting themselves out of a fee. Readers will think of the author as someone who is genuinely out to help them-which instantly opens the door to an open and honest relationship.
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1. How PR people work with journalists and the media
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