The "Efficacy Cycle" of the Press Release, Part I

When I got my start in public relations, I worked for USCAR, a very interesting technology consortium made up of engineers and R&D types on loan from Chrysler, GM and Ford, whose job it was to collaboratively research advanced technologies in the pre-competitive stage of development. Most recently, USCAR’s battery consortium made some news by awarding $8.2 million to a batter suppler to further develop lithium ion batteries.

Back then, we were issuing several releases per year, and going the normal route of pitching individual reporters at the key automotive trades, as well as issuing on the auto list of PRNewswire. This being in the earlier days of the Internet, online pickup was modest.

By 2000 or so, many PR practicioners, including me, were growing wary of the avalance of releases issued by companies of various size and importance, and many became, for lack of a better term, anti-release. The idea was: the more you said, the less they remembered, and worse, your credibility could be harmed if editors and reporters kept getting inundated with inane, non-news releases from companies starving for attention and coverage. We felt a certain pride—and still do—by having the nominal fortitude to tell clients, “Regrettably, that’s not news, don’t do a release on that.”

Today, the pendulum has swung back, and not entirely for the right reasons. One client recently had their IR folks audit their company vs. competitors, and one of the metrics was “# of releases.” One, but not all, of the reasons this mattered was that as auto blogs, news sites, etc. developed this nearly unquenchable appetitite for content (especially video, but that’s another story), releases were getting “picked up” online, and these hits “counted” towards media coverage targets, and boosted share of voice (Factiva’s definition is as good as any). But the IR guys seemed interested not just in the resulting coverage, but just the raw volume of releases issued as a surrogate for “media” activity.

The implicit debate, of course, isn’t limited to automotive, but it just happens to be top of mine these days for some of our auto clients. I’d love to hear what you think though, whether you’re inside or outside of auto.