A primary technique of what Seth Godin calls the TV-industrial complex4 is interruption. Under this system, advertising agency creative people sit in hip offices dreaming up ways to interrupt people so that they pay attention to a one-way message. Think about it: You’re watching your favorite TV show, so the advertiser’s job is to craft a commercial to get you to pay attention, when you’d really rather be doing something else, like quickly grabbing some ice cream before the show resumes. You’re reading an interesting article in a magazine, so the ads need to jolt you into reading an ad instead of the article. Or you’re flying on American Airlines (which I do frequently), and during the flight, the airline deems it important to interrupt your nap with a loud advertisement announcing its credit card offer. The goal in each of these examples is to get people to stop what they are doing and pay attention to a message.
Moreover, the messages in advertising are product-focused, one-way spin. Advertisers can no longer break through with dumbed-down broadcasts about their wonderful products. The average person now sees hundreds of seller-spun commercial messages per day. People just don’t trust them. We turn them off in our minds, if we notice them at all.
The web is different. Instead of one-way interruption, web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment a buyer needs it. It’s about interaction, information, education, and choice.
Before the web, good advertising people were well versed in the tools and techniques of reaching broad markets with lowest-common-denominator messages via interruption techniques. Advertising was about great “creative work.” Unfortunately, many companies rooted in these old ways desperately want the web to be like TV, because they understand how TV advertising works. Advertising agencies that excel in creative TV ads simply believe they can transfer their skills to the web.
They are wrong. They are following outdated rules.
The Old Rules of Marketing
Marketing simply meant advertising (and branding).
Advertising needed to appeal to the masses.
Advertising relied on interrupting people to get them to pay attention to a message.
Advertising was one-way: company to consumer.
Advertising was exclusively about selling products.
Advertising was based on campaigns that had a limited life.
Creativity was deemed the most important component of advertising.
It was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for the client to win new customers.
Advertising and PR were separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals, strategies, and measurement criteria.
None of this is true anymore. The web has transformed the rules, and you must transform your marketing to make the most of the web-enabled marketplace of ideas.
Public Relations Used to Be Exclusively about the Media
For nearly a decade, I was a contributing editor at EContent magazine. I occasionally write for the HuffPost, contribute guest articles to many other publications, and maintain a popular blog. As a result, I receive hundreds of broadcast email press releases and pitches per month from well-meaning PR people who want me to write about their products and services. Guess what? In 10 years, I have never written about a company because of a nontargeted broadcast press release or pitch that somebody sent me. Think about that: tens of thousands of press releases and pitches; zero stories.
Discussions I’ve had with journalists in other industries confirm that I’m not the only one who doesn’t use unsolicited press releases. Instead, I think about a subject that I want to write about, and I check out what I can find on blogs, on Twitter, and through search engines. If I find a press release on the subject through Google or a company’s online media room, great! But I don’t wait for press releases to come to me. Rather, I go looking for interesting topics, products, people, and companies. And when I do feel ready to write a story, I might try out a concept on my blog first, to see how it flies. Does anyone comment on it? Do any PR people jump in and email me?
Here’s another amazing figure: In more than 10 years, only a tiny number of PR people have commented on my blog or reached out to me as a result of a blog post or a story I’ve written in a magazine. How difficult can it be to read the blogs and Twitter feeds of the reporters you’re trying to pitch? It teaches you precisely what interests them. Then you can email them with something interesting that they are likely to write about rather than spamming them with unsolicited press releases. When I don’t want to be bothered, I get hundreds of press releases a month. But when I do want feedback and conversation, I get silence.
Something’s very wrong in PR land.
Reporters and editors use the web to seek out interesting stories, people, and companies. Will they find you?
Public Relations and Third-Party Ink
Public relations was once an exclusive club. PR people used lots of jargon and followed strict rules. If you weren’t part of the in crowd, PR seemed like an esoteric and mysterious job that required lots of training, sort of like being an astronaut or a court stenographer. PR people occupied their time by writing press releases targeted exclusively to reporters and editors and by schmoozing with those same reporters and editors. And then they crossed their fingers and hoped that the media would give them some ink or some airtime (“Oh, please write about me!”). The end result of their efforts—the ultimate goal of PR in the old days—was the press clip, which proved they had done their job.
Only the best PR people had personal relationships with the media and could pick up the phone and pitch a story to the reporter for whom they had bought lunch the month before.
Prior to 1995, outside of paying big bucks for advertising or working with the media, there just weren’t any significant options for a company to tell its story to the world.
The web has changed the rules. Today, organizations are communicating directly with buyers.
Yes, the Media Are Still Important
Allow me to pause again for a moment to say that the mainstream and trade media are still important components of a great public relations program. On my blog and on the speaking circuit, I’ve sometimes been accused of suggesting that the media are no longer relevant. That is not my position. The media are critically important for many organizations. A positive story in Rolling Stone propels a rock band to fame. An article in the Wall Street Journal brands a company as a player. A consumer product talked about on the Today show gets noticed. In many niche markets and vertical industries, trade magazines and journals help decide which companies are important. However, I do believe that, while all these outlets are important aspects of a larger PR program, there are easier and more efficient ways to reach your buyers. And here’s something really neat: If you do a good job of telling your story directly, the media will find out. And then they will write about you!
Public relations work has changed. PR is no longer just an esoteric discipline where companies make great efforts to communicate exclusively to a handful of reporters who then tell the company’s story, generating a clip for the PR people to show their bosses. These days, great PR includes programs to reach buyers directly. The web allows direct access to information about your products, and smart companies understand and use this phenomenal resource to great advantage.
The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media. Blogs, online video, news releases, and other forms of web content