Well if you live in New Zealand, you’ll know there’s a bit of a game about to happen. I can’t go anywhere in Auckland without a copywriter somewhere trying to get my attention with messages linked to the Rugby World Cup. In amongst the deafening marketing chatter, I spotted this advert. It made me chuckle.
For anyone unsure about the New Zealand accent, this will give you the perfect insight into how to communicate clearly over here.
This week tweets and news updates have been flying around on the subject of New Zealand’s PM, John Key, and his appearance on the David Letterman Show during his trip to the US in 2009. Everyone is getting over-excited about $10,000 being paid to a public relations firm to secure his place on the show. I’m hopping mad about the reporting so far. And the easiest way to explain why is to share with you a bit about the PR process:
Public relations is all about messages. It is about getting the right messages to the right audiences at the right time. Companies will use PR for a variety of reasons but that’s a blog subject for another day. In this case, John Key was off to wave the NZ flag. He wanted to raise the profile of this beautiful land in which we live and attract the US tourist dollar. So in his case, using a PR firm was all about profile raising to a particular audience.
In order to raise profile, a public relations consultant will look at the client business or organisation and create a series of messages that will appeal to the audience or audiences. They will spend time researching how best to position the client, minimising the chance for negative publicity and maximising the chance of identifying relevant messages that grab attention.
Once all that more strategic stuff is sorted, they’ll move on to tactics i.e. how do we get these messages across?. And to do this they’ll search hard for broadcast, print and social media opportunities. Lots of questions will be used to check if tactics are appropriate:
That all goes into a plan. Then the PR team will hit the phones and emails, trying to sell the client and their expertise into the journalist. Because the most important thing about public relations is it is not based on a commercial agreement. News stories appear because the journalist or producer believes it to be relevant to the readers, listeners or viewers. And the vast majority of the time, they only find out about things if PR consultants like me get in touch.
The journalist’s job is to interpret what the client says which is why PR consultants work so hard to get the messages right, train spokespeople, and target the right media. Journalists don’t just take a cheque and report the story verbatim. You only get control like that when you pay for it directly with the media outlet. And that’s called advertising which is also a blog for another day.
PR is a sales process. And it is a specialist sales process. Therefore people don’t do it for free. Public relations agencies charge money for all the strategic development work, the research on tactics and the preparation that goes with the sell-in process. And if the sell-in is successful, there is a load of work to prepare spokespeople for interviews, or develop just the right info for journalists, as well as making sure everyone gets what they want out of the process. So understandably public relations consultants are paid for their work. But the media aren’t paid to take the story.
Tourism NZ saw John Key’s trip to America as a great opportunity to boost interest in New Zealand. They employed a fine PR firm to position NZ in the hearts and minds of as many relevant Americans as possible. The PR firm was given the Prime Minister of New Zealand as the spokesperson for the job. And everyone delivered. Clips of John Key doing his ’10 reasons to visit New Zealand’ slot on the Letterman Show were shooting about on Facebook, Twitter, websites, blogs as well as broadcast media. The Letterman Show is a big win – it gets over 3.5 million viewers every week. The New Zealand population is 4.4 million.
So why the fuss? I think the media here wanted the story to be far more sordid than it is. I think they wanted to say John Key bought a slot because NZ is desperate for someone to take notice. But for me, this just isn’t a story. This is just about public relations in action.