Eric Yaverbaum, Robert Bly, Ilise Benun. Public Relations for Dummies, 2nd Edition

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he paused a second and told me they were great, but that he couldn’t afford

them. The point is: Establish a budget first and then frame an event you can

do within your budget.

I’ve worked with event budgets ranging from $30,000 to several million dol-

lars. With a $500,000 budget, you can afford to do a travel promotion with

an appearance by a pitcher from the baseball team that won the last World

Series. When your budget is smaller, you may have to stick to something

simpler — hot-air balloon rides or just hot dogs in the parking lot.

The biggest plus of events is their unique ability to dramatically demonstrate

a message and make it come alive. PR is the art of demonstration. You just

can’t say you’re environmentally friendly or technically savvy; to get the

public to believe you and the press to quote you, you have to demonstrate

that these claims are so. Consider this example: When the Park Central Hotel

in New York City wanted to communicate the message that the improvements

being made at the hotel would improve the quality of service for guests, it

offered a day of free “personal renovations” in the lobby, where visitors could

get hairstyling, massages, and manicures (more on that event later in this

chapter).

Controlling Event Costs

A general guideline is that a special event always costs at least ten times

more than a print promotion (for example, mailing a press release). There’s

no getting around it — events cost time, money, and effort.

However, you can take several steps to control costs and keep the event

budget at a reasonable level:

! Keep the event local. Hold it in your own town or the nearest city, not

the city where the annual industry meeting is held, 2,000 miles away.

! Allow only essential personnel to attend. Having executives travel to

the show or conference wastes your budget and their time.

! Be a scrooge about expenditures. For example, at events where wine is

served, I tell the waiters to ask attendees whether they want more wine

instead of automatically pouring more in the glass. The savings are

considerable.

! Shop around for everything. You would be shocked to discover how

prices for seemingly comparable services and items vary. For instance,

many so-called B-list celebrities who are very well known and are crowd

pleasers will work for a fraction of the cost of a superstar with a slightly

bigger reputation who doesn’t buy you much extra as a draw.

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Determining Your Event’s

Theme and Concept

Demonstrating a key message should always be the reason for and key objec-

tive of any promotional event. Look at your product or service. Identify the

key messages you want to communicate. Now get creative and, using the

methods outlined in Chapter 5, brainstorm ways to use events to demon-

strate these messages.

Here are some examples:

! Carvel Ice Cream wanted to modernize its image as a place that really

cared about kids. To animate the message, it brought free ice cream to

55 schools in the New York tri-state area with the best attendance

records.

! To support the launch of IKEA’s line of a.i.r inflatable furniture, I helped

conduct the IKEA a.i.r Open Golf Tournament benefiting the Asthma and

Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA). We covered a golf course with

room settings by using the inflatable furniture and other IKEA furniture.

Soap opera stars Jackie Zeman and Julian Stone were on hand to raise

money to send 100 children with asthma and allergies to the AAFA’s

summer camp. Media coverage included the Los Angeles Times, Reuters,

CNN, and local affiliates of all major networks.

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Fine smokes feed old folks

Cigar smoking, once a hot trend, has faded in

recent years, and our client, Club Macanudo —

a New York City cigar club — wanted to demon-

strate that cigar aficionados are people with

taste who appreciate the finer things in life. Our

agency created the “Ultimate Cars, Premium

Cigars Road Rally” in which participants in 25

luxury and collectible cars drove through New

York’s Westchester County.

At each rest stop, drivers were given a fine cigar

to smoke. Onlookers could see happy people

driving beautiful cars, smoking, and enjoying

their cigars. The event proceeds — which

included the entry fees plus sales of humidors to

the crowd attending the event and its awards

banquet that evening — benefited City Meals-

on-Wheels, a nonprofit organization providing

food to elderly New Yorkers. The event was cov-

ered in the

New York Post

and the

New York

Daily News

and on WB Channel 11 among other

media.

