Like all sequels this story contains elements of last outing.
I’m the hero, obviously…
The cast of villains is different, however, their actions – while not exactly the same as those that went before – are hauntingly familiar.
Over one month ago I met with a company that appeared to be doing something a bit different, interesting even. At the close of the meeting, I suggested that we had an opening for a contributed article.
This should be music to the ears of any right thinking PR man. It’s free publicity, where you get to write about your favourite subject.
Indeed, the PR man seemed pretty enthusiastic about the offer.
I think I left it a week and then emailed and informed them that I was serious, they really could submit something, but I’d need it by the end of the month.
They were still happy and, having been told the word count, said that they’d be handing the job over to their PR agency.
About a week before deadline, I emailed the agency to see how things were coming along. They asked for more time. Fortunately, I’d built in some slack. The original deadline had been the last Friday of the month, I gave the agency the weekend, plus a day. So Tuesday…..now well over one month after the first meeting and offer of contrib..
>> Hi Finisher: We will definitely have the article to you by Nov. 4th.
>>
>> Thanks again.
>>
Was the response of the agency. A day or two later, the PR emailed again if they could possibly reduce the word count from 1500 to 1000.
….er…so let me get this straight, you’ve had the best part of a month to write 1500 words about your client, and now a few days before the deadline you’re telling me that you can only realistically write 1000 words.
F*ck me, I could write the extra 500 words for them during my lunch hour if they bunged me a tenner. I didn’t say this of course. I said, “well, the word count is 1500 because we need to fill a page, 1000 words won’t fill a page’” – here I compromised – “how about 1250 and maybe you’ve got a nice image or two?” (…the story would genuinely benefit from a nice image or two).
Then….radio and email silence…nothing…..nothing for days…
Hmmm, maybe my insistence upon writing another 250 words over the 500 less than originally agreed word count has stumped him….maybe I was supposed to just say ‘OK send in a thousand words and we’ll whack in a SuDoku to fill the white space….’
On the afternoon of Nov 4th (the new deadline day I’d emailed the agency) – I got this response….
Hi Finisher: The Company’s Director of Marketing (copied on this email) is responsible for sending the final article to you. He understands the deadline is today.
Best regards,
Agency Bad PR
The director of marketing didn’t send me anything.
The morning of the day after deadline day I emailed the director of marketing asking for the feature…
I got nothing….no response…stitched up….now I had a big page to fill….two days after the deadline….
I scrambled around and managed to find something extra to fill the space…the designer laid it out, I proofed it and then signed it off, job done, (over the past week I have coordinated, edited, proofed and signed off 32, 1500 word features from a variety of sources….)
A day after all this, I got an email from the internal marketing guy asking for a further 24 hours to get his piece in…
So, to recap – the original meeting happened 44 days ago. In that time, they’ve been unable to cobble together 1500 words about themselves. That’s 34 words per day guys….
This post comes in at a little over 700 words and it took me about five minutes to write. Surely 44 days is long enough to write a featurette about yourself????
I am now more than slightly sceptical about the prospects of this particular company delivering on their promises of bringing some really high end, expensive and complicated technology projects in on budget or on time.
Showing posts with label commissioning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commissioning. Show all posts
Thursday, 6 November 2008
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
In-house comms monkey in tale of woe shocker!
A while back I got a half decent pitch. A high profile speaker at a conference that my firm was organising was willing to put his name to a contributed article.
Now, for all the usual reasons we don’t usually take contributed articles. This one though would be different. The writer, as I said, would be quite senior (I know, I know. He wouldn’t really be writing it, but he’d be putting his name to it, and the readers don’t really care or know that the author would more than likely be some PR flunky or jobbing journo). Not only would the ‘writer’ be fairly senior, but his company is rather large in the industry I cover….and, what’s more, it’d be totally exclusive.
I supplied the PR with some thoughts on an angle, I gave him a nice comfy deadline (about a month) and I said the word count should be 1,500.
Naturally, I’d built some slack into the deadline, so when I go this missive three days after the date it didn’t matter too much – or so I thought:
Hi Finisher,
Please find attached the article. Sorry for being late, but we needed a little more time for validation.
Can you please check if the whole text seems correct for the publication, and then send the modified version back to us for validation?
Thank you
BPR
The fact that the email didn’t have an attachment should have started the old alarm bells a-ringin’. Sadly, I ignored my better judgement and decided to engage...
Leaving it a minute or two, I then emailed the PR to tell him of his schoolboy error. He apologised and then sent through another email with an attachment that contained a one page doc of about 330 words in length.
I read through the four paragraph-long note and deduced that while the PR had at least managed to attach a doc this time, it was clearly the wrong one.
The information before my eyes would not pass for an article in a primary school newsletter. It was a poorly written note describing what the executive would be talking about at a forthcoming conference. I was expecting a 1500 article ‘written’ by a very senior executive at one the world’s most widely recognised brands.
I sent an email that said:
Hi BRP
Thanks for this. I should be able to use it as part of a news story.
I take it you’re not going to submit a full length feature?
Finisher
Imagine my surprise, then, when I got this in return:
Hi Finisher,
The article is more than 1500 words long, do you still have space for some more text?
