15  Writing publicity

I think God is groovy. He had a great publicity agent. (P. J. Proby, quoted in J. Green, The Book of Rock Quotes)

Think of the great variety of communications that business organizations produce. There are display adverts and advertising features placed in newspapers and magazines, sales letters, leaflets, ‘fliers’ (one-sheet mail-shots), brochures, instructional pamphlets, posters and management reports. Public Relations (PR) items in the form of press releases and feature articles are edited to their standards by the publications using them. There are also corporate videos and websites, and the various forms of broadcasting advertising.

The writing skills required for these communications are not often allied to business acumen and administrative ability. Business people need interpreters who can research a subject and know how to get the required message across compellingly to the targeted audience. A job for a journalist, in other words.

Journalists may move into the world of publicity at a point in their careers where there is little scope for promotion or when they find that they will be paid better. Their contacts will be highly valued and so will some of their experience – for example, of rewriting clumsy press releases.

They must, however, be prepared to learn new skills. Rather than one editor there are various groups to please: more than one executive within the employing company and within the client companies. That means a lot of compromises.

To adapt, the journalist-turned-publicity writer needs to develop a sharper focus on the audience too. Although journalists are used to having a definite age group/social class/professional group in their sights, a publicity writer will think of the 19-year-old daughter of a next-door neighbour if a young woman’s perfume is being promoted, or a 60-year-old uncle if an insurance policy for those about to retire is the subject.

Surveys are often used to identify a market before the writing is thought about. The social grades scale of readership provided by the National Readership Survey (NRS) will indicate how to pitch the message. Publicity writing aimed at a trade journal, for example, will contain exactly the amount of technical jargon appropriate for that particular audience.

The writer may be asked to write several versions of a press release – about a motor car, for example – for different markets: middle-age upmarket, yuppies, technical, woman’s, downmarket, and so on. Different media may be used for one campaign. Peak-hour TV may get the main message to as many people as possible, followed perhaps by adverts in the broadsheet papers, reshaped for the tabloids and then for selected magazines, highlighting the attractions of the message for each market.

This chapter suggests ways of obtaining training in publicity writing and work for the different kinds of organizations that supply it. We look at the main areas first: advertising, Public Relations and publicity as journalism (getting publicity by getting into the media). Then come hints on how to obtain publicity writing work and some guidance on special writing techniques.

ADVERTISING AND PR DEFINED

In a publicity campaign it can be hard to distinguish advertising from Public Relations (PR). Advertising is selling, PR is informing. But the informing is ‘selling’ an image as part of the process of selling products and services, or promoting a business (or ideas that will promote it). For convenience, let’s call all this activity selling the product.

The official definitions will keep us on the right track. Advertising, according to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, ‘presents the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospects for the product or service at the lowest possible cost’. Less kindly, Stephen Leacock said it was ‘the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it’. PR, as defined by the British Institute of Public Relations, is ‘the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organization and its public’.

As an example of the former, let’s have a look at advertising copywriting.

Subject and market research

Whether it’s advertising or PR work the publicity writer needs to do the subject and market research that journalists do, and often much more. The industry or activity being written about must be studied. That means accessing the right publications and Internet sources. It may also mean visiting trade fairs or factories and interviewing industrialists, managers, workers.

To get an advert or a press release or a promotional feature into a publication the writer needs to research the target publications. What sort of content does it want, what sort of readers does it have? Get media kits from them and study the editorial calendars.

ADVERTISING COPYWRITING

An advertising agency invited to apply to a client for a commission presents, after some research, a ‘strategy’. This identifies the audience aimed at, media that will provide access to that audience (target publications, etc.), general approach, expenses (for example, any survey that will be needed) and an estimate of fees. It’s a sophisticated form of the journalist’s query letter, and it ensures that agency and client are on the same wavelength.

Copywriting means providing the words for advertising, whatever form it takes, but it is most readily identified with the most traditional form – display adverts in newspapers and magazines.

What an advert must do is clear enough. It must grab the reader’s attention, arouse desire (or stimulate interest in the proposition), sustain interest, provoke to action (buy something or perhaps fill up a coupon) or make the reader remember the name. To do these things, because space is expensive, words must be used with great economy.

Slogans for compression

Great economy encourages experimenting with the various compression devices found in newspaper and magazine headlines. Alliteration, rhymes, puns, catchphrases, references to song or film titles are among the devices.

