PR Corner: Why do some publicists offer me “bylined articles”?

Today’s voluminous digital PR mailbag includes a note from someone who has written to me many times — always addressing me by name — to offer me an article. Not an idea, a complete article. “Would you be interested in the 1,000 word bylined article below? …. Kindly let me know if you plan to publish the article…”

“Article” isn’t actually the most accurate word — the piece is sort of an opinion thing about business coaching, written by the head of a business-coaching company, or something. Sort of one of these “Six Rules of Whatever” writeups. I didn’t actually read it.

How am I on this PR person’s blast list? She seems to know my name — but at the same clearly has absolutely no idea who she is writing to.

I get these things all the time. Do they work? Are there publications that accept and publish “articles” like this? What value do they have? Seems like a waste of money to pay someone to send stuff like this around. And since I always tag such solicitations as junk, it kind of eliminates the publicist my from radar permanently.

What does your sound brand like?

Anybody out there read the blogs on AdAge.com? Just curious.

Anyway, I was poking around that site earlier this week, and noticed a blog called “Songs for Soap,” and this entry asking “Does Every Brand Have A Sound?

We all know that there is no longer the slightest stigma involved in a band, indie or established, renting its music to a brand, but I was still a little surprised to read just how far from those forgotten notions we’ve come: The entry concludes with the marketers actually lecturing musicians about how to make sure they’re worthy of such collaborations!

“Artists need to think of themselves as brands; what they stand for, what their values are and what message they want to give,” if they are to succeed in partnering with consumer brands.

So to turn the item’s headline around, the question for musicians, I guess, is: Does your sound have a brand? Maybe there’s a future career here — consultants who help bands write their mission statements and so on.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, this September 4, 2006 Consumed addressed Umpqua Bank’s unusual music-branding work with Rumblefish, whose founder is the first person I can remember articulating the “what does your brand sound like” pitch.

On a related note, the same blog has an entry on Girl Talk cutting a long-form ad “I’m a PC” ad. Interesting ona number of levels, and I hadn’t heard about it. (And again for what it’s worth: My July 20, 2008 column on Girl Talk.)

Flickr Interlude

Originally uploaded by Morris Brum.

[Join and contribute to the Murketing Flickr group]

PR Corner: Is it good to dis another journalist in your pitch?

This morning the ever-busy transom included a blast note from a PR person I don’t believe I’ve ever heard from before. It included an attachment — an article from another publication.

And it began: “The attached is worth noting, despite the fact that the reporter chose to disregard all the research [we] shared with her on” etc., etc.

It continued from there to make the pitch, which had something to do with said data. (The actual subject of the pitch is beside the point for my purposes here.)

Now, as a journalist, I’m not sure how excited I am supposed to be about dealing with a PR person whose pitch includes a de facto slam of some other journalist (whose byline was obviously on the attached article), distributed to an untold number of others.

It seems to imply a set of terms: If I don’t see the story exactly the way the pitch sees the story, then I’m “disregarding” the most important facts. Not only that, I’ll be labeled unprofessional, and that charge will be blasted around indiscriminately in a way that I can’t even respond to it. (I have no idea if the reporter in this case even knows about it.) So my basic reaction to this pitch was: Here’s a PR person I don’t trust.

It would be really easy for the PR person to have made the same point differently — and actually in a way that would make it more appealing for another journalist to pursue. “The attached is worth noting. One surprising angle not explored here is our research showing” etc.

No cheap shots at third parties. No implied confrontation about what the “real” story is (and that the only way it can be told is by mindlesslessly regurgitating the pitch).

Just a thought.

More timelessness


Here’s the latest chapter in my ongoing coverage of counterfunctional watches — meaning watches that do a bad job telling you what time it is, or no job at all, but have some kind of other aesthetic and/or identity payoff (see related Consumed; related Murketing posts; related links):

It took me a minute to figure out what was going on here, but Etsy seller belleslettresFake Watch Collection is made of magazine images of watches, laminated, with a snap closure. It’s a wearable picture of a watch. Obviously they don’t tell time, but at $15 or so, are cheaper than the real-world Rolexes and so on that they depict.

Via The Storque.

Just Looking


This would be an example of what Friend of Murketing Lucian once called “life imitates Photoshop.” It’s an upside-down planter. Apparently real. Created by Boskke.

In The New York Times Magazine: The Polo logo

THE BRAND-NESS OF STRANGERS:
We’re incidentally exposed to familiar logos constantly, but that doesn’t influence us — does it?

This week in Consumed, a look at an iconic logo, and at what recent research suggests about how exposure to such symbols — via “incidental brand-consumer encounters” — may exert an influence we don’t notice.

Read the column in the November 16, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

[Bonus link: Study cited in the column is summarized here.]

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. The Times’ Consumed RSS feed is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

To make a point about Consumed that you think readers of The Times Magazine would be interested in: “Letters should be addressed to Letters to the Editor, Magazine, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10018. The e-mail address is magazine@nytimes.com. All letters should include the writer’s name, address and daytime telephone number. We are unable to acknowledge or return unpublished letters. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.”

Flickr Interlude

plastic rainbow, originally uploaded by Made in Mississippi.

