When Melanie Hammmond Clark, the pastor at the Covenant Presbyterian Church right here in beautiful Racine, Wisconsin wanted newspaper publicity to build her congregation, she did it the old fashioned way...
She bought it.
How does one do that, you ask?
Before we answer that we need to understand how media outlets work.
Traditionally, there are two groups at a media source: editorial and advertising.
Editorial reports the news, advertising sells...well, advertising.
This creates a major potential ethical problem. Couldn't one sell more advertising if they reported positively on their advertisers and negatively on those who don't advertise with them?
Probably so.
Hence "The Chinese Wall"
The Chinese wall is a an imaginary wall that separates the two sides of the business. Theoretically, advertising and editorial don't talk with each other and the editorial department isn't even supposed to notice who and what is being advertised through their media outlet.
This issue does create a challenge to us as PR practitioners. Frankly, we frequently want free publicity for something that we really should be paying to have advertised.
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This is a major reason why many of our news releases get rejected; they're not news, they're advertising. That's why we work so hard to find angles, hooks and partnerships to turn announcements into news.
But that's another article...
Pastor Clark understood this principle, so when she wanted to hold a seminar on Dan Brown's best selling book "The DaVinci Code", she wisely bought advertising to fill the pews.
But Pastor Clark was also smart enough to recognize that there was publicity value in this story too. For those of you who haven't read it, The DaVinci Code is based on the theory that the holy grail isn't a chalice, but the literal descendants of the married couple Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the knowledge of which and the descendants from which are theoretically hidden by the Church and protected by the Knights Templar.
(The story's an interesting read, by the way - not that I accept the premise, but he did a good job of building a story around it. I recommend reading it, just to watch the way that this masterful writer crafts his words into a story.) Check it out The DaVinci Code here.
Now, here's where Pastor Clark's story gets interesting. At first people came to the ongoing series of lectures based on the advertisements. But now they'll probably come from the article that ran in this week's paper about the series. You can see it here for a few more days:
I haven't researched to find out if that article came as a result of a pitch, or whether our bright local news correspondent, Lee B Roberts just saw the news value of the story and pulled it together himself, but here's the steps on how it could have happened and how you can do the same thing yourself:
1. Run an ad to generate guaranteed placement and traffic to your event. (PR's iffy, so if you want to ensure that people know about your event, advertising works)
2. Identify the story hook (in this case "discussions aim to decipher the DaVinci code", building off and localizing a best-selling novel)
3. Pitch the story to your media contact (in this case, approaching either the Religion or the Local editor would have been best) with your pitch focusing on how you are localizing this national story by holding discussions here in town. Invite them to attend.
4. If the media contact shows up, help them gather what they need for the story. If they don't, be sure to grab audience commentary at the event and re-pitch the story afterwards.
5. Offer a personal interview to help flesh out the details of the story.
These steps should help you to break through the Chinese Wall, and turn your paid advertising events into free publicity!
For more information on promoting your events, check out How To Create A Media Buzz To Promote Your Special Event and How To Create A Buzz For Your Special Event
Posted April 29, 2004
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