I was at a Vistage meeting with a dozen CEOs and the speaker showed a 60-second video to illustrate a point. All 12 CEOs were flabbergasted by it. Click on this link and watch it to see if you can correctly count the number of times the white team passes the basketball. You have to watch carefully because there are some short passes.
Spoiler alert. Don’t read further until you watch the video. If you don’t watch it, you won’t get the full effect of my message.
Almost every CEO in my group got the number of passes right, but only one out of the 12 saw the gorilla. We were dumbfounded. It seemed impossible.
Focusing too intently on getting your product mentioned by major media, such as The Dr. Oz Show or the Wall Street Journal, can obscure other media opportunities. Opportunities that collectively have even more impact. Yes, even more than Dr. Oz.
Let’s keep picking on Dr. Oz. Imagine him as an orange growing on a tree within a large orange grove. Now consider what would happen if that orange grew to be 200 pounds. Imagine the attention it would get. Tourists would flock to the grove to see such a monstrosity. A cottage industry would likely sprout up around the tree. Can’t you just see it? Booths surrounding the tree with vendors hawking t-shirts, postcards and big giant stuffed oranges.
Meanwhile, all but unnoticed by the gawking tourists, pickers are carting away tons of regularly sized oranges.
For some reason, marketers get all googly-eyed over the notion of getting national media coverage, media they will likely never enjoy. At the same time they ignore hundreds, even thousands, of easily obtained media stories whose combined audience size would dwarf shows like The Dr. Oz Show. It’s like staring at a 200 lb orange you will never taste while the rest of the orchard rots. Not too bright.
Dr. Oz’s 3.5 million audience size is paltry in the scope of the number of media impressions our company delivers. It’s common for our publicists to arrange more than 3.5 million impressions in a single day. We’d go belly up if we only pinned our hopes on nationals.
Does that mean we don’t try for major media? Nope. And we get our share. What it means is we try for ALL media coverage. Our goal is to help companies tell their stories, not risk making them a best-kept secret. We’re here to spread the word.
Admittedly, Dr. Oz has cachet. But so do local media personalities. Everyone remembers Walter Cronkite, but they can also rattle off a list of past hometown media celebrities. Being from Minnesota, mine were Dave Moore on TV, Boone and Erickson on the radio, and Dick Youngblood in print. Who were yours? Who are they today? Should they be talking about your company and your products? Of course they should.
Here’s the gem that gets overshadowed: collectively, local media stories appearing all over the country are national media coverage. That means even if your product was never mentioned by the “national media,” it could absolutely achieve media coverage nationally.
Straight and to the point: your chances of getting covered by the national media are slim, but your chances of getting local media nationally are excellent.
Now, get on the phone and call us. Put our publicists to work arranging media coverage nationally for your company and its products – city by city, region by region – until you have covered the nation. Your story needs to be told.
By arranging local media interviews, we can get your story in front of 3.5 million people (the same size audience as The Dr. Oz Show) for about $15,000. No kidding. Call Heather Champine, our VP of media production, and she will explain how. Her number is 952-697-5269.
P.S.
I run my letters by our publicists to get their feedback before I send them out. They liked the letter but said I missed a point. They called it the “ripple effect.” That’s when we get a local story, the nation media notices it, and they pick it up and run with it. Peggy Davies, a senior publicist here, pointed out that it happened for her last week. She arranged a local market story in Minneapolis for one of our clients, Shot Beer. The story was picked up nationally by Yahoo.com, Sports Yahoo.com and several national blogs. Here’s a link to the story if you would like to see it.
