Occasionally it becomes impossible to compete directly with a rival firm or event. What they are doing is just so far beyond what you can manage that you have no chance at all of attacking them head-on, so the only alternative is to make a guerrilla attack-which in PR terms means upstaging the competition.
Sir Richard Branson is a past master at doing this-turning up at opening days wearing a town crier's outfit, or making a "spoiler" announcement ahead of a competitor's grand press conference. But there's nothing to stop anyone doing it.
The DJ at one radio station realized that his show would have no chance whatsoever of competing against a main sporting event that was due to clash with it. So he said that, to show his support for the teams, on the day before the match he would sit in every seat in the stadium.
He got permission to complete this, and of course the stunt produced the local TV news: the shots of him moving from one seat towards the subsequent in a 50,000-seat stadium clearly produced more interesting TV than yet an additional interview with the groundsman concerning the state of the pitch, or using the coaches about the state of readiness of the players.
Timing is essential-doing something on the same day cannot work, because the competitor's event will swamp it. Doing it two days before is too soon, two days following is too late: this DJ got it exactly right by acting on the day before. Such stunts are hard work and might not usually pay off-but it is better than doing nothing in the face of a juggernaut!
Children are an emotive issue: anyone who is, or has been, or will be a parent has at least some emotion about kids in general. Yet from a PR point of view they are often neglected, when in reality they could (and ought to) be a potent source of PR coverage. Newspapers and TV love stories about children, simply because they know that their readers and viewers adore stories about children.
Even though children are often ignored or neglected by PR individuals, they have parents and grandparents, and will ultimately grow up to be customers. In some instances, needless to say, they already are clients.
One advertising agency devised a series of tips for producing mediasavvy kids. The agency gave parents a toolkit for teaching their children the difference between advertising and TV programs, and in between advertising and news stories.
This somewhat unusual idea went down extremely well with parents. Many parents are afraid that their children will be manipulated by advertisers, and equally do not trust advertisers themselves: the agency helped to restore some trust in advertisers, but more importantly it showed itself to be a caring organization.
In practice, nothing is lost: children fairly quickly turn out to be mediasavvy anyway, and certainly they are by the time they're making independent buying decisions, so the physical exercise only accelerated the process and made some parents' lives a bit easier.
There are numerous other ways PR stories could be generated by doing something for children: advising parents on how to stop their children becoming overweight (this is the kind of thing a health-food store, a gym, or a restaurant could help with), or perhaps teaching kids how to look following their money (banks, financial advisers, and accountants could help here). Articles on such topics are very most likely to be published by newspapers and magazines.
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1. How PR people manage to attract the attention of teens
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