All I Want for Christmas
Well, it’s that time of year again – the days are getting shorter, flip flops are being replaced by boots and some shops have started to put their Christmas cards on display.
But while everyone else mourns the end of summer, for the world of PR, this means the start of a flurry of Christmas-themed activity.
It’s a time of year when brands selling everything from toys and food to gadgets and clothes are desperate for coverage.
We have already brainstormed several Christmas briefs, and at least one festive survey has been written ready for some December coverage.
I’m sure this is only the first of many to come in over the next few of weeks.
However, while Christmas is a huge event in the PR world, to newspapers, it’s not a such a big deal.
Although the papers do sometimes get into the spirit of it, they know it’s a time when they are going to be inundated with stories about the festive period – some from brands with an obvious and fitting link to the occasion, but others less so.
All this means is fed-up news editors reading Christmas story after Christmas story, feeling less festive as the day goes on and as a result, probably giving the story less coverage than we were hoping for.
PR as an industry is obsessed with a calendar of ‘key’ dates – Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day, the summer holidays, back to school, the clocks changing, Halloween, Christmas – the list is endless.
while Christmas is a huge event in the PR world, to newspapers, it’s not a such a big deal
But rather than leading to some great coverage, the reality is that your ‘brilliantly timed’ story about said calendar date ends up just one of many similarly themed releases landing on the news desk that day.
The papers are only ever going to run one, or if you’re lucky, two stories around the same theme each day, so the competition for space around these key events is huge.
And at Christmas, although there may be more space dedicated to the day, the most the papers are going to run is one page of festive stories – or perhaps two in the days immediately before the big day.
Coupled with the usual battle survey-based or PR led stories face day-to-day, there are likely to be quite a few disappointed brands this December.
So why do it? Why spend hours working on getting the story perfect, when there are probably hundreds of other PRs working on pretty much the exact same story.
Our advice is simple. By all means, send out a story to get your toy client that much-needed coverage as the present buying rush begins – but try and avoid anything which talks specifically about buying toys at Christmas.
Broaden it out as much as possible – instead of present buying for children, do something based generally on parenting, youngsters or families.
And instead of a Father’s Day story looking at the gifts unlucky dads always get landed with, do something which simply talks about dads.
Doing something which would fit on a page at any other time of the year, rather than only on a certain day, will give it much more chance of being picked up and landing on a page.
Try and avoid anything which talks specifically about buying toys at Christmas.
Not only will it face less competition for those valued column inches, but it will probably be the only release a journalist has seen that day which isn’t piggy-backing onto a ‘key date’.
Hopefully this means your story will be the one which gets coverage at a very competitive time of the year.