For a poster or full-page advert a slogan with a picture is enough. Here are some old ones, a few of which survive or resound in the memory: ‘We’ll take more care of you’ (British Airways), ‘Don’t be vague, ask for Haig’, ‘It’s good to talk’ (BT), ‘Mars are marvellous’.

Slogans have to fit the times; some buzz words date quickly (as journalists know). Avoid using an idea that can be readily adapted by a competitor. ‘Who made the going great?’ (Pan Am) was exploited by ‘Who made the Boeing great?’ of the British Overseas Airways Corporation, as British Airways then was. Conversely, if you try to adapt the latest techniques of competitors to your particular message, the advert may draw more attention to itself than to the product, may have more artifice than life.

The message in all copywriting should be reduced as far as possible, so the prescription goes, to the Unique Selling Proposition (USP), the one concept or idea that will persuade the customer to buy. Journalists are used to finding a ‘controlling idea’ (see pages 20–1) for a piece of work. Another approach to a good advert is via an ‘image’, showing that the product satisfies psychological needs. An advert for central heating says, ‘Come in from the cold’. Some adverts play on the reader’s fears of being left behind in the rat-race, others promise increased sexual powers or opportunities.

Developing the idea

The process of composition, from knowledge about the product, through selection of subject matter, to proposition or image, has close parallels with the process of developing ideas for features described in Chapter 4. A slogan or catchphrase for an advert which neatly encapsulates the idea for the copywriter may come early, just as a title may come quickly to a feature writer. But the research to identify the audience and the subject research can be more extensive for an advert of 200 words than for an article of 2000.

Copywriters do legwork where appropriate. They may visit factories – for example, to see computers, cars, perfume, clothes if those are the products they are writing about. They talk to manufacturers, to journalists who assess the products in trade papers, to customers.

A useful approach to content is to use the five W questions used by reporters but with rather different kinds of questions. Who is involved? What is it? Where will it be most useful? Where can you buy it? When is the best time to use it? Why is it used, and how? Why should this product be bought rather than competing products?

Which subjects grab the attention on the whole? A renowned Daily Express editor, Arthur Christianson, said there were three subjects for a mass circulation newspaper: sex, money and sport. Advertisers appreciate the value of these and have added animals, babies, cars, disasters, entertainment, fashion, war and weddings. The triggers must, however, be deployed with imagination.

Special word power

As well as cliché subjects, there are cliché words that have their uses as a kind of shorthand. There’s no point in avoiding ‘bargain’ if it means 10 words instead of one.

Clichés more recently coined or emotive words handled like clichés are called ‘buzz’ words because they are signals, immediately recognizable, setting up predictable reactions. They include ‘new’, ‘now’, ‘free’, ‘introducing’, ‘announcing’, ‘secret’, ‘magic’, ‘mother’, ‘unique’, ‘economy’, ‘breakthrough’, ‘guarantee’. Action words should be short: ‘phone’, ‘send’, ‘take’, ‘buy’, ‘ask’.

Adverts often work by being ironic, or by sending themselves up, and using clichés can work as part of this style. The normal rules of grammar and spelling can be broken to good effect: ‘Beans Meanz Heinz’. Copywriters have the poets’ need to be more than usually concise and to stir the imagination with metaphor. Yoking two kinds of ideas together in a collision, as poets do, produced ‘New Statesman. Things you would not find in a month of Sundays’.

Typography and layout

The design of an advert can make or mar the impact of the words. In an advertising agency the copywriter will normally work closely with a visualizer from the art department, and they will share ideas about design, illustration and words. A freelance writer who does some copywriting may join up with one or two others as a team to share different kinds of expertise. They meet up in the ‘situations vacant’ columns of the advertising and marketing weeklies.

FROM PR INTO JOURNALISM

Publicity writing aims to get past editors into the editorial pages of newspapers and magazines and must be regarded as journalism. Press releases, specially written PR-orientated feature articles and the content of house journals might be promoting a company or its products or services, but the writers must behave as journalists. The pieces must have the news values and fulfil all the other requirements of good journalism. Let’s take press releases as an example.

Press releases

These are of two main kinds: hard news and trade. A hard news release means one that contains news value for a newspaper or magazine. Suppose a new kind of lawnmower is being launched that will expand the manufacturing company, with more jobs in the centres of production. Though the main purpose of the release will be to promote the product, the news value must be projected first. If the release is to be sent to local editors where there are employment gains, it will be adapted to reflect those gains. For a trade magazine, on the other hand, the innovatory qualities of the new machine may become the news value. And so on.

