Free Ink

You Had To Be There.

Call in Europe, a new international phone company, threw a press party last December at a New York nightclub. It drew 70 reporters from outlets like Financial Times, the New York Times, ABC News and PC magazine.

The telecom hoped to garner press for its 39-cent-per-minute rate for calls from France to the U.S. So it plied its guests with drinks and hors d’oeuvres, and handed each one a Motorola MotoFone and SIM card. Better yet, it invited them to stay after 7 p.m., when its own part of the evening ended and co-sponsor French Tuesdays started.

What did it get for the $50,000 it paid for this shindig?

Not a single column inch of copy. And fewer than 10% of the reporters activated the free cell-phone service by the Jan. 31 deadline, according to president Patrick Gentemann.

“It was a nice party,” he says. “But I think they were there for the sushi bar more than anything else.”

This did not sit well with Gentemann. He dismissed PR agency SS Public Relations, whose president Steve Simon says the feeling was mutual.

“We didn’t want to work with him again,” Simon notes. “[Gentemann] was never satisfied. Our job was to bring 80 to 90 people to a press party on a cold night right before the holidays, and we delivered.” He adds that it wasn’t SS’s job to follow up on coverage.

What went wrong? Maybe it was a bad press list. Perhaps Call in Europe’s message got confused with that of French Tuesdays, a networking party company for the Francophile community. Or it could be that Call in Europe can’t rely solely on publicity in the United States as it does in France.

Then there’s the worst possibility: That the news being offered wasn’t compelling enough, despite Gentemann’s claim that “I think I have a good story.”

And that’s the challenge for any marketer doing PR. How do you get a journalist or a television talk-show booker to agree that you have a good story?

One benefit of PR is that “it’s basically free” (meaning you don’t have to buy media), says Tom Meyer, president of Davie Brown Entertainment, the event-oriented agency part of The Marketing Arm.

But Meyer adds: “If you’re not doing something PR-able, it might not be something worth doing.”

There are several ways to achieve that. One is to hook into a larger event or story. For example, Timberland was a sponsor of last January’s Sundance Film Festival.

Sundance only offers sponsorships to environmentally conscious companies, and it just so happened that Timberland had recently introduced a shoe made from recycled material. That made it “a PR-able story,” Meyer says.

The result? Coverage by Reuters, NPR, Us Weekly, The Boston Globe, Hollywood Reporter, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and on numerous blogs and Web sites.

It didn’t hurt that celebs like “Entourage” cast member Rex Lee and Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden were seen fondling the shoes.

This qualifies as what Davie Brown calls “celebrity seeding” — not an outright endorsement, but the star shows interest in the product and usually receives it as a gift. A photograph of a celebrity holding a swag bag has tremendous worth when picked up by the wire services.

The real trick, though, is to get ink regularly.

Public relations “carries the message to the community in different ways than paid or placed media,” says Liz Arreaga, a partner in the Hispanic market-focused promotions agency Mercury Mambo.

But you have to start with “an understanding what the objectives are,” she adds.

STUNTS

Another way to ensure press is to create media-friendly stunts. For example, over the last three years the reality TV show “Bridezillas” has run an annual event in New York’s Times Square. It always gets TV, print and radio coverage.

In 2005, 30 seemingly deranged brides-to-be decked out in wedding dresses jumped into a real cake in search of a ticket worth $50,000. A year later the theme was the “Running of the Bridezillas,” modeled after the annual bull event in Pamplona, Spain.

Last June it was a two-minute cake-eating contest. The winner stuffed herself with nine of the 4-inch cakes.

“We received a total of 127 million impressions,” says Jonathan Margolis, president of the Michael Alan Group, which created the event for WE: Women’s Entertainment, the network that carries “Bridezillas.”

“The key is to come up with something that hasn’t been done before.”

How do you develop a spectacle like this?

“Everybody works together,” Margolis says.

Then there was the event tied to Spike TV’s season-three premiere of “Pros vs. Joes,” in which regular guys play against professional athletes.

Michael Alan street marketing recruited hoop enthusiasts to face off against two retired players from the New York Knicks, Charles Oakley and Charles Smith. The contestants’ friends and families were invited to serve as a live audience.

Talk about publicity: Oakley and Smith were eager to share opinions on what ails their former team, and they were quoted in the New York newspapers’ sports sections.

For its part, Michael Alan only creates the events. Margolis says he’s never seriously thought about adding PR to his list of services. For one thing, it would be uncomfortable working with companies he may have to compete with in the future. And it isn’t financially feasible. “It would have to be billable,” he says. “Also, we wouldn’t have the same power as a [Howard] Rubenstein.”

PLACEMENT GUARANTEED

But back to Call in Europe. This writer was invited to the December event apparently because the PR firm used a press list from the January 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, for which I registered as a freelance writer.

That list was clearly outdated. And someone should have screened the reporters with a phone call. It’s more valuable to attract qualified journalists than to fill up the room with bodies.

They also should have noted the differences between the trade press and general business media. But in fairness, press conferences usually are set up at the last minute and there’s no time to do that kind of vetting.

Despite his party debacle, Gentemann remains convinced that PR is valuable. When Call in Europe was launched in the United States, for instance, the company got “plenty of phone calls,” he says.

But free ink isn’t really free — Gentemann had to pay SS a retainer. “It cost me $30,000 to get two lines in a Wall Street Journal travel article,” he says.

However, prices are lower at PayPerClip, a PR firm that charges for specific media placements. A Wall Street Journal mention costs $4,000.

That’s only one of several types of pickups featured on PayPerClip’s rate card. The most expensive is $10,000 for a spot on the “Oprah” talk show.

In contrast, a slot on CNBC costs $5,000 and a local radio station pickup in the 30th largest market goes for $600.

“Getting on ‘Oprah’ is quite a coup,” says Rich Virgilio, managing director of PayPerClip, which doesn’t charge an up-front retainer. However, its sister PR company Stephenson Group is retainer based.

Virgilio founded his agency following the dot-com crash. He realized that PR and marketing budgets are usually cut first during a downturn, and that there was a need for placement-based arrangements. Other agencies provide them as well.

In order to make overhead and justify a retainer, large PR firms will meet regularly with clients, conduct research or offer a client’s executives to a speakers’ bureau. Still, one would think that an objectives-setting process could be put in place without input from a PR outfit, Virgilio notes.

PR agencies also can easily become press-release mills. But why would you need that service if you have someone in house who can write? “Big PR firms are not thrilled [when competitors offer ‘guaranteed results or pay nothing,’]” he says. “They have to rack up billable hours on nonsense. At the end of the month they’ve put together a great strategy but no press.”