Exclusives for all!

Article placement is an increasingly popular trick in the PR’s stacked deck. In fact I know of at least one firm that does nothing else. At regular intervals they send me unsolicited offers of freebie articles written on behalf of their clients on topics so closely related to the clients’ actual products that, if the topic and the products were people, sexual relations between them would cause a major scandal. And possibly result in a hideous deformity. Which is not a bad way of classifying these articles.

The beauty of these features, none of which have been written at the time the pitch is sent, you’d hope, is that they’re always ‘exclusive’. It’s a funny old word, ‘exclusive’. It’s been so thoroughly flogged by marketing pros for such a long time that it’s almost ceased to hold any meaning. It’s a bit like ‘amazing’ or ‘fantastic’.

The meaning they wish to convey, of course, is that only you—the lucky recipient of this email—is privileged enough to have the opportunity to publish this old flannel. This rather falls down when you realise that every one of your team has received the offer and, in all probability, you could name another twenty hacks who were BCC’d as well.

Technically, perhaps, the PR is right. It’s exclusive in the sense that you’ll be the only one who publishes it, should you accept the offer. But the only way that would make you special would be by proving that you have commissioning skills so pitifully underdeveloped that they’re probably of interest to medical science.

In the past it’s occurred to me that it would be a good idea to orchestrate a kind of bidding war for one of these features, whereby everyone on the mailing list responds simultaneously that, yes, they would like to use that feature on an exclusive basis. It would be interesting to see how the PR would handle it, once the spasm of sweet, blinding ecstasy had subsided, leaving them quivering and red cheeked, like a really good, well, you know.

But ultimately it would be cruel, for it wouldn’t get published as part of the experiment and then they’d be lying all alone in the wet patch feeling even worse than before. So we won’t do it.

Statistically you stand less chance of placing one of these articles than correctly picking out a specific molecule from a golf ball with your eyes closed. And as every school boy knows, it takes roughly the same number of molecules to make up a golf ball as it would take golf balls to make up the Earth.

Admittedly, you could look at the forward features list and time your emails accordingly. But this throws up two problems. First, you’d have to send more than one email, and you couldn’t use the same text for every recipient—which would be MORE WORK. And second, as you’ll see from previous posts, forward features lists hold no more actual information (and far fewer unintentional laughs) than the theories of L Ron Hubbard.

So I think the touting of an unwritten article to someone who hasn’t requested it, and won’t publish it, on a topic that doesn’t suit them at all has value only as a subject for philosophical debate, like the tree falling in the empty forest—itself as hackneyed a concept as the exclusive contributed feature.