Alex Blyth

I had an interesting couple of pints with some of the clever digital PR folks at Edelman last night. We discussed the irony of a print magazine about social media, the fun to be had in playing golf courses backwards (tee-off from the first but aim at the 18th green – sounds entertainingly dangerous!) and finally, the long-term decline of advertising.

As regular readers of my blog will know this is a theme I’ve touched on before.  In this recession trade titles are suffering from the slump in ad spend. They always do – but I’m not convinced that by 2011 ad spend in print will be back where it was in 2007. Marketers are putting more and more of their ad spend online. They’re increasingly convinced that it is more targeted, more trackable, and crucially, cheaper.

Marketers expect to spend less on online ads. This is a big problem for publications that rely on advertising for their revenue – which is almost all of them. If their ad revenue falls how can they continue to make a profit? Sure, they can save money on print and distribution, but still, for the majority the equation won’t add up.

The only way they can plug this revenue shortfall is to persuade readers to pay for content.

And yet we know this won’t work. In the early days of the web, publishers learnt very quickly that people will not pay for content. We expect the Internet to be free.

And this is where last night – well into our Staropramen – we came up with a good idea.

It’s based on two initial premises:

1) People’s expectation of the quality of online content has risen in the past decade – we have become more adept at sorting through the online waffle to find what is genuinely useful/interesting to us

2) People are now much more comfortable with paying for things online than they were ten years ago

So, while in 1999 paid-for content might have been a non-starter, that doesn’t mean that it still is in 2009.

Then the third, crucial, premise is:

3) People don’t subscribe to content online, not because they’re not willing to pay for it, but because they can’t be bothered with all the hassle. They know they’ll have to go thorugh half a dozen pages of form-filling, they’ll have to find their credit card details, they might be signing up to a long-term deal they can’t get out of, and then the site might go down meaning it was a waste of five minutes. Five minutes might not sound like a lot, but when we’re looing for information online we expect to receive it immediately.

So, here’s the idea we came up with……

You buy credits in advance and then buy content simply by clicking a button, and paying £1, 50p, 25p, 10p even, for that specific article. It would be a simple application that every publisher could add to their sites so there became one instant, low commitment way for people to pay for content. It would be like the Oyster card of online publishing. Or iTunes for written content.

Great idea or just the Staropramen talking?

Ok, so this one genuinely confuses me. Over the years it has puzzled me but I still can’t figure out why PRs do it. Recently I’ve started asking other editors and journalists if they’ve had this happen. Around four out five have looked astonished and said “Yes! How weird is that? I thought it was just me. Now, why DO PRs do that?”

I’m talking about spending a fortune luring me out of my office to some fun event, taking the time and trouble to tell me about something interesting they or their clients are doing, and then completely failing to follow it up. No, more than that – on many occasions I’ve actively followed up on a discussion I’ve had with someone over lunch, at the racecourse, on the golf course, or somewhere similar, and found it almost impossible to get further information out of the PR.

Why does that happen?

As a journalist I get invited to quite a few events like that. I’m always up for going to them – it’s good as a freelance to get out of the office and meet some new people, and I’m never going to turn down tickets to see England play at the World Cup in Germany, or a golf day at the 2010 Ryder Cup course, or lunch in the Portrait Restaurant. Of course, the people who are inviting me know that they’re not buying coverage from me.  They are though getting my attention and have a chance to tell me about interesting products, services, ideas, news, and so on that I might want to put in my articles. That’s why they run these events. Presumably.

So, why do they then, almost without exception, fail to follow up after the event?

(I should point out that not every PR does this. I’ve got several PRs I work closely with, where the relationship began at one of these events. I came along, had a good time, discussed something interesting, and we followed it up afterwards. But, honestly, that is the exception.)

For a while I thought it was me – maybe having met me they decide that I’m not really that important a journalist after all, and they’re focusing their efforts on the other people who were there.  But then I discovered that most other journalists have the same problem.

Whatever the reason, it’s pretty annoying. Once or twice discussions at these events have prompted me to pitch ideas to titles I write for, and then, once I’ve been commissioned, I’ve had to go back to the editor and say I can’t complete it simply because the people who originally pitched the idea to me have gone AWOL. Letting my clients down like that does not make me happy. In fact it makes me very unhappy.

So, from the PR’s point of view, they’ve spent all that time and money and have not only achieved no coverage, they’ve also damaged their relationships with the people who came on it.

Now, why would they do that?