News Releases, When?
by Paul McGoldrick
Once upon a not-so-long-time-ago my desk would be covered every morning
with FedEx and UPS envelopes containing press releases and glossy photographs
-- most for some reason showing products next to a dime or a quarter. Then
came the web explosion.
Now the majority of companies post their news releases promptly on their websites. But there are others that still do not get it and it can be very frustrating as a journalist to be wanting to use an item, even to review it, and to realize you cannot get the news release and/or a data sheet.
But what has become noticeably different is the way that individual distribution now takes place compared to the "old" days.
Take a convention like NAB -- now permanently taking place in Las Vegas because it is one of the only cities with enough deliverable electrical power at its convention center. It used to be that you saw few news releases before the show, unless you were one of the few trade/print publications in the business (with a two-month lead time); and even then the detail in the releases tended to be more teaser than content. As a visiting journalist your first stop at the Convention Center would be at the press room to pick up your badge and the releases -- from the little alphabetically located pigeonholes -- of those companies that were of interest, or that caught your eye.
Now, the releases start to arrive three months before the Convention -- in very detailed form, by e-mail. The vast majority are embargoed so there is nothing you can do with them, so what's the point in sending them out? One of the reasons may be to persuade you to visit particular booths but I think it is probably just a lack of logically thinking the whole thing through…
If you look at other shows there is a different approach, but the results tend to be just as loony. I'm writing this on the opening day of the 2006 3GSM World Conference, taking place in Barcelona, Spain. (Wish I was there to enjoy the food and wine, but I doubt many delegates will have the time to do much outside the convention venue and their hotels.) I have had a few e-mails in the past weeks about the Conference but most have been the generic, "We'll be there at Stand XXX; see you?"
Today is a different story. I have had a dump truck load of e-mailed news releases including 19 from one company! Exactly the same thing happened with the January 2006 CES show's opening.
What do the PR people inside these companies, or the PR agencies they use, think I can DO with this lot? There are only so many news items we at analogZONE run and the time to do a product review is long enough that you just cannot offer to cover a fraction of this stuff.
I can criticize…but can I also offer a solution?
Partially, but not completely. A lot of the releases cover updates of products, new alliances, business stories, even news about people. They can wait for a paper release until after the event. We're not talking here about the Paris Air Show where you want to make a splash by announcing orders -- most, if not all, secured months before -- to give the impression of what a success the show was for you as a supplier. No, those sorts of topics can wait.
Release, under embargo, only the TWO Most Important Products you are going to announce two or three weeks before the event, giving us time to react. Ignore the rest until a month or two months after the show, and THEN release them. Yes, a whole bunch of people saw the products at the show, but many other bunches of people didn't. The majority of design engineers don't get the kind of time, or financial allowances, needed to attend a trade show -- or the majority of conferences.
Why is it only a partial solution? Because PR folk are under pressure from every product manager or group to regard their offerings as the most important, and there is no party -- at most companies -- with the authority, or guts, to really make that determination and place the shown products into A, B and C priorities.
But the overall result is that all the groups lose out because of the shotgunning approach. Indeed, one could go further and say that most shows are irrelevant these days, with the alternate information channels that are available -- and that might well be absolutely correct.
But, whatever the solution, let's not go back to all those FedEx envelopes.
My bi-monthly recycling is bulky enough as it is.
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