Canada’s first Advertising Week starts today, with events across the country. Speakers include Sir Richard Branson, and neural scientist – amazing speaker Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor.

In an article a few days ago in the National Post, the chief executive of Institute of Communication Agencies Gillian Graham argued that it’s the worst time to cut advertising spending:

“It has been proven that those who cut spending in these times will exacerbate their revenue challenges and ultimately, lose share.”

As with any statistics and most research, results are interpreted.

What the studies referred to above don’t do is compare revenue results if time and money is invested in advertising, versus less money invested and energy put toward getting free editorial.

In tough economic times, I’d argue, some of the advertising budget can be much better invested in publicity efforts. For far less money, clients can get more column inches, more airtime, more online presence and more visibility.

To get massive publicity coverage, you need:

1. someone who’s a huge media consumer, across all media
2. personal media contacts in your target market (I’ve re-thought this – I don’t think this it’s critical to already have these in place)
   
3. a kickass, current media database
4. a ‘hook’ – why this story now? why should readers/viewers/listeners care?
5. a high-level (ideally, top) person who:
   • will make significant time available to do media interviews, and will be willing to prioritize last-minute media requests for the length of the campaign push
   • is a ‘good talker’ – articulate, energetic, can speak concisely, uses anecdotes/storytelling, and can translate more complex topics to layperson language
6. someone other than your interviewee, to be the ‘pitch’ person
7. great-quality visuals, minimum 300 dpi for most newspapers
8. most of the publicity effort going to crafting individual media pitches
9. a media relations professional who:
   • has created and executed many campaigns
   • genuinely believes in the cause, the event or the product that they are pitching
   • ideally has worked as a journalist or producer themselves

In tough economic times, directing money to free editorial via publicity is the route to go.

photo by Altemark

]]> http://lmighton.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/publicity-tips/feed/ 0 lmighton 337248947_f1eadc7cc0 http://lmighton.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/a-real-page-turner/ http://lmighton.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/a-real-page-turner/#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2009 23:43:06 +0000 lmighton http://lmighton.wordpress.com/?p=349 ]]>

I don’t like reading multi-page documents online.

I’m trying to be more environmentally responsible with the amount that I print, but like most people I scan rather than read online text.  With more than a few pages, or with complex topics, online information just doesn’t lodge in my brain in the same way.

But I know I could do better with my tree-consuming behavour.  So I was intrigued when I happened across FlipViewer.   I don’t know if more book-like (‘multimedia interactive’) software has existed for a while, but this was the first time I came across an e-book that really felt like reading a book.

The Lancet sent out an email that they’re currently offering a free e-book online, Darwin’s Gift.  The visuals are like real pages turning, and for me the experience is way more pleasant.  I also love the cover art.  There’s even audio of paper pages turning.  So I’m going to try again to do more big readings online.

–

My next quest in improving my environmental behaviour:  an all-in-one printer that offers easy two-sided printing.

Any printer I’ve ever owned has pitiful functionality for two-sided printing.  The whole document prints out on one side first, and then  you have to manually feed the same pages back in again.  Every printer I’ve ever done this with either misses a sheet, or sucks in several pages at once, and the numbering of the pages ends up chaotic – pages missing, pages only partly-printed, and a real annoyance to try to find pages as you’re reading through a document.  Though at an office I almost always ensure I’ve selected two-sided printing, at home I’ve given up.  If anyone knows of an inexpensive small office/home all-in-one printer that does an excellent job of two-sided printer, I’d like to know.

–

The free e-book is a promotion to bring in new subscribers to The Lancet, but you don’t have to subscribe to read the book.   I couldn’t find a way to download and read it offline, so from what I figure, you have to read it online.

This is an excerpt from the blurb (the links are mine):

Darwin’s Gift celebrates the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. You’ll find essays about Darwin’s life and work, and the enduring legacy of his remarkable theory of evolution. These were Darwin’s gifts to all of us.

I’m beginning to see that two separate topics that have been on my mind can be – perhaps need to be – linked.

Both are about videos:

• The ‘jaw-dropping’ testimonies of cancer patients in Ontario, Canada who have been denied funding for their cancer treatments.
• The other, university professor Randy Pausch’s ‘last lecture’, which over the past week+ has had such a huge public response. It is the story of a man who desperately wants to see his kids grow up, but now knows that will not be possible. All three kids are under six, and they are why, at the end of his university talk to a full lecture hall, he told the assembled students and faculty that the talk they had heard was not for them.

Last year, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation invited viewers to give their opinions on who is (or was – they can be dead) the greatest Canadian to date. Canadians finally decided on Tommy Douglas, who shifted Canada to universal health care. That Canadians held his initiative so incredibly important is why I’m surprised at the lack of outcry about the inequal and often inadequate health care treatment from province to province. I’m amazed that there aren’t more comments on this video, or more links to it from other sites.

Jumping back to Randy Pausch – one of the memorable things he discussed was the purpose served by brick walls. The brick wall is important, he said, because its existence (and our frustrations at how impassable it seems to be) lets us know how badly we want something. I love how this statement re-frames my perception of insurmountable obstacles.

It seems to me that we need to figure out how to bring that re-framing to activate more Canadians into moving toward that brick wall. We need a surge of civil society committed to removing the bricks.

.

This is an inspiring, hope-filled story about a woman who founded the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company.

OneWorld Health Institute is targeting the diseases other pharmaceutical companies don’t touch – diseases that take the lives of many, many people in poor countries.

Watch the video about one person who took on a massive challenge, here.

- from the Social Edge e-newsletter of the Skoll Foundation