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! Another client of mine, the Park Central Hotel in New York City, wanted

to publicize a $50-million renovation. That may sound like a big deal, but

it’s actually far from a record in the world of high-priced hotel renova-

tions. To draw attention and press coverage, the hotel sponsored a

“Renovate Yourself Day” in its lobby. People could come in for a free

facial, manicure, hairstyling, massage, shoeshine, and even a consulta-

tion with a plastic surgeon who used a video imaging system to show

people what they’d look like before and after a face-lift or tummy tuck.

The event — and the hotel’s renovation — got coverage on all four net-

work affiliates, national TV, and a feature story in the Daily News.

Events like these can help elevate you above your competition, because

you’re playing on a different field. The creative theme and the fact that you’re

doing an event are what set you apart from your competitors who may publi-

cize a company only by doing the usual press release (for example, “Hotel

Undergoes $50-Million Renovation”). Yawn.

With a little creativity, you can apply this kind of thinking to come up with an

event to publicize your own business. Just follow these steps:

1. Decide the key message that you want to communicate and whom you

want to reach.

A local dry cleaner, for example, may want to compete with other dry

cleaners — for example, a national chain — by showing that the local

store is a cornerstone of the community.

2. Think of a way to demonstrate the message.

In the example in Step 1, how can you prove — not just say — that you

are a part of the community? Perhaps you can make some kind of dona-

tion or offer a service.

3. Decide how you tie that donation or service to your product or

service.

A dry cleaner cleans, so perhaps the dry cleaner can sponsor a “Clean

Up Happytown Day.” Residents come to the messy downtown park for a

cleanup effort; the dry cleaner provides the garbage bags, entertain-

ment, and refreshment for the volunteers. And what does a dry cleaner

clean? Clothes. So maybe the dry cleaner invites local residents to bring

in old clothes, which the dry cleaner then cleans and donates to a local

shelter.

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Planning the Event and Logistics

Although a clever theme and a creative approach can make your event, poor

planning can break it. Event planning is a detail-oriented task, so assign some-

one on your team who’s good at details to handle it.

Here are a few tips to help you plan your event:

! Determine the number of attendees, the location, and the exact time

and day of the event early in the planning process. Many of your needs

depend on the season, weather, time of day, and day of the week on

which you hold your event.

! Visit the event site as early as possible in the planning stage, both

before and during the creative process. Take your team to the site for

part of the brainstorming process.

! Do a mental walk-through of the event from start to finish. Write down

each of the major steps and the tasks involved with each. Prepare a

schedule with deadlines, and assign people to each task. Specify when

every detail will be completed and by whom. Double-check timing on

everything that must be ordered. Allow time for delays; they happen

more often than not.

! Communicate regularly with all vendors, participants, and volunteers

to make sure that they’re on schedule. Ongoing communication helps

them maintain a comfort level and makes them less likely to pull out. If

they do pull out, you’ll know about it in time to find a replacement.

! During the mental walk-through, visualize the event. Do you need

sound, lighting, décor, signage, tents, a stage, a band shell, heat, air-

conditioning, entertainment, music, toilets, dressing rooms, water,

security, food, drinks, storage for supplies, a coat room?

! Make a rough floor plan of the event. Make sure that you have enough

space. Keep updating the floor plan as the event proceeds.

! Leave out no details, no matter how small. The success or failure of an

event is in the organization and the precision of details. If everything is

perfectly organized and all the details are correctly done, your event is

more likely to be a success.

! Write down everything. Make detailed checklists. Go over them again

and again. The more often you review them, the more details you can

add.

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! Make an agenda or time line for the event itself. Everything must be

perfectly timed, in many cases to the second. Have rehearsals until you

get the timing right.

! At a pre-event meeting, give all staff and participants an information

package. The package should contain any press releases (refer to

Chapter 8) regarding the event, an overview, the event agenda or time

line, the responsibilities of each person, staff schedules, a layout or map

of the event, a schedule of breaks for the staff, location of rest areas, and

location of food and beverages. Give out uniforms at that time if you

want your people to wear them.

A word about timing. You may ask, “How can we make sure our event isn’t

ruined by a hurricane or overshadowed by a scandal or crime that steals the

headlines that day?” The answer is: You can’t. Unforeseen events happen all

the time, and there’s nothing you can do about them. That’s what makes

events so risky.