Getting past editors

The general interest in your release for a national market or the local interest for a regional must hit the editor between the eyes. Many releases sound too much like adverts: plug, plug. Many are too long.

Notice the tired phrases (my italics) in this paragraph of a news release for newspapers, no doubt both national and regional in aim:

ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL MOVE
The National Homelink Service, launched by the National Association of Estate Agents two years ago, has proved a resounding success with the number of offices throughout the UK and Channel Islands now amounting to over 600. A new link has recently been formed with an American Real Estate Company, which has joined Homelink and therefore extends the service across the Atlantic. A valuable addition which enhances the links already in operation in Europe through members in the UK.

This is the service congratulating itself. The words don’t seem to be aimed at anybody in particular. What is important about the new link? Who will benefit from the service? How does it work? The second paragraph begins to tell us, but again in weary language.

Homelink was designed to make house hunting easier, and the number of enquiries received show that this free referral service is of considerable benefit to anyone moving to another area….

A brighter start would be something like:

HOUSE HUNTERS’ NETWORK
House hunters can now link into a national network of over 600 offices. That means speedy contacts, and the referral service is free.

Adapting to different markets

A new building company has been established to exploit a central heating system using solar energy. The system is about to be launched with demonstrations in newly built model houses in large towns throughout the country. Plastics and other materials are used that are cheaper than traditional building materials. Labour costs for building the average three-bedroom house will be greatly reduced.

For a national newspaper the news peg is likely to be the prospect of a revolution (but be careful of that word: radical change?) in the housebuilding industry. The regional papers will want to cover the nearest demonstration in a town. Trade magazines that cover solar energy and plastics will expect the more technical information that will interest their readers.

This release could be adapted for several different markets (after the necessary market research) by changing only the heading and the first paragraph. The news value would be expressed in those places, and then the interesting facts ordered in a way that would suit all those different markets.

The story must be of intrinsic interest to the general reader of the publication. The facts should be strong enough evidence of the merits of the product to speak for themselves. Avoid superlatives (‘excellent’, ‘world-beating’, ‘unique’) and emotive adjectives (‘lovely’, ‘fabulous’).

Writers of releases must think hard about what people need or want to know, whether it’s mobile cassette libraries or a new kind of nicotine remover, and then engage their interest with subtlety. A news peg may have to be manufactured (picture of celebrity using nicotine remover).

Trade releases

Some trade magazines have an audience of garden equipment retailers serving owners of small gardens, others have an audience of retailers of heavier equipment for parks. A manufacturer of garden equipment trying to get releases published may have to adapt one for those two markets, or write two separate releases. The owner of the small garden may be particularly interested in extra-close mowing, while the council employee maintaining a park will be more interested in staying power. Those W questions will include: Who will benefit particularly from a certain product? What questions are a particular group of readers likely to ask about the products? And so on.

Retailers are being sold a market as well as a product, so trade releases answer marketing questions as well as the usual questions about the target audience as listed above. Retailers want to know:

•  Will the product sell quickly and will it fit marketing plans?

•  What discounts/special offers/trade deals are there?

•  What is the sales potential? (And is there any research evidence for this?)

•  Is the selling pattern likely to be seasonal, occasional or regular throughout the year?

•  How will the product be promoted?

•  Is there any advertising or press information available?

•  Will there be any demonstrations, launch by celebrity?

•  Too much specific detail may help competitors to fight back, so some information – about media campaigns, for example – may be put in general terms.

•  Many trade releases succeed in listing the necessary facts and benefits but fail to inspire with an idea. To take a simple example, the news value of a solution for polishing metal antiques could be identified by associating the product with growing home ownership and house pride.

Press releases are often sent by email. Don’t send long attachments. Copy and paste it into the email itself.

Ending with contacts

Contacts, with telephone and fax numbers and email addresses, should be given at the end of releases: the writer and key sources of information. These could include government departments, local housing departments, manufacturers and suppliers of products. Editors often want to follow up a story suggested by part of a release even if they don’t want to use the material as it is.

OBTAINING PUBLICITY WORK

For training courses, see Appendix 6. You can train yourself too. For example, you can go online to sample press release models provided by PR companies and have a go at rewriting them. Otherwise, train yourself by sampling press release and advertising models given online by PR companies and advertising agencies. Look for offers of work, online and in the press; when you have an adequate portfolio, advertise your services in the press. For providing publicity work online, see Chapter 9.

