Some people find this Youtube video of a mock-plaintive junior at PR agency Ten Yetis amusing. Maybe it did the trick but it left me feeling a little embarrassed for her. If I was her client, I’d be wondering if that’s all there is to pitching journalists – and wondering if I didn’t need a little more marketing savvy injecting into my PR efforts.

Why, for example, was there not one single good reason offered up to the journalist to write about the product in that video? Why do readers need to know about it, why is it better than similar apps? It’s not like there wasn’t enough time – she had plenty to plug the product name (three times I counted). Maybe it’s a pile of crap and maybe that’s why, as a pitch attempt, this PR flack’s effort was pretty lame. Just my view of course, based on the information available at the time of writing. Am I right or am I being too harsh?

Note: a couple of days after writing this post, I was directed via a Twitter follower to this blog entry about other ‘quality’ output from Ten Yetis PR. And today, a very experienced trade magazine editor read my post and told me “they do the kind of PR that makes you want to kill out their emails before you even read them.”

There was a good illustration recently of why it’s so important to think carefully about the subject line when pitching story ideas by email to journalists. It arose at a recent breakfast briefing organised by media information firm Gorkana with The Independent on Sunday’s Julian Knight. Knight edits the newspaper’s money and property section. He’s got ten pages to fill each Sunday on his own, so it quickly becomes apparent that his week is a constant stream of commissioning, writing and editing – all done to fit in with a conveyor belt of various deadlines. At the same time he’s got to keep an eye on his emails, all 3,000 of them each week. Assuming he receives roughly 40 emails on his screen, that’s 75 pages in all. Gorkana reckons it would take about three minutes to flick through a page of emails, opening them up and deciding whether to keep them or not. On that basis, Knight could spend nearly four hours a week going through his emails and that’s before he’s read any through, opened attachments or chosen to reply. You can see why so many judgements are made on those few words within the subject line, and why it’s vital to spend time thinking about them when pitching stories to busy newspaper journalists.

So you think you’ve discovered something that would make a good television news item and get you or your organisation some great exposure, maybe even swamp your website with customer enquiries? Now all you’ve got to do is sell the idea. Where to start? This two minute video from Associated Press (AP) is a great primer.

Although it’s from the US, the principles of pitching stories to television are pretty much universal – and of course AP is a global syndicator of news.

The question of how to pitch television came up recently as a LinkedIn question. People think pitching to TV is just the same as pitching print media, but as you can see from my brief answer here, there are lots of specific considerations required for televisual stories.  Have you successfully pitched TV news or any other TV show? Tell us how you did it in the comments section.

This is a story that will ring plenty of bells, and should be encouraging, for those who spend most of their time pitching stories to media. It might also be revealing to those who pay their salaries.

A couple of years ago I worked for a management consultancy. The firm specialised in the corporate finance function, helping CFOs of medium to large corporations improve operating efficiencies, and generally improving the ability of their finance functions to serve the business strategically. It was all very sober stuff and, as might be expected, the firm’s employees were smart and switched on. That’s the background, here’s the story. I got talking to one of the firm’s principals about ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) and how it seemed to be gaining some traction beyond the early hype. He presented a compelling case about why finance directors were the best people to lead a company’s CSR strategy. In a nutshell, it was all to do with their knowledge about data, its collection and its presentation. I was convinced. After a bit of digging around, it became clear that no one else had really talked about this.

Now, The Financial Times has a weekly accountancy column that’s occasionally opened up to outside contributors. Knowing this, I did my preparation, called up the column editor and pitched the idea of an opinion editorial for my client, timed around a topical industry event. He quickly rebuffed the idea, doubting accountants were interested in CSR and telling me that, in his opinion, it was a flaky subject anyway. At that point, most in my situation would have given up and reported the rejection back to their client. But I was bemused. A well-developed instinct for stories told me this was still a good idea. So, a few weeks later when the section editor was replaced by someone else, I tried exactly the same pitch again. Her reaction was the diametric opposite of the first and produced this article.