For example, in 2005 a lot of planning went into an event my firm scheduled

for a major retailer in downtown Chicago at the same exact time the city

scheduled the White Sox World Series Victory Parade, one of the great sports

stories of modern day. (The Sox hadn’t won the Series since 1917.) Needless

to say, that dampened the effect on our event. I’m fond of telling clients who

want to do an event that, if they name any major news event — a war, an air-

line crash, a political scandal — I can tell them about one of our special

events that the headlines preempted that day. It’s just a risk you take.

Publicizing Your Event

The tools for reaching the press discussed throughout this book — phone,

e-mail (Chapter 16), press releases (Chapter 8), pitch letters (Chapter 11),

and meetings — apply equally to promoting events. Because events are more

time critical than many other promotions, I suggest that you e-mail or fax

your materials for faster delivery and a slightly greater sense of urgency.

Should you create some sort of clever invitation to lure the press to your

event? If the concept doesn’t intrigue them, they won’t go, no matter what

you send. But if the event is appealing, they’ll come. A press release announc-

ing the event does fine as an invitation.

As for TV coverage, watch the evening news. On most local affiliates, the last

story is always a light feature piece. If your event catches the producer’s

interest, this is the spot in which it will probably run.

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Measuring Event Results

My measure of a promotional event’s success is simple: If it doesn’t get major

press coverage, it’s a failure.

The event itself is important, but it’s the PR effort to promote the event that

makes or breaks it. As I discuss in Chapters 8 and 11, the key is strong press

releases widely distributed to the appropriate media outlets and diligent tele-

phone follow-up to all of them, with an eye toward convincing as many as

possible to cover the event.

I don’t care how many people came or the impression you made on them.

Given the time, expense, and sheer work involved in sponsoring an event, it’s

only worth the cost and trouble — in my mind — if you get media coverage.

Thousands of people turned up to watch the IKEA a.i.r Open Golf

Tournament. Throughout the golf course, in the open air, pieces of IKEA’s

new, inflatable a.i.r furniture were blown up and displayed.

Those thousands of people in attendance saw the new furniture, but the real

benefit was the press coverage, which gave us more than 40 million media

impressions. (A media impression means that a person saw, read, or heard

about the product in the media. If a TV news story covers an event and the

viewership is 100,000, that counts as another 100,000 media impressions for

that campaign.)

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When bad news happens to good events

Events are risky because coverage of your event

can be preempted by the news of the day, and

that’s a factor you cannot control. As I mention

earlier in this chapter, this has happened so fre-

quently that if you name a world crisis, I can prob-

ably tell you the PR event I was having that day.

Baseball player Cal Ripken, Jr., appeared one

morning for my client Itsy Bitsy Entertainment at

a major licensing trade show in Manhattan. I

found out the night before his appearance that

Vice President Al Gore was coming to the city!

Fortunately, Gore arrived in the afternoon. Had

he come in the morning, I guarantee the press

would have covered the Gore visit and ignored

our Cal Ripken promotion. Fortunately, that was

not the case, and the event helped Itsy Bitsy

make the front page of the

New York Times

busi-

ness section. But it could have easily gone sour;

we were extremely lucky.

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A large, well-attended event can attract as many as 5,000 people, but a well-

publicized event can reach hundreds of thousands more through media cov-

erage. Attaining that press coverage is the real objective of promotional

events.

The shorter the event, the smaller the window of opportunity for the media

to cover it. Whenever possible, I make an event two days to maximize the

opportunity for media coverage.

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Chapter 20

Spotting and Seizing

Opportunities

In This Chapter

! Getting the timing right

! Capitalizing on current news and events

! Making the most of changing conditions

! Searching for an opening

! Finding ways to get noticed quickly

he reason that so many companies get so little PR is that they don’t show

up. Opportunities present themselves every day, yours for the taking. But

most people never see them. In this chapter, I show you how to condition

yourself to spot PR opportunities as well as act to take advantage of them.

Remembering the Importance of Timing

I already said that part of getting a feel for PR is to consume media from the

point of view of the PR professional, not as the general public. Doing so is

especially important in the quest to identify and exploit PR opportunities.

