And why do you want to write about our product?

At the recent OutDoor show in Friedrichshafen, I wandered into the Outwell booth to ask about the company’s new “pop-up tent” it was pushing in, yes, press releases in the newsroom and on prominent displays in the booth. Outwell is a Danish company that distributes its family camping and outdoor gear in 30 countries.

Wearing my media badge displayed prominently, I took a couple of slow laps around the booth to see what the company had. I walked past a couple of Outwell employees…twice…as I circled, and they looked up at me a couple of times but quickly went back to their own conversation and coffee.

Finally I maneuvered over closer to their table and stood and stared at them.

“Yes?” one man looked up and finally asked, not exactly sounding welcoming.

“I’m interested in finding out more about the pop-up tent, a little about how it works, its technology, the patent and that kind of thing.”

He stared at me a moment. “Who are you?” he asked.

I apologized for not stating I was with the media; though I assumed my media badge sort of made it obvious. After I explained where I was from (speaking in German, mind you, so misunderstanding was not an issue) and that I wanted more information about the tent, he stared at me for a minute again, and then asked simply, “Why?”

Hmm, OK, I admit it is not often a journalist seeking to write about a product has to deal with someone wondering why…especially a representative of that company.

Well, it’s our job to cover this show and write about what we see, I said.

“We don’t sell in the United States,” he said.

I said that didn’t make a difference; we write about interesting things we see here for our trade audience back in the U.S. and also in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South America.

“Why?” was the question again.

I wanted to say, “You’re kidding me, right?” But, bit my tongue.

“I just want some information about your tent. That seems pretty simple,” I said, adding that I had seen in a German outdoor newsletter that it stemmed from an American patent.

Long pause with a penetrating glance….. “Just a minute,” he said.

At this point, they had to realize I wasn’t going to give up. I just hoped the tent went up far easier than my attempts at prying information from this company.

He ducked into the back behind a curtain. A moment later he came back out with a woman.

“Can I help you?” she said in English.

I decided to make the language switch from German to English too since maybe that would help with their apparent confusion. Anything to speed this along.

“I’d like to have your new tent shown to me. I am interested to hear about the technology and a little bit about the tent design,” I explained again.

“Why?” she asked.

Frankly, I was beginning to wonder why myself. But, I resolved to persevere though I am sure I did let more than just a casual tone of frustration enter my voice as I responded: “Look, this is so simple really. I am a journalist and I just want to see the tent and get some information that I might possibly want to include in a story. How hard can that be?”

“Calm down, you want some coffee?” the woman responded.

Coffee?? To calm down? It was all I could do just to keep myself from responding, "Why?"

Instead, I stated firmly, “No, I don’t not want any coffee, just information!”

She called over yet another man, a product manager, it seemed. I must have finally passed muster, worn them all down, or she needed backup -- I’m not sure which.

She then produced a press kit with a CD and the product guy showed me the tent, insisting it had nothing to do with an American patent but was in fact their own. I told him I only mentioned that since I saw it in some German press and in fact I knew there had been a U.S. patent 10 or 12 years ago on something similar, and that SNEWS had in fact seen the product at an Outdoor Retailer trade show, and just wanted to take a look. The product guy explained it well, showing the hinges and how it worked…finally.

I left the booth shaking my head. No coffee for me; I needed a stiff drink.

Know thy media…please?

PR is tough! And, it is one job we at SNEWS® can state unequivocally we would not want to undertake. To borrow a few lines from one of our SNEWS PR Awards articles from 2002, “A good PR contact is worth his or her weight in gold to a journalist, and, of course, to the company he or she represents. We media admire all the effort and energy that good PR communication requires, especially when you have to deal with so many whiny, self-centered, ‘I need it yesterday’ people like journalists -- yeah, we're talking about ourselves, the collective media. Of course, we just as quickly despise those who waste our time with worthless drivel and reams of meaningless paper or useless promotions.”

But just as a writer needs to know how to tailor an article to suit a particular magazine’s audience, subject matter or interests, the same holds true for PR: PR agents must know the media, its audiences and needs where they are pitching story ideas. It is not one-size-fits-all. Forgetting this leads to very bad experiences for the PR agent, the publication, and quite likely, the writer very often caught in the middle. And could also lead to less good press for a company.

Recently, the SNEWS team had a new freelancer take on a pretty basic short story, highlighting two to three new and innovative products that retailers might be interested in for the coming year. She was new, but the PR agent for one company she was dealing with was not. However that agent appears to have forgotten she was dealing with a trade magazine, not a consumer one. As a result, the story came in with one of the featured products actually being nearly five years old and not at all new. After a few back and forth communications with the writer, who was naturally frustrated that she might have wasted her time writing up a product that was clearly not new, we decided to contact the PR agent.

When we asked her why she pitched an older product to our writer when she was asked for fresh information – and she of course must know who we were and what we’d want anyway -- we enjoyed the following exchange:

1. Instead of apologizing, she decided her best tact would be to defend her position by telling us, “I'm certain the X Product falls under this requirement…” Let’s see… We request a new and innovative product and we are a trade magazine that seeks details and technical information. So, you decide that a five-year-old product fits our requirements of delivering information retailers might care about as new and innovative? We were truly perplexed trying to figure this out.
2. Then, she raised the ante by deciding we as media clearly don’t know what we ourselves wanted and that we obviously had no idea about other media outlets. So she decided to lecture us a bit by emailing, “To remind you, these are the X that were just featured in USA Today, which is one of the leading news publications in the country.” Gosh, golly, bumpkins that we are, guess she thought we’d never heard of USA Today. And as for using that plug by USA Today to justify why that product should be important to us and our readers, we refer you to our April 24, 2009, editorial in SNEWS -- SNEWS View: But the New York Times gave it a great review…

End result? We have cut the product from the article. We paid the writer for work she completed, but basically we paid her for work that won’t be published. So we wasted our time and money too. None of that is great for the writer, ourselves or the company. But the kicker is, we will now avoid dealing with this PR person as much as possible. She obviously doesn’t understand our needs, nor has she tried. And we’ll just be forced to go around her anytime we need any sort of information from the company that is accurate, believable, and appropriate for our audience. Now that just isn’t good PR for anyone.