The lesson here is twofold: trust your instincts and be (selectively) persistent when pitching media stories. I said there was something in this for the PR team paymasters and here it is: a good media result often takes time, skill and effort. Please set your budgets accordingly.

Most companies who hire marketing services firms love to assert their power by making their suppliers jump through hoops from time to time, and it’s an increasing practice. Which is why, a few times each month, suppliers of advertising, public relations and other marketing services have to participate in a time consuming and usually fruitless ‘beauty parade’ game, otherwise known as pitching for client business (other businesses use the more generally known term: selling).

I’ve been on both sides of the fence on many occasions and can tell you it isn’t pretty. Clients often draw up flaky briefs that are impossible to interpret and then refuse to be pinned down by answering perfectly reasonable questions of detail. The agency people will try to persuade the client that they’ve had their best account team giving lengthy, considered thoughts to the brief. In reality, it’s likely that most of the effort is the result of whichever individual has enough free time working into the wee hours of the night before the pitch. So it was interesting to see the results of a survey on this theme from the UK’s Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) reported here.

The survey, completed by 51 out of the 180 PRCA firms, found that the amount of time spent on a new client sales pitch varies widely but the average is 20 hours. That got me thinking about the cost. Fortunately, the PRCA also produces another survey called the ‘inter-firm comparison’. This is an anonymous survey allowing agency management to benchmark their businesses against other PRCA member firms on various factors, including hourly rates charged. To arrive at a reasonable cost estimate for our average 20 hour sales pitch effort we have to make some assumptions about how that time breaks down. Here are my ‘best guess’ assumptions:

• Board Director: 2 hours
• Account director: 8 hours
• Account manager: 6 hours
• Account executive: 4 hours

Using the PRCA’s 2009 hourly rates for the different job levels, and the above breakdowns for time, the theoretical cost of that one sales pitch, based on unrecoverable hourly rates alone is £2,292. Over a typical 46-week working year, assuming the agency pitches once every two weeks, the theoretical annual cost amounts to £52,716 per agency.

This figure excludes any third-party costs. PRCA communications director Richard Ellis says the 20 hour average refers to ‘time spent preparing for a new business pitch’. We must therefore assume it does not include the time travelling to, from and attending the various pitch process meetings, multiplied by the number of people from the agency involved; it looks a bit on the low side otherwise. Neil Backwith* thinks so too. He tells me 50 hours is the average time investment for a new business pitch made by the groups of PR firm CEOs he works with. If we use Neil’s figure, the annual cost jumps to £142,312 per agency. But even this might well be conservative. Ellis says the survey figures “went into the ‘over 200’ at the other end of the scale”!

Who pays for all this? Clients ultimately, of course, but indirectly through the fees agencies have to charge for their services. As Backwith points out,

“By asking more agencies to pitch clients will end up paying higher rates for the privilege – quite the opposite of what they hoped for!”

Do they and their procurement colleagues realise this? Do they care? Is there a better way? Microsoft’s Peter Devery clearly thinks it’s time for a change, stating in a recent PR Week article that:

“…. the PR pitch beauty parade is a legacy of an old industry. The process is lengthy, costly, resource-hungry, inefficient and often does not result in the required level of understanding which will lead to a fruitful partnership. We have to move the industry on, for both the agencies’ and clients’ sake.”

Some in the agency world are fighting back by banding together and refusing to pitch. But sadly it’s the Belgians who are doing the rebelling, not the Brits.

Postscript Feb 2011: I’ve just discovered www.winwithoutpitching.com, founded by Canadian Blair Enns. The resources on his site are well worth a look.

* Neil Backwith is a management consultant, trainer and mentor to professional services firms and their leaders. He was previously chief executive (EMEA) at PR firm Porter Novelli. He is author of the PRCA book ‘Managing professional communications agencies’.