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Course In Advanced Public Relations TheoryWeek Three: Still Waiting For Godot By Dean Rotbart
Good morning class:
Today, Iād like you to write a news release that will be so zippy, so imaginative, so detailed, so literary that it will prove irresistible to the media, even though the subject of the news release is dull.
You have an eternity. Now begin.
As assignments go, this one is a no brainer. It canāt be done.
I suggest you close your worksheets and turn them in blank. Anyone who undertakes to do otherwise is sure to fail.
Yet when you leave this electronic classroom and return to the real world, chances are mighty that if you work in media relations, soon, -- probably even this month ö some chief executive officer will summon you to the executive suite and command just such a performance.
That CEO, you see, is an adherent of EMTMR.
EMTMR, as youāll recall from our earlier classes, stands for the Efficient Markets Theory of Media Relations and its basic precept is that every company, person and product has a publicity birthright.
Depending upon your station in life, your EMTMR may cast you as a regular on CNNās Lou Dobbs Tonight, or it may relegate you to the back reaches of Supermarket Week.
Most CEOs, of course, feel it is their gosh darn privilege to sit next to Lou, so they order up news release after news release alerting the dozing media that it is time to do their duty and deliver on the CEOs fair share of publicity.
Thatās it!
Most CEOs have an over-inflated sense of how much publicity they deserve, but they have no doubt ö EMTMR ö of their entitlement. If they donāt get their desired results ö and such thick heads seldom do ö they typically excoriate the media for malpractice and sooner or later fire their PR advisors, figuring that the damn fools canāt even write a workable press release.
After all, according to EMTMR, if the media correctly understood the CEOās message, surely the media would cover the story. Itās the mediaās obligation and the CEOās right. If EMTMR isnāt working, it must be the PR agentās fault. Case (and mind) closed.
Sound like an exaggeration? Let me assure you, it is not.
Few CEOs truly understand ÷ I mean in-their-gut-like understand ÷ that publicity is neither an entitlement nor a mirage. Newsworthiness is what you cause it to be. Rather than the widely accepted EMTMR, publicity actually is governed by Rotbartās MTYFS, a radical new, eponymously named approach that proves anyone can obtain More Than Your Fair Share of media attention.
According to my theory, the beast known as ćinherent news valueä is purely mythical. The way journalists and news organizations actually function is anything but efficient. Good, deserving stories get overlooked ten thousand times a day; while shallow, insignificant, fluff passes for front-page news with regularity.
You can damn it and you can fight it. Or you can figure out how to best produce your own proprietary brand of shallow, insignificant fluff. That is, if you want to generate news during those months when you donāt ćgenuinely deserveä the coverage.
Most CEOs remain stuck on what they ćgenuinely deserve.ä Even if such a mythological character as inherent newsworthiness did exist ö and it doesnāt ö the majority of CEOs fail to recognize they have greatly overestimated their weight on the newsworthy scale of judgment.
I personally have looked dozens of CEOs in the eye and told them point blank that they will have to ćmanufactureä the news if they are ever going to merit the kind of media attention they crave. Their companies, their products and their personalities carry no media currency as they are.
And what do these otherwise savvy business executives and successful entrepreneurs typically respond upon hearing my harsh but true assessments: ćIf you canāt write a more effective news release, Iāll find someone who can.ä
Like Vladimir and Estragon, they are still waiting for an illusive Godot.
For homework this week, Iād like you to email me (rotbart@tjfr.com) about your worst CEO encounters. You can exclude all names and other identifying characteristics to protect the truly pigheaded. But tell me about a CEO youāve met who will wait forever for his or her ćgenuinely deservedä media coverage.
Class dismissed.
September 3, 2003 |
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