PR success factors? Commonplaces as an acquisition tool

Almost every two days I receive an e-mail with the "ultimate", because "statistically significant" and "empirically substantiated" characteristics of particularly efficient and effective media work. The latest in this inglorious series slipped through my spam filter last Friday and begins like this: "What makes press offices really successful: Proximity to journalists, diverse target groups and a strong focus on image." Actually, the subject line should have read "What PR agencies are really looking for: proximity to potential clients." But okay, who's going to jump right in in our line of work? The banality of the findings of such success factor disclosures, however, subito eliminates even the last doubt that an aggressive acquisition policy is hidden behind such pseudo-service. This also applies to the "survey of almost 300 specialists and executives from German corporate press offices", archetypal in its simplicity, which reached me before the weekend. The study was prepared - also not untypically - by a Mainz business administration professor and a Hamburg PR firm. The third member of this unholy alliance of academy and agency is the DPA subsidiary News aktuell, which is responsible for the distribution and marketing of the joint product.

But let's move on to the ten equally important killer criteria for "press offices with above-average success". Here are the three already mentioned at the beginning:

- "Individual media contacts": New German for "access is king." Of course, public relations work is always a relationship crime. However, instead of increasingly direct access to the editorial offices, colleagues should rather concern themselves with the relevance of their content, because "content is king" also applies primarily to interest-driven information suppliers.

- Broad target group coverage": After the quality of the contact, the quantity. And here again, a classic commonplace. Of course, without coverage there is no response. But far more important than any obscure degree of coverage is the prior, careful identification of the key addressees for the respective content. Freely according to the motto "less (noise) is more (impact) ".

- Concentrating on the image": No way! The functional difference between advertising (sales promotion for the purpose of increasing turnover, vulgo "sales") and public relations (cultivating relationships with the public, vulgo "image") is basic communicative knowledge at high school level. With this "finding", the authors themselves insult the intelligence of young professionals.

I would like to spare you and myself the rest of the golden rules. Except perhaps this one: "PR professionals convince the boardroom and tap into higher budgets. Thanks for this food for thought, I would never have thought of that! No wonder, when you have been earning your bread and butter for a few years in the clueless non-profit sector. Yet our organization desperately needs an upgrade in media monitoring. Apart from clever dashboards and sentiment analyses, there are supposed to be tools for calculating the so-called "ad value equivalent" (AWÄ). In view of the quality and quantity of the coverage of our campaigns, the current AWÄ would probably provide further arguments for the overdue increase in personnel in the communications department. Should that be the case, this column would have been worthwhile after all. At least for me.

Oliver Classen is media spokesman for the Berne Declaration, a development policy organization. He previously worked as a media journalist.