Even the easiest, most obvious news story is not a sure thing if you do sloppy work.Case in point comes via this pitch sent in confidence by a major non-profit health organization dedicated to saving lives from a life threatening disease.
----Economy Bears Down on Funeral BusinessIn today's economy with everyone doing cutbacks, the funeral business is down and cremation services are up.
According to organizations tracking the nation's post -mortem habits, the Cremation Association of North America reports that about 35 percent of deceased Americans wound up cremated in 2007, a number likely to rise close to 60 percent by 2025. The National Funeral Directors Association is a little more conservative, predicting a national cremation rate of roughly 51 percent by 2025, but confirms that national cremation rates are rising - particularly in New York, where nearly 37,000 deceased were cremated in 2005.
I am happy to put you in contact with CLIENT of the three generation funeral home franchise, CLIENT Funeral Homes, who is well versed on this topic and would be a perfect resource for shedding light on this new phenomenon. I appreciate your interest and consideration and look forward to hearing back from you in regards to this unique business story.
SIG FILE----
Off-Target IreThe anonymous tipster writes:
I received the pitch below a few minutes ago, and knew I must share it with you. It is bad on many counts, but most notably because I am not a journalist. I am an in-house PR person, and my entire team received this. Feel free to point out the terrible taste in blasting this out to the media team at a health organization that is dedicated to SAVING LIVES.
Stupid is as Stupid Does The off-target recipient above could only have interpreted this pitch as being in bad taste. However you CAN pitch death. I’ll argue that you can even pitch death using an economic trend. Anecdotally I will tell you that my brother works for a funeral home chain and they’ve had layoffs. There are even trends in funeral care making news.
But it ALWAYS comes back to the audience. So you might want to check your list to make sure you’re only sending the pitch to actual, relevant media outlets. This underscores why you, gasp!, can’t just do a keyword search on an online media dbase and spam the search results with the same message. FAIL
tags | public relations | PR | media relations | media | good pitch | bad pitch | bad pitch blog
The crossfire effect between journalists and PR can be ugly-- and it usually ends up with PR people bugging other PR people. I try to take the Santa approach (checking the list twice) to minimize the casualties.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the recent FAIL fad has made the word lose all meaning to me. Anyone else?
It seems like that's all many PR agencies do these days--blast releases to as many outlets as Bacon's will let them, regardless of the media outlets' beats. My editorial team gets totally irrelevant releases all the time despite the fact that we've directly tweaked the Bacon's listing.
ReplyDeleteWe've tried asking nicely, but ultimately we had to get firm and block all mail from repeat offender PR agencies. See this post on my personal blog about the policy adopted by my publications: http://tr.im/hzP8
There's too much emphasis put on the "off-target" pitch. The tasteless pitch, the blatantly opportunist pitch ... sure. Off-target? clean up your profile for one.
ReplyDeleteThis, however, falls into the tastelessly off-target pitch category.
One of the true inner circles for sure.
And why I still use the phone.
A lot.
I think this was written badly, but I've been seeing print and TV coverage of how couples are holding off on divorce bc they cannot afford the costs in this economy.
ReplyDeleteObviously, this pitch needs to be finely targeted, but the logistics of death are terrible. In good times, many people have trouble handling costs. And people's preferences on how they want their remains handled is very personal. I know some people who would be very upset if the economy prohbited them from carrying out a loved-one's wishes.
I think there's a decent story in there, but the pitch needs to be better angled and sent to only the right places.
Hopefully, no one is saving a spot in hell for me for saying all this...
Aside from a very poor choice of recipient (I work for a health care org too), this isn't really a bad pitch on a trend tied to a hot topic--the economy. What else are funeral home PR people supposed to pitch? If not some variation on death?
ReplyDeleteBUT I totally agree with other commentors who point out that spamming the Bacon's (Cision) result list isn't the way to go.
But, is the health organization even listed in Bacon's? I doubt it. So, that means someone took the time to manually add them to a media list.
ReplyDeleteThere IS a story here, but it's got to be targeted. The best pitch isn't blasted, but tweaked to each outlet.
It's another reason why press releases themselves are going away. It's all about the pitch.