How do you catch the attention of people who spend all their time trying to catch the attention of others?
The pioneer in management information systems for the advertising agency industry, Adman faced aggressive competition from programs that weren’t as comprehensive or targeted, but appeared to be more affordable.
How do you convince mothers-to-be that your local hospital is a better place for giving birth than the big-city hospitals that are just a short (if frenzied) drive away?
Bloomington Hospital faced just that situation in trying to promote its maternity services. They knew that a hospital’s image is particularly important when it come to maternity. Parents-to-be labor to choose the right site for their arrivals. With powerful challengers less than an hour away, this hospital needed a campaign that could deliver.
If you’re going to come up with a cleverly invented name or spelling for your product or service, make sure it doesn’t create any inadvertent pronunciations.
Case in point: Pizza Hut has been promoting its line of calzones as P’Zones. They want you to pronounce that as “puh-zones.”
One of the surest signs of a professional writer is that his or her first drafts are absolutely terrible and often unreadable.
Surprised? It’s true. While most non-writers assume that those of us who earn a living stringing words together try to create brilliance and beauty with every keystroke, the simple fact is that our real skill emerges in the rewrite stage.
Sometimes, businesses have to deliver bad news to customers. That’s a fact of life, but it’s rarely easy to do. In most cases, the best way to do it is just that — do it, get it done, and move on. If the business relationship is solid, it will withstand one instance of bad news.
Not long ago, a service provider with whom I’ve worked for well over a decade decided that it was just too tough to share some bad news. As a result, they damaged their working relationship with me, and I’m willing to wager they’ve done the same with other clients.
In my last post, I talked about the role of editors and why most are comfortable with publicity. This week, I’d like to offer some simple advice that will make you a valuable resource for an editor instead of being viewed as that most despised of creatures, the “flack.”
The most important advice of all is to never send an editor anything that doesn’t have relevance to his or her audience. If the editor runs a magazine for chicken farmers, his readers probably won’t care about a new device to floss swine teeth. Not only will the editor delete your news release; he’ll store your name in his memory as someone who wastes his time. Each time you do that, you lose more credibility. Eventually, your emails will be filtered directly into the trash.
Publicity is a funny animal. Those with little or no experience tend to assume one of two things: either that getting something in the newspaper or on TV involves some sort of mystical expertise, or that they have a right to demand that the media use whatever message they want to share (“Tell them to put this on page one!”)
As with so many other things, the reality is quite different from the perception. While cynics may think of publicity as a manipulative tool for influencing the news, it actually serves the important role of making the media aware of things they might not otherwise know about. Most editors and producers actually count on publicity to help them with the newsgathering process — even more so today, as staffing has been slashed to the bone. There are more pages and hours of news to fill than staff members to fill them.
I always like to call attention to smart, low-cost ideas that provide powerful marketing value, and I have to thank my sister and her cat, Noel, for making me aware of this one.
When my sister and her husband took a vacation recently, they needed to board Noel. My sister looked around and found a nearby pet resort that seemed to be a nice place — far nicer than the vet’s cages in which our childhood pets spent our vacations, emerging upon our return like prisoners of war.
You’ve started running a new ad. You think it’s a good one, and based on the early response, your target audience appears to agree.
And then the phone rings or the email appears. One or more people are clearly upset with you. They don’t understand why you ran such an offensive ad. They’ve found something objectionable in the visual, or perhaps in the words. They’ve taken offense at something you never considered. You didn’t plan to upset anyone! Now what should you do?
A client was planning to advertise in a publication produced by a printing company with which I had worked in the past. Wanting to verify that the company was still producing that publication, I emailed the customer service contact I had dealt with, and asked her a simple question: is your company still printing this publication?
Her reply didn’t answer my question. “I’m now working in a different department and Jane Doe is now handling projects like that.” Clearly, she didn’t want to be bothered by my request.