Delivery Failure: Bad Marketing Messages

Bad public relations
Quoth one sage: “The subject line ‘Press Release’ is the promotional equivalent of jogging pants. You’ve given up. Book a holiday.”

The medium really does affect the message in public relations. So why are so many people delivering that message so badly?

A press release thudded into my inbox today from a Los Angeles PR firm telling me that some company has “officially announced” the expansion of its corporate headquarters. My only response was, “So?”

Recently our esteemed digital editor tweeted that a press release entitled “Press Release” was, well, pretty lame public relations. I tweeted another time that press releases might want to check such things as spelling of names, targeting, and overall value.

I don’t want to rant here, because, frankly, I’ve been known to do a little PR myself. But these examples indicate to me that while the PR game is changing, many haven’t yet gotten with the program.

For example, the first example wasn’t just bad new public relations, it was bad old public relations. Anyone who announces anything is a fool because nobody cares unless they’re Apple or Google, or they’ve just made a ton of money. And announcing that some unknown company is expanding its corporate headquarters is worse than sludge. It just clogs up the information network.

But together, these examples show that many people still don’t get that public relations is no longer public relations. By many people, I don’t mean just PR people: I mean the companies that hire them and demand they do it a certain, familiar way.

Apparently the rise of more communications channels has become a double-edged sword – as much as it has allowed communicators to tailor messages to different channels and receivers, it has also commoditized information delivery. Companies now often presume that they can cheaply send out masses of messages and it will somehow work.

The mass mailing about some corporate headquarters opening somewhere that nobody except a few insiders cares about is an egregious example of this. It’s just numbers: get a mailing list and send out as many copies of the release as possible.

Don’t worry if it worked, just be happy that it was sent. Even the postal service has better ROI than that.

So let’s do a quick lesson, please. PR is a subset of marketing, which is all about reaching prospective customers to persuade them that your product or service is the best choice when they’re making a buying decision.

Today, you do that by engaging those buyers in conversations. These can be as shallow as advertising, or as deep as social media discussions and content specifically tailored for a certain type of buyer.  

It is not about shouting irrelevancies into the ether to everyone and anyone in the hopes that the noise will somehow land somewhere.

If the message does make it through, it will be to some poor dolt in Podunk who’ll listen to anybody.