I’m looking at a release sent out today that starts off OK and then goes completely off the rails in the space of a few words.

The company’s release starts off detailing what a client needed, and suggests the company was able to deliver, but instead of describing what they did and what it has meant, the leading paragraph goes into a death spiral blabbering on about the specific technical details.

The target audience cares alot more about what the install is doing for the client, and very little about what’s under the hood. That’s particularly true for a solutions provider that’s selling expertise, not gear.

Instead of:

“Our client needed a way to educate and inform visitors so Zippy AV installed 6 RP3017-TCX monitors from Whizbang Industries, controlled by an array of our Super500T media engines!”

How about:

A new digital information and wayfinding screen network in the Big City Events Center, put together by Zippy AV, is already making a marked difference in how visitors are getting around and using the region’s biggest convention facility.

Turned on six weeks ago, the network includes screens …

“We’re over the moon happy,” says the facility manager. “Zippy AV did a tremendous job. We looked at a lot of vendors and settled on these guys, and it was a great choice. Blah blah …”

Zippy AV, a full-servce digital signage solutions provider based in Midsized City, worked with this screen vendor and used its own computers and blah blah blah …

Presumably, the target readership for the PR is not the other suppliers, so who cares if their specific parts numbers are mentioned? The target readers for this should be other public facility operators, and what wets their collective whistles is word that the stuff actually does make an impact and that one of their brethren thinks Zippy did a good job … So maybe when these other facilities think about doing their own thing, they’re already familiar with a solutions company that knows how to do this stuff.

I can guarantee they didn’t scribble down the bits with part numbers, and chances are, they stopped reading before the end of the first paragraph.

Press releases are almost always for your target customers, not for you, or your vendors.

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