Great Publicity? Or PR stunt gone too far?

Here’s a thing.

A stunt in which £20,000 of petrol was given away in north London to promote a computer game has been criticised as “irresponsible and dangerous”.

Traffic was gridlocked outside the Last Stop garage in Finsbury Park as drivers queued for £40-worth of free fuel each.

The move was to promote the game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.

Full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7599639.stm

The PR masterminds behind this story will be utterly elated with the response to this story.

I can almost hear the high fives from my office here in sunny north west England.

When it comes to generating coverage, the BBC website is something of a holy grail for UK businesses.  Especially if you succeed in securing an elusive website backlink.

But, for me, the debate is how concerned do you think Mercenaries 2 or the PR team will be about the negative comments?

My hunch is not at all.  The (justified) middle-aged uproar only serves to increase the credibility of the game in the eyes of the core teenage and twenty-something game-playing target audience.

Awareness .. tick.

Credibility .. tick.

Fancy running this particular gauntlet with your business’ PR?  Tread carefully my friends!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

How to Send Photographs to the Media…

Placing images about your business in the media is a much overlooked discipline. But, once you’ve achieved your stunning publicity shot, there are a few protocols you might want to bear in mind.

Image spec.

I find a good rule of thumb is to ensure any image is at least 1MB (or as close to it as possible) in size and a jpeg. This way the file should contain enough digital info to reproduce crisply on the page.

Captioning.

Because I deal with such a wide variety of media titles I assume the lowest common denominator with captioning – and that means emailing with the caption in the body of the email that the image is attached to.

‘CAPTION: LtoR Geoff Sellingstuff opens the Acme Supermarket with Mayor Billy Politics’ – or whatever.

I have included captions in the file info – but many smaller titles amazingly don’t realise this yet! Until they do – I’ll probably continue with the email approach.

Procedure.

NEVER email a 1MB photo with a news release. I have occasionally distributed resized smaller versions (thumbnails) to hopefully whet a journalist’s appetite. But the risk with this is that journalists ‘think’ that that’s the biggest file you have and conclude that the image will be too small.

If in doubt ask the journalist. Some like to receive the image themselves – some like to send it to the photo desk with the journalist’s name in the subject line.

And sometimes I’ve successfully placed images in the paper by going direct to the picture desk – and not even speaking to the journalist. Each paper, each picture and each story will be different.

When I email, my news release pre-amble always says something like : ‘Hi Hope the following is of interest. Ive got a great photo to go with this – let me know if you’d like to see a copy.’

In addition, the ‘Notes for Editors’ at the end always say PHOTO AVAILABLE – followed by contact details to request it.

Following up.

As is well – and shrewdly – documented, you should never follow up and ask a journalist if they’ve received a press release. NEVER. However, calling to ask a journalist if they’d like the photo seems OK – and amounts to the same thing anyway.