When you read the papers and watch the evening news with an eye toward

spotting PR opportunities, you notice patterns emerging that you never really

paid attention to before. For example:

" On April 15, the evening news always does a feature story about the last-

minute taxpayers — every year.

" On the last day of public school, the media run stories on preparing for

the summer and finding activities to keep kids busy and entertained.

" Stories on how to give flowers, buy flowers, or arrange flowers always

run around Mother’s Day.

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The fact is, the media are always going to do “built-in” stories. And because

they’re always looking for a fresh angle to an old story, that’s where you

come in. If you can provide that fresh angle in a way that promotes your

product, company, or cause, you can ride the coattails of the story they were

already planning.

An example is “Petting Day at the Post Office,” a campaign we did for a pet

manufacturers association. The objective was to promote pet ownership as

healthy by demonstrating that pets help relieve people’s stress.

We know that TV always sends cameras to the post office the evening of

April 15 to do a short feature piece on last-minute taxpayers standing in line

to file returns. We put a petting zoo in the post office and invited frazzled

taxpayers to pet a cuddly puppy or kitten after finally getting their returns

in the mail.

Naturally, the cameras turned to the petting zoo, showing the once-nervous

taxpayers now relaxed and smiling as they petted the animals. The reason

the campaign succeeded: timing.

The quintessential light campaign? To be sure, it’s a little fluffy (pun inten-

tional). But actually, it demonstrates an important message — the need to

reduce stress — in a visual (and highly memorable) way. Sure, the campaign

is cute. But it’s also on target with the client’s strategy.

Few things are as stressful as preparing your tax returns, and April 15 is the

only day of the year when the broadcast media universally focus on taxes. If

we had put up a petting zoo anywhere else at any other time of the year, I am

convinced that Petting Day would not have received nearly as much coverage

as it did.

Reacting to Current News and Events

Opportunities can be keyed to one-time events as well as recurring events.

For a decade, Seinfeld was the leading comedy on TV, so the ending of the

show was big news. Now, the people behind Seinfeld said many times that it

was a show about nothing. So for one client we devised a campaign we called

“Thanks for Nothing, Seinfeld.”

The objectives were to reach a particular target audience — the demograph-

ics of which just happened to match the same audience Seinfeld reached —

and get 100,000 consumers in this audience to sample a bag of potato chips.

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Because Seinfeld was about nothing, nothing was what you had to do to get a

free bag of these chips. Any consumer who sent in a bag or envelope contain-

ing nothing would get a free bag of chips. This campaign received enormous

media coverage and won several PR awards. In fact, the Seinfeld people asked

to use the story in their own promotions for the last Seinfeld episode.

Looking for an Opening

Do you have a marketing problem that PR can solve, but you can’t think of an

angle that would appeal to the media? If you think creatively, chances are you

can find some way to tie it in to current events or news.

Astor Chocolate is a fine chocolate maker with a brand awareness problem:

Nobody knows who they are. Yet when you stay at a fine hotel, the chances

are 70 percent that the chocolate left on your pillow at bedtime is an Astor.

How to tie this in with anything? After some brain-stretching, we came up

with “The ‘Square One’ Academy Awards Wake-Up Call.” Every year, the

Academy Awards show runs longer and longer, forcing people who want to

watch until the end to stay up later and later. In this campaign, we promised

that if you contacted us, you could stay up as late as you wanted and not

oversleep, because we would give you a wake-up call along with free choco-

lates for your pillow.

To maximize your PR coverage, strive to go where the cameras already are.

Now, where are the cameras on the Fourth of July? At the fireworks. How

about on Labor Day? At the lake and shore, filming the bathers and boaters.

Another of our clients, Progressive Boat Insurance, wanted to show that it

cared about the safety of the boat owners it insured. We came up with

“Keys, Please,” which was a variation of the liquor campaigns encouraging

people who become inebriated at bars to give their keys to friends who can

drive them home: We offered, during the Labor Day weekend, a free towing

service for boat owners who got too drunk to drive their boats safely (see

Figure 20-1).

Note that promoting safe boating is not only good for Progressive Boat

Insurance’s image, but it also literally goes right to the bottom line: The

fewer boating accidents its policyholders have, the lower the dollar

amounts of policy payouts.

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