When offering writing services, find out first the name and job title of the most appropriate person to talk to. Promotions director? Publicity director? Sales promotion manager? Marketing manager? Advertising manager? Titles vary greatly. Campaign, Marketing Week and similar magazines give copious news about publicity about what these people are doing. Before approaching a company you would be advised to do some research into it and to decide what convincing evidence you have that your writing skills would be of particular value to it. Both staff and freelance vacancies are advertised in those magazines.

If you want a full-time staff job, you’ll stand a better chance if you can provide cuttings of publicity work published. That work will have given you special insight into the whole process and into the varied responsibilities of staff writers. So let’s assume it’s freelance services you’re offering.

Apply to the promotions or publicity director of a business organization or the director of an advertising agency. Advertisers’ Annual or British Rate and Data BRAD) Advertiser and Agency List give names. Articles in the advertising and marketing publications will suggest which companies might respond. You can also advertise your services in those magazines.

Consultancies and advertising agencies offer publicity writing services to the publicity departments of companies. Show those departments why you think you could do the job better. Indicate in your letter that you have done your research, that you know what their clients want, and enclose samples of writing backing up your claim.

You may want to try obtaining commissions from the agencies and consultancies rather than directly from client companies. That will save you time spent looking for work. The disadvantage is that you have lost some independence, you are further removed from the client, and you have to depend on the agency briefing you well.

Building your portfolio

Develop a portfolio as you go so that you can back up a letter touting for work. Try to collect samples of various kinds of work. Your original press releases together with what was actually printed may impress.

Once you become knowledgeable about a particular business or industry, organize your workload. Suppose you build up expertise in the hotels and catering business. You might have such long-term projects as books, both general interest (The World’s Most Unusual Hotels), with ideas for spin-off articles, and specialized (New Ideas in Hotel Organization).

Shorter-term projects might include brief career guides for publishers’ series and educational texts on related subjects such as diets, home economics, etc. You might write brochures on hotels for tourist agencies or the texts for tourist boards’ publications.

Specialist services

This brings us to the opportunities for specialists. If you’re something of an expert on, and have published articles on, gardening, computers, DIY, homeopathy, cosmetic surgery, dentistry, mountaineering or sailing, or whatever, there are corporate clients who might be interested to hear from you. Manufacturers of gardening equipment, plant nurseries or landscape gardening firms, for example, will value your contacts, experience and communication skills.

Travel writers obtain commissions to write brochures for travel agents, and writers for trade magazines can obtain commissions to do copywriting aimed at those markets.

Fees are generally much higher for publicity work than for journalism. You may want to secure a contract for each piece of work done or work on a retainer basis.

TECHNIQUES FOR PUBLICITY WRITING

It’s worth summarizing the special qualities of publicity writing.

Descriptive

Avoid too many adjectives and adverbs and choose adjectives for precision. If you say a product is ‘truly amazing’, the ‘truly’ casts doubt on the ‘amazing’, a word that has been drastically devalued anyway. Find one precise adjective that will convince. Give the burden of meaning to nouns and verbs. Description means making the reader see, hear, smell, taste, touch. Avoid abstractions.

Narrative

Putting the meaning into verbs will help keep the story moving. Saying what happened is essential. Initial thoughts, plans, problems, how it began and how it progressed may not be.

Exposition

Avoid over-long sentences. Planning your piece is essential when explaining something. Make a checklist to make sure no important fact has been omitted.

What kind of order is required – chronological or logical? Who are the target audience? How readily will they understand? How technical can you be? What exactly is being explained? Does the audience have to understand how to carry out a procedure or merely understand, roughly, how a machine works?

Avoid a confusing mixture of pronouns: ‘one’, ‘he’, ‘you’, etc. Consider using the passive. Punctuation is important: a comma in the wrong place can completely change the meaning.

Argument/persuasion

In news releases and persuasive articles the facts must be marshalled clearly and in good order to support the proposition. There’s a tendency to ‘knock’ the opposition simplistically in some releases. It’s better to talk generally about the dangers or difficulties that have been surmounted by a new product or service, and concentrate on its positive virtues.

In most writing aimed at persuasion it’s useful to anticipate objections/criticisms before going on to the virtues. State improvements realistically. To repeat: the facts will convince if they are good enough. Superlatives rarely convince.