BPR
I opened the attachment again, was I wrong? Maybe the guy was trying to hypnotise me with barefaced lies. Perhaps my Word’s word count tool was on the blink. But no, 330 words worth of presentation notes sat before me on a single side of A4.
“I think you must have attached the wrong doc.” I said “The one that you sent me is 330 words!”
After a moment or two I got this:
Sorry Finisher i ment 1500 signs, my mistake...
1500 words, as you said in your previous mail, looks like a big article, what else could we talk about? (i hope that we aren' too close to the deadline to discuss about it)
BRP
I decided to throw this chap a bone. He was well past the original deadline, but clearly he had special needs.
Yes, I’m afraid I wanted 1500 words, not 1500 characters!
If you still wanted to write a longer piece, maybe you could talk about your …here I described something relevant to his company that would be extremely easy to write about …. You’ll have to move quickly, the deadline for the feature is the end of this week at the latest.
I admit, I should have dropped this as a lost cause much earlier, but I soldiered. I even attached the full transcript of an interview that I’d carried out with his firm’s CEO a week earlier, suggesting that maybe he could use it for ‘inspiration’.… the following day I got this:
Hi Finisher,
We finally decided to send the [original] article, plus a concise presentation of [the company I work for] (attached file).
Your suggestion is still too recent to deal with it, although it is an interesting article idea.
PS: Can you please find an attractive title to the article? And then send the final edit back to us, before publication?
Many thanks
BPR
The attached file containing a “concise presentation” of his firm was, in fact, a press release boilerplate pasted into Word.
I was gobsmacked. He seriously thought that adding his firm’s boilerplate info to the 330 words of notes already sent late would make for a compelling article. Not only that, he wanted me to think of an “attractive” headline AND, get this, send it back so they could check it.
Jeeeeeeeee-zuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Now, for all the usual reasons we don’t usually take contributed articles. This one though would be different. The writer, as I said, would be quite senior (I know, I know. He wouldn’t really be writing it, but he’d be putting his name to it, and the readers don’t really care or know that the author would more than likely be some PR flunky or jobbing journo). Not only would the ‘writer’ be fairly senior, but his company is rather large in the industry I cover….and, what’s more, it’d be totally exclusive.
I supplied the PR with some thoughts on an angle, I gave him a nice comfy deadline (about a month) and I said the word count should be 1,500.
Naturally, I’d built some slack into the deadline, so when I go this missive three days after the date it didn’t matter too much – or so I thought:
Hi Finisher,
Please find attached the article. Sorry for being late, but we needed a little more time for validation.
Can you please check if the whole text seems correct for the publication, and then send the modified version back to us for validation?
Thank you
BPR
The fact that the email didn’t have an attachment should have started the old alarm bells a-ringin’. Sadly, I ignored my better judgement and decided to engage...
Leaving it a minute or two, I then emailed the PR to tell him of his schoolboy error. He apologised and then sent through another email with an attachment that contained a one page doc of about 330 words in length.
I read through the four paragraph-long note and deduced that while the PR had at least managed to attach a doc this time, it was clearly the wrong one.
The information before my eyes would not pass for an article in a primary school newsletter. It was a poorly written note describing what the executive would be talking about at a forthcoming conference. I was expecting a 1500 article ‘written’ by a very senior executive at one the world’s most widely recognised brands.
I sent an email that said:
Hi BRP
Thanks for this. I should be able to use it as part of a news story.
I take it you’re not going to submit a full length feature?
Finisher
Imagine my surprise, then, when I got this in return:
Hi Finisher,
The article is more than 1500 words long, do you still have space for some more text?
BPR
I opened the attachment again, was I wrong? Maybe the guy was trying to hypnotise me with barefaced lies. Perhaps my Word’s word count tool was on the blink. But no, 330 words worth of presentation notes sat before me on a single side of A4.
“I think you must have attached the wrong doc.” I said “The one that you sent me is 330 words!”
After a moment or two I got this:
Sorry Finisher i ment 1500 signs, my mistake...
1500 words, as you said in your previous mail, looks like a big article, what else could we talk about? (i hope that we aren' too close to the deadline to discuss about it)
BRP
I decided to throw this chap a bone. He was well past the original deadline, but clearly he had special needs.
Yes, I’m afraid I wanted 1500 words, not 1500 characters!
If you still wanted to write a longer piece, maybe you could talk about your …here I described something relevant to his company that would be extremely easy to write about …. You’ll have to move quickly, the deadline for the feature is the end of this week at the latest.
I admit, I should have dropped this as a lost cause much earlier, but I soldiered. I even attached the full transcript of an interview that I’d carried out with his firm’s CEO a week earlier, suggesting that maybe he could use it for ‘inspiration’.… the following day I got this:
Hi Finisher,
We finally decided to send the [original] article, plus a concise presentation of [the company I work for] (attached file).
Your suggestion is still too recent to deal with it, although it is an interesting article idea.
PS: Can you please find an attractive title to the article? And then send the final edit back to us, before publication?
Many thanks
BPR
The attached file containing a “concise presentation” of his firm was, in fact, a press release boilerplate pasted into Word.
I was gobsmacked. He seriously thought that adding his firm’s boilerplate info to the 330 words of notes already sent late would make for a compelling article. Not only that, he wanted me to think of an “attractive” headline AND, get this, send it back so they could check it.
Jeeeeeeeee-zuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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