This morning Chris, another senior person at the integrated communications agency I work for handed me a section out of the Wall Street Journal and pointed to the headline: “Paying for PR — But Only When It Works.” My heart sank. Then I read the article. Actually, charging per placement is not a bad strategy, if all the client wants is to be in the news. From the agency standpoint, I could see that if one was great at pitching, and charged enough, it might work out nicely — and be economical for both agency and client. The downside as I see it is that the hit is short-lived unless you do something with it to prolong its usefulness (i.e., post on Web site, send out link announcing coverage to mailing list). But that’s strategy, and Pay-Per-Placement PR lives in a no-strategy zone. Also worth noting: The woman profiled in this piece, a retailer of gift baskets, paid the agent six grand for the Wall Street Journal hit — but will she get $6,000 of business from WSJ readers? That’s a lot of gift baskets, man. If you ask me, it doesn’t add up. For myriad reasons, Public Relations still regularly gets a bad rap — even though there is evidence that even the ad agencies are starting to wake up to the power of the PR platform. And does the single isolated tactic of pitching the media really qualify as PR? I’d love to hear what the other PR pros have to say about this article. Comments?
Comments:
2 Comments posted on "Pay-Per-Placement PR"
Andrew on December 18th, 2007 at 12:15 pm #
I read that article last night. One thing that struck me was that it was essentially a single source article — the experiences of this one woman were standing for the whole of a PR strategy. Where’s the additional perspective? Plus, the headline is rather misleading; she paid for a lot of PR that didn’t work, and even paid too much for pay-for-placement PR. To me, there was far too little take-away for businesspeople who are naïve about PR; I might be scared away from pay-for-placement based on the costs this woman was paying. I agree that $6k seemed like too much for this article. If it were a direct hit in the WSJ, it would be worth it, but this one was of marginal use to the woman’s business. How is talking about PR foibles going to help sell gift baskets? I’d say she’s still getting ripped off.
rickey gold on December 19th, 2007 at 7:08 pm #
I’m doing a pay-for-placement campaign currently for one of my clients. The key word here is “campaign”. It’s part of an overall marketing campaign. Some of the PR is really on-the-fly as I talk to people rather than specific pitches. Regarding the whole concept of pay-for-placement…anyone I work with is told upfront that one shot placements are not worth doing (ok, maybe in a few unusual situations, it could be, but that’s certainly the exception). In this client’s case, I’m spending a fair amount of time educating writers about their service and building relationships. If I had existing contacts in this industry, I might have worked on a traditional retainer fee basis. Does it work? I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know when this campaign is over. Post a comment
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