From PR to Eternity » News release

How moving: What PR can learn from advertising

Matthew Watson — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 10:47:00 +0000

During a recent trip to Berlin, my friends and I came across moving advertisements in Alexanderplatz. The adverts, which I assume were either robotic or remote controlled, really grabbed my attention as they whizzed around the town centre. At which point my friend said: “I bet Matt blogs about that!” She was right.

Being quirky is a great way to stand out, but it’s not sustainable. TV commercials and moving billboards were once new, exciting and different ways to advertise, and so captured the public’s imagination. But now they’re just background noise, unless the actual advert is interesting.

The same is true in PR. There are plenty of ways to spice up press releases, but if the content is as dull as dishwater than there’s no point. Rather than focus all our attention on jazzing up the delivery with pretty designs and social media add-ons, we should ensure the we give the actual press release the same amount of attention. After all it’s the really creative adverts that we remember.

Check out this video of mobile adverts in Berlin by Mrneglect:

An interview to a kill

Matthew Watson — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:10:00 +0000

The assessment day in London went fairly well. We were placed into small groups and given a client to create a pitch for. As the day progressed we were given updates and had to rework our pitch to accommodate them. I had lots of great, creative ideas but since public speaking isn’t my strongest point I’m not too sure how I did.

During the day we all had a quick interview with one of the staff, which I quite enjoyed. I talked about all the things I got up to at Concept Communications last summer and the PR campaign I put together for Mogul Magazine. We were also set the task of writing a press release in thirty minutes and creating a small list of media to send it to. Annoyingly I completely forgot to make the media list, but I was quite proud of my press release so hopefully that will even things out.

I find out if I’m through to the final interview round sometime during the next two weeks. Unfortunately the final interview is scheduled for the day I fly to Nice. So if I’m lucky enough to get an interview I will have to cancel or modify my holiday dates.