[Join and contribute to the Murketing Flickr group]

Brand value stat of the day

The WSJ has a story about lux brands cutting prices. It would appear they have room to do so:

Luxury-goods companies don’t disclose margins for their individual brands, but Louis Vuitton, one of the world’s most profitable labels, is estimated to have a margin of 45 cents on every dollar.

That’s not additional cost due to design or materials or other quality-related expenses in the production process that are passed along to consumers. That’s the markup. That’s profit.

That’s amazing.

Crafty thought: Stop picking on grandma

The resurgence of the handmade movement under the banner “This isn’t your grandma’s …” has left some seasoned crafters with mixed emotions. “On the one hand, when I first heard it, I knew exactly what they meant, so that is a good thing for marketing,” [Boston-based doll artist Mimi] Kirchner says. “But it got old really fast. Now it sounds like the slogan of people who have no idea what the history of craft in America is all about.”

True, most of what’s considered hip in the craft world these days isn’t what our grandmothers were doing. But the roots of today’s craft brilliance grow in the rich soil toiled by our grandmothers.

Good point. The rest is here.

Ethical shopping tool

GoodGuide.com strives to provide the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of products and companies.”

Anybody tried this? Any thoughts?

Diddy says election reveals the fragrance we need

Regarding his new product, a fragrance called “I Am King” ($57), he tells WSJ:

“When you see Barack Obama, you see a strong, elegant black man and when people see my ad, it’s almost like that’s the trend.”

Riiiiiiighhhhhht.

[Consumed on earlier Diddyscent is here. ]

Flickr Interlude

Originally uploaded by R. Walker.

We keep this in the car. When we have to park at a meter downtown, as E points out, this is the change we need.

[Bonus! DIY instructions to make your own Obama “change” jar: 1. Google around for an Obama “change” image. 2. Print it out on sticker paper, at the appropriate size. 3. Cut out and stick onto empty jar. 4. Fill jar with change, to desired level. Crafty!]

Of merch, murketing and money

So I saw the chair above on Coolhunting the other day (as did plenty of other observers), and I was interested. A chair made to look blood-splattered — I would almost like to have that. But it’s pretty expensive — $5,000.

I had to read the item again to figure out the inspiration for the chair. I don’t have Showtime, and don’t know much about the show Dexter, which is about a serial killer. But that’s the inspiration.

According to this official site, Showtime and Metropolitan Home have revamped a townhouse in Gramercy Park into The Showtime House, “a beacon of modernism inspired by six Showtime original series.” That is, it’s sort of a big walk-in ad for Dexter and The L Word and Californication — you go in and just sort of bask in this aesthetic manifestation of those programs.

And if you like what you see in the Dexter Dining Room And Kitchen, well, you can buy it!

Somehow to me this stuff becomes way less interesting when I realize it’s essentially a high-end brand extension. But maybe I’d feel differently if I were a Dexter fan. Or maybe it doesn’t matter at all — if I had the money, I might enjoy looking at that chair, or using some of the other products (the plate at left, for instance), and the Dexter factor would just fade into the background. What difference does it really make? I’m not actually sure.

Anyway, I also learned from the official Showtime House site that there’s actually collateral merch for all its shows, designed by Savannah College of Art and Design Students — here’s a link to the Showtime SCAD collection, but be warned that a video pops up. (I think this is separate from SCAD’s Working Class Studio). This stuff is somewhat more affordable, and some of it seems like straightforward buyable expressions fandom: T-shirts and the like.

Other items are more ambiguous, in that (like the chairs) they might be appealing to people who don’t care about the show — the $75 Dexter pillow, for instance. (I did say somewhat more affordable; up to you whether $75 pillows are part of your budget.)

Anyway I think this is murkily fascinating — sort of an elevation of the promotional object into a high-design piece.

I wonder if people are buying? And how much their decision is tied to the shows that “inspired” this stuff?

In a book club? Here’s an offer.

Last night I posted Murketing.com’s exclusive Reader’s Guide to Buying In, compiled and written by the author (me). I believe, as stated, that now is a really good time to take consumer behavior seriously, to talk about it, to think about it. I think the book would be good in the book-club setting.

So to back that up even more, I have an offer. A while ago I read this USA Today article about authors doing conference calls with book clubs. I thought: “Yeah, I would do that, that sounds interesting.” Lots of publishers do this now, or so I gather.

And thus: if your group takes up Buying In, and you’re interested in arranging a conference call (all it takes is a speakerphone) write me at murketing@robwalker.net (subject heading “book club”) and we’ll work something out. (Or I’ll do the Skype videocall setup I’ve offered to college classes, if you prefer, and you have the technology.)

And obviously: I don’t really care if you have a formal book club or not. If you’ve bought the book and my  “tour” didn’t come to your city, and you want to round up some friends and make sorta kinda like a book clubbish gathering, we can probably work something out. You don’t have to go through some set of corporate hoops; there’s no middleman on this; it’s just me.

So tell your friends. Share it on Facebook, post about it on your blog or in book-club forums. Etc.

I’ll get back to regular Murketing.com-type topics and posts later today. Thanks for bearing with me.