Anna Wintour's Fashion "Editing"

September's Vogue is supposedly all about championing the hardships of the working (wo)man in the troubled economy. It has advice about how to shop on a budget, like mixing those super-affordable J Crew classics with Gucci boots. Hey, you could probably make an outfit for under $1000! Great.

American Vogue has faced some accusations in the past about only writing on advertiser's work. This claim was made all the more valid by a mention of EXPRESS legwear. Vogue has a typically Wolford-or-die attitude, so the mention puzzled me until two pages later there was a 3-page layout for EXPRESS. Coincidence?

How is this newsworthy?

In our perfect pitch session a few weeks ago we learned the 7 components of news. They are as follows:

1. Proximity
2. Timeliness
3. Human interest
4. Conflict
5. Eminence/Prominence
6. Consequence
7. Visuals

If a PR person were pitching a story about a new J Crew to the NYT, it might seem like a stretch to expect anything. After all, it's 1. A national company 2. Ongoing 3. Not that interesting 4. Conflict-free 5. Not important 6. Of no consequence to the nation and 7. Not that aesthetically interesting (unless you really like sweater racks).

BUT hey, sometimes a story gets an awesome placement for no apparent reason! Instead of envying this lucky PR professional, I like to see it as a sign: sometimes you never know what a phone call will get you.

Blog to Book

Is "I can has cheeseburger", i.e. LOLCats, all that's fit to print? Apparently so! "I can has cheeseburger", the blog famous for putting funny captions on cute animal pictures, has released a book. Now your cat-loving grandmother can experience the fun without having to deal with the internet.

Turning a blog into a book is a great idea to create revenue, and to insure that there will be a lasting copy of your content. In his 19th century novel Illusions Perdues, Balzac emphasizes the importance of developing a good binding system so that novels will live on after their contemporaries are gone. Now we have no physical copies of our most important neo-celeb writers, what will happen to Andrew Sullivan or Julia Allison when their days are over?

When You Need PR: Launching a New Brand

There are many times when you need PR, but the one I want to touch on is: launching a new brand/product.

When introducing a new product, you have three options:

1. Launch with advertising
2. Launch with PR
3. Do nothing and hope word-of-mouth carries the product name.

I'm assuming most brands/people won't do nothing, so we will focus on the first two.

Why advertising?

While I consider launching a new brand solely with advertising foolish, I completely understand the appeal. Their are many benefits to launching a brand with advertising:

1. You pick the outlet (TV, radio, print, online)
2. You control the content (control over print ads and commercials)
3. Guaranteed hits (You can get an accurate number of who has seen your ad)

Advertising is the safe route, NOT the effective route.

Why?

Advertising's major downfall is the lack of credibility. There is plenty of data to back this up, but lets go the common sense route. What do you think would be more effective, an ad for a new novel by a Nicholas Sparks or Oprah's endorsement of his new book? The answer is obvious.

Do you think anyone would take a new coffee shop seriously if it touted that it had 'the worlds greatest coffee'? Of course not. This was mocked by Will Ferrell's character in the movie Elf. When his character went ecstatic and congratulated the coffee shop on being 'the world's best' it drew laughs from the audience. They realized anyone can call themselves the 'world's best' and it seems outlandish that anyone would believe it, therefor laughter ensued.

But lets say that coffee shop mentioned above, received a review from The New York Times, verifying that it indeed, has some of the best coffee in the world. Would that not draw a significant amount of buzz? Much more than running a print ad in the Times with the same claim.

So if advertising isn't how you should launch a brand, why Public Relations?

In one word: credibility.

PR is riskier. You can't completely control the message, the timing, or that you will even get coverage. While these are disadvantages to take into account, the power of credibility outweighs all of them.

For the most part, people believe what they see or hear on TV, radio, blogs, and customer reviews. The more cluttered advertising becomes, the more likely consumers are to seek out a third-party for their opinion.

Laura Ries makes an excellent point in her book "The Fall of Advertising, and the Rise of PR":

"It's ironic that America's advertising agencies, the 'advertising builds brands' crowd, do almost no advertising themselves. Rather they depend heavily on PR to build their own brands. They deluge the trade presses, especially Advertising Age and Adweek, with samples of their work. No award, no matter how trivial, goes uncrowed....How can you believe in advertising for others if you don't believe in advertising for yourself?"

So if PR is significantly cheaper and more effective, why not?

Famous brands built by PR: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Linux, Segway, Red Bull, Amazon, Ebay, and many more.

There is too much more information on this topic for one blog post. Much more to come..