What's My Motivation for This Scene?
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Broadcast builds brands, creates awareness, increases institutional confidence and influences parallel media. So why is the world of broadcast a PR turn off? Firstly this is not a territory for amateurs. For the interviewee, natural humility might be attractive but a stammer or fit of nerves can kill. And for the PR, the medium offers complex logistics and tight schedules, the need for strong visual backdrops and the perennial challenge of finding an interviewee prepared to go on air live at 6.15 am. With hundreds of programmes to sift, each with its own peculiar embargoes and schedules, a collection of editors, producers, reporters and researchers to influence and a debate over quality and quantity fuelled by unreliable and overpriced monitoring and evaluation, an overworked PR can be often be excused for sticking to the traditional knitting.
And while broadcasters often complain that PRs give too many scoops to the papers or fail to take their needs into account when they break news, they do little to help their case. Too few seek to engage with their PR peers during downtime, understand issues or cultivate contacts.
The result is often that too few broadcasters have time for PR departments and agencies with no dedicated broadcast PR expertise, and too few PRs know how to adapt or sustain a story on air that might protect or recreate it in print.
A curious by-product of this breakdown is apparent in UK financial services, where retail banks spend millions on commercials that are inaccessible to the mainstream BBC, while frequently failing to adapt or create PR campaigns for news features and programmes that would give them more credible exposure for free!
Despite its insincerity and forced intimacy, eccentric methods and horrible programme timings, the future is quite definitely on air, and a PR function not geared up to its needs is out of tune with reality.
All you have to do is summon your motivation for the broadcast scene. Think sales, corporate credibility, brand. Think promotion. You could even think family, because broadcast in its widest sense touches everyone. Think of how proud your kids could be!
Whatever you think, don't duck the issue. Engage. Step up to the breach, summon the spirits and bring your story to life.
In 1997, Nick Hadjinikos established the UK financial community's first specialised broadcast PR unit at London based Citigate Dewe Rogerson. In 2000, he joined Europe's first internet bank, First-e, as Head of PR. He can be contacted at nhadjinikos@hotmail.com.
