Unsubscribed: Will the spam pitch kill PR?

A friend in PR and I were talking the other day about media lists. This friend was lamenting the difficulty in finding good lists for  print and online journalists and bloggers on specific topics: luxury travel, foodie, parenting, etc.
This led to me running down some of the media list aggregating services that I have used [...]

Ad Age: Social media marketing supplanting traditional media relations

And the earth’s temperature is heating up.
While the dismantling of traditional media both financially and by audience/credibility has been gaining steam for years, this past year’s economic meltdown has only exacerbated the derailment. Clients are pursuing more direct lines to consumers through micro-targeted ads, Youtube channels, Twitter accounts and tactics of the like while PRtists continue [...]

Post no links

But sometimes I must.
From PR in Canada and the leading writer on PR research and measurement, Alan Chumley, a note about stakeholder relations research and measurement. We’ve talked a lot about measurement (and my own insistence that measurement really does not exist in a meaningful way for marketing communications) and Alan’s call to pay attention [...]

Sex and the Cold One

Tying your pitch to current trends or already popular topics is a common strategy in proacive media relations (PMR). PR has the license to creatively integrate their product or company with top stories of the day. Gas prices are reaching a record high and your client makes hydrogen fuel cells? Britney Spears admits she can’t [...]

Pitch, Feverishly

I recently received a pitch from a PR agency through e-mail. At first, I was a little annoyed. There was no possible way I could have been interested in the watery social media company the practitioner was acting on behalf of. I thought of simply deleting the e-mail. I thought I might publish the pitch [...]

Obay Buzz Goes Offish

It’s tricky (tricky, tricky, tricky) pulling off an “It’s Coming…” campaign. You know the ones. Some vague, non-sequitur ad that doesn’t mention a product or a brand but instead leaves you scratching your head and wondering “What was that all about?” “It’s coming…” campaigns double down on a bet that the audience will take notice, [...]

The Axis of a Shreddie

From AdNews:

Kraft Canada has begun a marketing campaign for its Shreddies brand of breakfast cereal. The campaign, called “Diamond Shreddies,” was developed by Ogilvy & Mather. The creative features images of the square pieces of cereal turned 45 degrees to form diamond shapes. The campaign purports to introduce a new diamond-shaped variety of the product. [...]

Marketing and PR: Not ready to make nice?

After reading an insightful post on Gary Schlee’s blog about the increasingly cozy relationship between marketing and PR, I decided to post a comment. Read the post then come back and follow along below:
I believe the differences between PR and marketing are largely artificial. That is to say, PR is a specific aspect of marketing [...]

Hill & Knowlton Canada information session: a report

I attended an information session at Hill & Knowlton Canada today and thought I would share some of my thoughts and tag it to a new category, “Jobbing Out” where I’ll discuss the environment of employment in public relations and corporate communications.

The hour-long presentation led by Human Resources Manager Paule Bellegarde laid out a history [...]

Veritas fumbles Scrabulous assessment

Veritas Public Relations puts out an excellent newsletter called Touchdown & Fumbles which is a round up of the best and worst communication plays of the week. I’m a long time subscriber and I’d be lying if I said that the format of Stractical was not largely based on TD&F.
But Veritas’ principal media coach, Bob [...]