There are countless blogs now on the digital signage and DOOH sector, but still just a handful of Web-based portals and news sites that cover the industry on a daily basis. The people who runs those commercial services make the calls daily on what either goes from their email Inboxes to their digital pages, or to the Trash folder.
You can work with these folks, or you can irritate the daylights out of them. Guess which approach is more effective in meeting your marketing needs.
I sent around a note today to the editors of these news sites to get their point of view on how things work, and got a lot of great responses. I will do a few posts about what they had to say, with this first one on the issue of what I call carpet-bombing.
This is the practice of sending press release after press release out to the same media outlets, with the notion that this shows the business has incredible momentum in the marketplace. There was a sports-oriented company doing this last year, and the new, undisputed champion is a software company that at least seems to put out a press release a day announcing a deal that sees its product installed in another small venue somewhere.
“We as editors get so many press releases per day as it is, it really doesn’t help to get carpet bombed with insignificant ones,” says Bill Yackey of Digital Signage Today. “If a company sends releases of little value to the industry too frequently, I may begin to ignore them, and that doesn’t help anyone.”
“Press releases are a valuable marketing tool, however, there’s a fine line between being informative and being abusive. We’ve reached a point where we’ve just stopped paying attention to companies that issue press releases too often, or make claims in their releases that are too over-the-top. There are several companies in this industry that have been too aggressive with their PR and we just won’t carry their news anymore,” adds Lionel Tepper, Managing Director, Digital Signage Universe.
On the other hand, several editors said they would rather get the releases than not at all, and indicated doing a mental filter on what matters and what doesn’t, or what is just yet more blabber, is easy enough for them.
Denis Gaumondie, who writes the French (and now English, as well) portal OOH-TV, suggests companies would be wise to show some restraint, and would probably get a better reception from editors like him. “I don’t care to know if a company signs another bar, or bowling alley, or whatever. It’s just irrelevant,” he says. “If I was them, and patient enough, I would aggregate four or five press releases like that and put one release together.”
My take: You can easily wear out your welcome with an editor. Even those editors who indicate they will deal with the carpet-bombing campaign of a company would also, probably, confirm any releases from that company stop getting read beyond the headline.
Editors are interested in news and in educating their industry. If a company is in the business of selling software, it is hopefully NOT news that the company actually did some business and got a small client here and there to sign on. The news is when a software company does a big deal, like an entire chain of stores. Or the company does something that hasn’t been done before, or very much — like converting a whole restaurant from backlits to digital menu boards.
My advice is to be judicious about your PR. Send things out when you really have something worth telling the world.
When a company engages in carpet-bombing, and the daily deals all look tiny and irrelevant, that company can start to look a little desperate for attention.
NEXT: “Scale by association.”
No related posts.
I mean, when there are studio-like picterus of your daily outfits… it’s hard to believe any of this is real. There’s nothing wrong with that though, it’s just the nature of the beast. Nothing on the internet or in the blog realm is real, and this fabricated sense of “style” that menswear has us perpetuating is only well, for lack of a better and non-ironic term, natural.Whether we’re on the street or sitting there setting up lighting just to take picterus of ourselves, it’s all kind of silly. It’s not a personal shot but we all take part in it. And I think that’s really what fyeahmenswear just felt like doing. I agree, he honestly has the biggest repository of menswear references, but it just means he’s immersed in this and willing to poke fun at how comedic it might be. I mean, when you step back and look at it from a far and then read a place like fyeahmenswear, you literally, well at least I do, laugh out loud hysterically because of the way he’s turned it into something worthy of a laugh. It’s all in an effort to say “lighten up”.I’m not hell-bent on making a certain point here, I can’t claim to see things from the same perspective as you considering this is your blog, but I just feel that it’s nothing to fret over. As much as we want these clothes, items and lifestyles to be “real”, they never will be. It’s just giving a bunch of power to false idols, tools for vanity, and in the end, it’s not that serious. Which is what all the critics, and all the enthusiasts (parties on both ends of the spectrum) fail to grasp. It’s not a race or an “I am worthy” contest, it’s just a hobby. I think if you treat it as such then nothing will get to you and none of it will become you. To the point where you can’t see the bigger picture and begin to laugh at what isn’t so serious.Just my opinion.