Extract | The Guide to Earned Media | Chapter 1

This extract from The Guide to Earned Media by Annie Pace Scranton © 2023 is reproduced with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.

PR and Successful Branding

How do you do PR? A common refrain is that PR is learned on the job. But what if you’re the lone person in your organization’s comms department? It’s not a widely-offered major or graduate program. I’ve heard countless professionals say that they were suddenly “gifted” the “opportunity” to run point on PR because they got one placement or created a social media post that performed well. While that is a nod to their creativity and hard work ethic, it often can feel a little lonely working in PR for a corporation, especially if there is no one to help you work through the inevitable challenges we all face. Hopefully this book will serve as that guidepost for you, as you aim to successfully navigate the highs, and lows, of PR. 

So, What Exactly Is PR? 

The value of PR is often extremely challenging to quantify. But the qualitative results, when executed correctly, can make all the difference in the world. According to the Public Relations Society of America, the leading US-based organization dedicated to the profession, “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” Essentially: PR is what gets you noticed. You can have the greatest company, product or brand in the world, but if no one knows about it, what good does it do? 

Let’s discuss briefly what PR is not. The chances are high that someone you work with or report to-perhaps the CEO, a founder, or an investor-doesn’t understand the differences between marketing and PR. PR is not marketing, advertising, social media, digital, or content creation. 

According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. Oftentimes, corporations will have a marketing budget and PR is likely a component of that budget. Marketing encompasses any and all ways in which a business promotes itself, thus including, potentially, public relations, advertising, SEO, social media, and many other promotional avenues. Marketing, in a singular sense, tends to mean how a company reaches out directly to its customer or potential customer base. 

Great marketing involves persistence and research. Persistence requires a lot of outreach, and research ensures that you are getting as many details as possible about a customer’s interests and prospective interests. 

Have you ever purchased a pair of shoes from a new brand you love and then all of a sudden you’re getting weekly emails from said brand, letting you know about a new sale or a new product offering? Marketing. Have you then opened up Instagram and scratched your head wondering, “Well, that’s strange… There’s an ad for that same shoe brand!” That falls within marketing. The brand is targeting you very specifically, based on research of your buying habits. 

Advertising is another form of marketing. This form is transactional, meaning that a company pays money to a media outlet to promote their business, brand or product. Glossy magazines have print ads. Commercials are also a form of advertising. Pop-ups before you watch a new YouTube video are ads. Advertising takes a large budget-it is “paid,” after all, and it works when it seeps into your subconscious without you even realizing it. 

Case in point: I was (and still am) completely obsessed with those Lincoln commercials that feature Matthew McConaughey. I love his voice. I love the way they were shot. I love how I feel when I watch those ads. As a viewer, I was a bit thrown when I first watched one of these, and the ad seemed to actually make me want to buy a Lincoln….. 

I know better than to fall for advertising, because I know so much about what goes into it. Ultimately, though, these commercials did push me to suggest that we test a Lincoln when we were eventually on the market for a car. (That was years ago, and we are happy Lincoln car owners to this day.) 

Public relations is different from marketing and advertising-in fact, it’s quite different. 

According to the Oxford Reference dictionary: Public relations is the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by a company or other organization or a famous person. Good PR can shape a company’s image. It can make or break a CEO, a start-up, or a political candidate. At some point, any successful business will invest in PR. It’s inevitable. But to what end? And how do you do it successfully? 

This book is going to focus on just this by walking you through the principles of earned media. Simply put, “earned media” consists of any material written, recorded, or broadcast about your company that you did not pay for and that you did not create yourself. 

Paid media is advertising. In other words, a company is paying a hefty sum to circulate an ad or a commercial. Owned media means just that: you own it yourself. It’s great to create content on your own (and we’ll get into this later on in the book) for your website and your social media channels. But nothing-nothing-within the greater context of marketing has the ability to bring real value the way that earned media can. 

So how do you go about securing earned media for your business? Securing earned media relies a lot on your ability to tell the story of the company you’re a part of. But how do you go about doing this? This book will break down this very thing for you-how to understand the origin story of the founder and the business, to really deeply feel as though you can communicate the brand’s ethos in a palatable way, all of which is leading up to the endgame: that press placement that will help in paving the way towards more brand awareness. 

