Press Release Writing 101: Sex, Green, Secret

Refreshing article courtesy of NY Times reporter Joanne Kaufman...Here's an excerpt, with tips that might bring a press release into the press:


The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”

There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”

Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.

ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.

How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations?

Those who make their living composing news releases say there is an art to this easily dismissed craft. Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a “breakthrough” onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file.

“P.R. people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the ‘who cares?’ and ‘so what?’ test,” said Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. “If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that’s likely to get attention. If you can use the words like ‘money,’ ‘fat,’ ‘cancer’ or ‘sex,’ you’re likely to get some ink in the general audience media.”

David Seaman, a P.R. stunt planner and the author of a book to be published in October, “Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz,” is a proponent of “safe,” “easy” “secret,” “trick” and “breaking” because they suggest that something is new and fresh, he said.



“Anytime you have ‘toxic’ next to an item everyone has in their house and has always been assumed to be the last thing that would harm them, you can be sure it will get picked up on the news, and the Web will spread it like wildfire,” said Allen P. Adamson, managing director of Landor, a corporate branding firm, and the author of “BrandSimple.”

The words that attract media attention change with the times. “Anything that speaks to long-term health risks is good these days, because there is a belief that there’s a lot of stuff out there harming us, from the cellphone on down,” Mr. Adamson said.

David B. Armon, the president of PR Newswire, a distribution service for public relations professionals, likens writing a news release to writing a headline for the front page of a newspaper: every word has to do heavy lifting.

“It’s a lot more scientific than it used to be,” Mr. Armon said, “because you’re not just trying to get media pickup, but to get search engine attention.”


“Green” and “environment” are huge right now, he said, as is “foreclosure.” “We’ve done 412 press releases that incorporate that word so far in ’08, up from 261 last year.” For the record, Mr. Armon added, the use of the word “toxic” in news releases is up 5 percent.

The words that may help get a news release picked up vary from region to region. Brenda Baumgartner, the news director and anchor at KPVI, the NBC affiliate in Pocatello, Idaho, for example, looks for words like “fishing,” “hunting,” “Mormon” and “polygamy,” she said, “because they fit the culture we live around.”

Words that help elevate a news release also vary from industry to industry. For instance, Tom Gable, the head of a San Diego public relations firm, said a news release about video games could benefit from a phrase like “faster graphics.” When talking about technology, he said, it would be “ ‘cost breakthrough,’ like the $200 computer.”

In the entertainment industry, on the other hand, the most basic of nouns will do — baby, breakup, marriage, divorce — according to Cindi Berger, co-chief executive of the public relations firm PMK/HBH. “Now attach names like Madonna or Jessica Simpson,” Ms. Berger said, “and of course the assignment editor is going to pay attention.”

Perhaps because many people in public relations are former journalists, they know what grates on the Fourth Estate. Mr. Gable, who was once the business editor of The San Diego Union, has compiled a list of words that will do a news release no good whatsoever, like “solutions,” “leading edge,” “cutting edge,” “state of the art,” “mission critical,” and “turnkey.”

Mr. Gable said that his company once did a weeklong survey of the releases that came out of PR Newswire and Business Wire, a commercial news distribution service, “and most of the releases identified their company as ‘a leader’ and described their research as ‘cutting edge.’”

“They were empty, unsubstantiated and had no news value,” he said.

Ken Sunshine, the head of a P.R. firm in Manhattan, said he thought the media had an institutional bias against “hype-y terms” like “world renowned” and “once in a lifetime,” which he studiously avoids putting in his news releases. “But ‘unique’ is fine,” he said, “if something really is unique.”

Ultimately, perhaps, the whole thing is less about terms than timing.

“Was it really the issue of toxic shower curtains that fired up assignment editors?” asked Mr. Armon of PR Newswire. “Or was it just a slow news day?”

Viral Marketing Hall of Fame 2008: Top 10 Campaigns & Results Data

Great summary of top strategies executed by big and small brands, courtesy of MarketingSherpa.

The overriding theme:
-> Rise of social media
Most of this year’s candidates sent videos to YouTube, created Facebook pages or organized communities on MySpace -- or all of the above. These sites are free to use and add seemingly unlimited viral potential to any campaign. That means free additional exposure from powerful peer-to-peer networks. Marketers are hearing the social media message loud and clear.

-> Peer-to-peer sharing is critical
There were two distinct groups in this year’s entries: fantastically thought-out campaigns and wacky content. Either way, success hinged on peer-to-peer sharing. As our winners illustrate, both strategies can work if enough effort is put into the right places.

Clever marketers created funny videos or text documents, posted them to a few social media sites and people shared like mad -- ka-boom! Other marketers left less at risk. They created contests, microsites, full-assault ad campaigns and got on every Web 2.0 medium reachable.

-> All hail mighty content
You’ve heard the adage -- we’re not even going to say it -- but all it took for some campaigns to go wildly viral was great content. Not every content-based entry made it to Sherpa’s winners’ circle, but there were enough to denote a trend. Most of the content being passed around was funny or sarcastic -- even if it was a bit risky for PR. But being truly funny requires risks. Some of these marketers went out on a limb to grab the ripest fruit.

Advertising 101- Don't Waste The Space

A full page ad promoting a Dow Jones service in today's WSJ reinforces my table pounding that someone needs to proofread advertising copy before spending mid-six figures on placing ads into the real world.

The entire text reads : "Make customers stick like glue." The first 'message' that my eyeballs transmitted to my brain was "Make customers sick..like glue." This was after my first cup of coffee, so perhaps my brain wasn't processing at the right setting. Then I looked at the ad again...same thing...I kept associating the ad with 'make customers sick'.... To the extent that it captured my attention, the strategy worked. But the ad failed, simply because it delivered a negative context and completely turned me off to what the actual service being promoted was.

OK, lots of ads out there, and many are carelessly thought out. At the top of the careless advertising list was a recent highway billboard campaign executed by Bloomberg LP's radio division. Placed smack dab on the busiest roadway in the heart of hedge fund country (Fairfield County, Connecticut), the billboard ad displayed an innocuous message "Check Your Pounds"...and a Bloomberg LP logo below. No radio station call signal displayed, no display of the company's cable television channel #--absolutely nothing in the ad that would drive the viewer to tune his/her car radio to the Bloomberg station. Bizarre.

When I called up the head of advertising buying at Bloomberg in connection with another topic, and pointed out what I thought was a surprisingly poor marketing strategy, he thanked me profusely for making the observation, and he said that it wasn't his decision in the first place t0 run or administer the billboard campaign. That billboard ad stayed in place for another 8 weeks and then it was replaced with an ad that displayed the radio call signal.