Competitions, lotteries, contests of any sort usually attract attention, but some are more newsworthy than others. Competitors keep in mind the firm, and often speak about the competition, but the very best outcome is, of course, if the competitors makes the news in some way. Some types of competition are better than others for this.
In 1958, the mayor's office in a little Spanish fishing village produced a major strategic choice. They decided that the village should try to attract more foreign tourists. The village itself was picturesque, it was near to a new international airport, and package holidays by air had been just beginning to become accessible. The mayor envisaged a town having a couple of small hotels, attracting well-off northern Europeans to inject some cash into the local economy, which was suffering greatly beneath Franco's dictatorship.
The mayor's office decided to organize a song contest. Songwriters and performers were invited to the village, along with a series of performances had been organized: the song contest was intended to be newsworthy, and to attract the kind of middle-class audience the village was trying to cultivate. A recording deal was on offer for the winner.
In the event, the winning song became a main hit, not just in Spain but throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The village itself gained significantly from the publicity, and even though the mayor's original concept for the village disappeared, it disappeared beneath a colossal injection of investment: the original fishing village was overwhelmed by the mass of concrete hotels that now characterize the town it has become-it is, of course, Benidorm.
Whatever we may think of Benidorm, it is certainly a prosperous place and a lot of money has been produced: and it all started with a song contest. Choose a competitors topic that is newsworthy. Invite particular contestants if in any way possible-if not, ensure that your pre-publicity is targeted at contestants who will generate publicity themselves. Make certain that the competition is strongly branded.
Press releases are the mainstay of public relations, but many firms don't deal with them well. Numerous press releases are simply thinly disguised advertisements, and needless to say periodicals won't print these for free: they anticipate to get paid for running advertisements. Press releases have the large advantage that periodicals do publish them for free. They also have an even bigger advantage-people read them, even when they have skipped past the advertisements.
The key to getting a press release published would be to make it as easy as feasible for the journalists and editors to make use of the release as it stands, with out having to rewrite it. Newspapers have a lot of space to fill, every day of the week, and going out to research news stories is both time-consuming and expensive. Like any of us, journalists are more than happy to save time and effort-so a well-written press release could be a godsend on a day when news is slack and the paper needs to be filled.
A press release is really a news story about your company. The point here is it should be news-something that is out of the ordinary, and that will probably be interesting to the newspaper's readers. A story about your latest sales promotion isn't interesting unless there's something very unusual about the promotion, but a story about your new factory creating 250 new jobs in a depressed area is interesting. The story needs to be written in a way that journalists and editors relate to. Journalists are trained to write in a "reverse pyramid" style.
The whole story is contained in the headline, then each paragraph provides a little more detail: the intention is that the story can be cut from the bottom by a subeditor to fit the accessible space. The very best way to get the concept of how to do this is to read some newspaper stories: it's easy to see how the story is total at each paragraph. Press releases ought to also be written for the specific periodical.
A story about a breakthrough in engineering strategies may be interesting to an engineering trade journal, but would not be interesting to Cosmopolitan: an article about your new female chief engineer would have the reverse characteristics.
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