An important thing to understand about PR and securing earned media is that it’s all speculative. Really. No publicist—I don’t care how experienced they are—has a smoking gun that will guarantee that they can generate earned media for their clients. They can point to their incredible case studies and track records and recent press placements. They can point to years of successfully being in business. They can point towards the many media contacts they have and know and work with routinely. But, it’s still not something that can be guaranteed. 

The other thing that’s very important to know about PR is that it does not directly lead to increased sales. If your boss comes to you and says, “I really want you to focus on PR so we can increase our sales,” you need to do whatever it takes to quickly educate her or him about the nuances of PR vs. sales or advertising. Have I seen clients dramatically increase their company’s bottom line after a string of amazing earned media placements? Absolutely. Have I also gotten clients incredible hits which garnered very little in terms of traction? Unfortunately, yes. 

A quick real-life example. I had a client several years ago who was an author based in Minneapolis. She hired us to help promote her first published book, on the importance of sleep, which weaved in some of her own personal narrative. She was telegenic, smart, and up for anything. We had a great run promoting the book, but the biggest moment of the campaign—and still, to this day, one of the biggest, best, and most fun bookings I’ve ever had—was when she was asked to appear as a guest on the TV show Live! With Kelly and Michael. 

As a publicist, this is a dream booking come true. A beloved national network talk show in the United States, with a high viewership and great track record for fun segments. The producers definitely leaned into that fun when we started shaping this segment. They wanted to actually have my client do the segment in her pajamas, along with Kelly and Michael—also in their pajamas—with a king- sized bed as a prop on set. 

The segment was fantastic-it was about six minutes (long for TV!). They started out by standing at the foot of the bed, asking the author questions about the book. Then they all got into bed together and she gave them sleep masks to put on, turned on the noise machine, talked about the importance of high-quality sheets, and they all pretended to take a snooze. At the beginning and end of the segment they flashed her book cover on screen and stated the title. 

It was exciting-we were buzzing afterwards and couldn’t wait to see the results. Would her website crash? Would her book sell thousands of copies on Amazon? It was all so exciting! 

But we had to rush so she could get to a quiet place for her next interview—a local radio show from her hometown of Minneapolis. It was a drive time show, so a great slot… but an appearance that in no way had the same reach as Live! 

My client called me the next day with some really surprising news to share. She relayed that, as a result of the TV appearance, she had received countless calls, texts, and messages on social media. Her old third grade teacher, a friend she’d lost touch with, her parents’ neigh- bors—you name it, they all reached out because they had either seen the segment or heard about it. But when she tracked the sales from the time of day that she had been on TV and any sales linked to Live’s online promotion of the book, the numbers were not that impressive. In fact, she hadn’t really seen a significant increase at all after doing the show. 

But what was most shocking was the fact that the local drive time radio show with the guy in Minneapolis had resulted in a couple hundred book sales! 

We couldn’t believe it. This was the first real eye-opening experience I had with earned media. I would have bet any amount of money that the national TV hit would have led to more book sales. But when I started really analyzing the situation and thinking about it, it (sort of) started to make sense. Let’s think about the viewers of Live! It’s on from 9-10 a.m. Most of the viewers are rushing around to get out the door, cleaning up after their kids have just left the house, or are just starting their day. They are passive viewers, likely with the TV just on in the background. They may have caught part of the segment with them in bed, gave a chuckle, and moved on. Likely, they were not paying close attention to who the expert guest was in the segment. 

Now, the drive time radio show-that’s a captive audience. If you’re listening, you’re likely driving. And if you’re driving, you’re just driving. You’re not talking, you’re not texting (hopefully), and you’re sort of locked into the show at hand. I guarantee you those couple hundred listeners truly enjoyed the segment, walked away with some news they could use, and when they parked at their office took out their smartphones, and ordered my client’s book. 

I’ve also seen the exact opposite work with another former client, who is a meteorologist at a major cable news network. He created and developed a smart umbrella that he took to market with our help. He was able to book himself on the very morning show where he provided the weather to the audience. The channel really did him a solid and, again, provided quite a long segment for him to explain and showcase how the umbrella worked, with a live demo including a wind machine to illustrate the umbrella’s strength in a rainstorm. 

I was standing off-stage with a member of his team. He had his computer open to the back end of the umbrella’s website, and we could see the sales in real time. It was unbelievable. In a six-minute segment they sold tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of products, and the sales continued in the days that followed as he continued to promote on social media using the link he publicized on the show. 

The bottom line is: PR does not equal sales. It can; it certainly can. But it’s not a guarantee.