Chapter 1

Why Public Relations Campaigns Fail – and How to Make Them Succeed

Have you ever seen a hippopotamus? Quite often, you will find that they have a bird on their back. It's a friendship that benefits both sides. The hippo isn't able to reach to clean its back. Yet potentially harmful parasites embed themselves up there. So the hippo makes friends with certain types of bird, who get to feast on the parasites. Both sides benefit.

Good media relations is like that two-way friendship. The effective PR person is always thinking: what is in the interests of the journalist? The ineffective PR person only asks: what message does my employer want me to drum repeatedly?

Alas, the vast majority of PR pitches – even from some big PR agencies – fail to acknowledge the needs of journalists.

Ignorance isn't bliss

The simple and most effective investment you can make in your public relations is to buy and read the publications that you want to get coverage in. I know that sounds obvious – much of what you will read in this book is, on one level, common sense. Yet it is rarely followed. I often come across people who complain, for example, that they cannot get newspapers or magazines to cover their material – but who do not have any copies of those publications in their offices. Of course, they may be accessing them on their tablets, but invariably they are not.

PR is like other forms of marketing: too many of the people doing it are clueless. According to Professors Morris and Goldsworthy, a survey they conducted with one of the largest PR firms “found that few if any employees recalled reading any books about PR”.12 That is good – for you. It means that with the basics you will learn in this book, you can outperform many of your rivals. I frequently find even sizable companies – turning over more than £100m a year – who run appallingly unsuccessful PR campaigns, despite employing supposedly well-qualified in-house people to run them. Those staff just haven't invested time to develop their skills.

The truth is that for all the PR industry's claims of professionalism, too much of what gets done in its name is based on ignorance. Of the 60,000 people in full-time PR jobs in the United Kingdom, perhaps 15,000 are highly skilled. Only they do things like going on training courses and reading books to keep their skills sharp, and join the Public Relations Consultants Association and read CorpComms to keep up to date with best practice.

In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are 212,510 public relations specialists,13 the vast majority of whom are not members of a professional body or trade association. If there is a similar split between skilled and unskilled practitioners as in the UK, that would mean around 160,000 of American PR practitioners need to radically improve their skills.

This problem is not new. Edward Bernays, one of the founders of modern public relations, told The New York Times in 1991 that “Public relations today is horrible. Any dope, any nitwit, any idiot can call him or herself a public relations practitioner.” They give the industry a bad name.

That so much PR is bad means that there is no reason why even small companies – with decent PR – cannot propel themselves into the limelight. Indeed, many firms have been built from scratch using PR as the biggest tool in their marketing arsenals.

But no PR programme will be truly successful unless it is based on a genuine understanding of the worldview and the sort of articles publications prefer. Edward Bernays, writing in 1923, defined an important duty of the public relations practitioner:

The public relations counsel is first and foremost a student. His field of study is the public mind. His text books for this study are the facts of life; the articles printed in newspapers and magazines, the advertisements that are inserted in publications, the billboards that line the streets, the railroads and the highways, the speeches that are delivered in legislative chambers, the sermons issuing from pulpits, anecdotes related in smoking rooms, the gossip of Wall Street, the patter of the theatre and the conversation of the other men who, like them, are interpreters and must listen for the clear or obscure enunciations of the public.14

The so-called “low information diet”, popularised by Tim Ferriss,15 who suggests that we should stop reading the news, isn't an option for those wanting to do well in public relations. Practitioners who are not reading to develop their general knowledge just won't prosper. Titles such as The Economist, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Wired and, of course, the newspapers are useful mind fodder.

How to get started

It doesn't matter what sort of media outlet you're interested in: you need to read the publication religiously. That might mean decamping to a major city library for a few days and reading the back issues. It certainly should mean getting a subscription, if it's a print publication, or always picking up a copy from the newsstand. Only if you engross yourself in a publication will you truly understand what to pitch to its journalists.

Let's say you are trying to get coverage for a startup business manufacturing camera bags, of various designs. The first thing to do is to walk into a big newsagent and buy all the titles about photography – there are lots of them.

You can find out which titles are the most important from looking at their audited circulation figures. The International Federation of Audit Bureaux of Circulations has member bureaux that create reliable figures for how many people read each major publication. These bureaux cover the circulations of titles in forty countries, although there are some agencies that are independent of the global federation. You can find out more at www.ifabc.org, where you can click through to an agency in your country. Some of the major circulation bureaux are:

• United Kingdom and Ireland www.abc.org.uk
• United States www.auditedmedia.com
• Canada www.auditedmedia.ca
• Australia www.auditbureau.org.au
• New Zealand www.abc.org.nz
• The Netherlands www.hoi-online.nl
• Denmark www.do.dk
• Sweden www.ts.se
  
  

Given that your time is likely to be limited, it makes sense to concentrate on publications that (a) are instinctively most interested in your work and (b) have the highest circulations.

For an online publication, you can work out how popular it is using a website called alexa.com, which displays how well-read the site is relative to others. Many major news sites now have their online readers audited by the Audit Bureaux of Circulations.

Looking at the circulation figures can be eye-opening. In the UK, there are local papers that outsell national ones. As I type this, the circulation figures for the Liverpool Echo show that it outsells The Independent – just. And the London Evening Standard, despite being a local newspaper, is one of the most-read papers in the land. I am sure that a lot of PR campaigns ignore local papers as unimportant – but I say look at the circulation figures before making that sort of judgement. Similarly, there are blogs which have a bigger readership than mainstream publications. Is there anything more widely read in the Westminster political world than the gossip-filled Guido Fawkes Blog? Everyone in UK politics seems to read the site, even if they hate it. Meanwhile, The Daily Caller, which was founded in 2010 and is only available online, breaks major stories and is one of Washington DC's most important news outlets.

As – in our example – you're making camera bags, let's say you are interested in Amateur Photographer, one of the most-read photography publications, which has been going since 1884. By reading the news pages over several issues, you discover that its news editor is interested in bossy police officers and security guards who pretend that they have legal powers to stop photographers taking photos in public places. You see, amateur photographers often set up tripods in public places to take chocolate-box images of famous buildings. And some security people think this is suspicious. (“Why is he taking photographs? He must be a terrorist!”)

Armed with this knowledge, you produce a free booklet about the legal aspects of photography in public places. The idea is that photographers can store it in their camera bag and show it to the police, if challenged.

You contact the news editor of Amateur Photographer and tell him that you will post this free guide to anyone who requests it from your website. You get to build up a mailing list of keen photographers, the public gets a useful guide, and the magazine gets a news story.

However, this story would be completely irrelevant to Outdoor Photography magazine. Its readers are landscape photographers predominantly taking shots in the countryside, and therefore are unlikely to be stopped by the police.

The dreary product or personnel announcement

There is only one thing a journalist finds more boring than a press release...