How to Manage a Successful Press Conference

Ralf leinemann and elena Baikaltseva

chapter

1 Why is a Press Conference Special?

all conferences have one thing in common: the message disclosed at the event is intended for the audience of the conference. this is so obvious that it need hardly be mentioned. A conference for physicists will address scientific topics. an oil and gas conference will address companies and research organizations in that industry. and how about a press conference? Well, you will argue that the audience is obviously the press and thus there is no exception to the rule, but this is true only at first glance the true audience is not even in the room during a press conference! the true audience is the readers of the magazines and websites, the viewers of the tv channels and the listeners of the radio stations your customers! a press conference is a bit like a game of Chinese Whispers: the speakers present to the press, who in return deliver the content to their readers. in other words, a press conference is all about presenting to the presenters. an immediate result of this fact is that you need to be prepared to measure the success of a press conference on two levels after the event. The first level is obviously the impact you made on the participants, the journalists. You need to ask questions like Did they attend in the first place?, Did they like your news? and Did they write what you expected them to write? The second level is the impact you made on the true audience that the journalists wrote for or broadcasted to. When measuring the results of your press conference on this second level, you need to ask questions like Did you create increased awareness for your company or your products?, Did the customers change their behaviour towards your company or your products? and Did the customers ultimately buy your products because of what they read?. We will discuss the topic of measurement in Chapter 28. for now we want to keep in mind that it looks straightforward to measure on the first level, but it may be complicated to measure on the second level, since measuring customers behaviour is influenced by many parameters, with PR being only one of them. And it indeed looks difficult to single out the influence of a press conference on customers behaviour.

Reach your audience

vendors want to reach their customers. they want to convince them to buy their products or services. there are several ways to get to customers. the direct one is through trade shows or events, addressing customers directly. these events could be presentations to consumers in supermarkets or user conferences typically addressing commercial or industrial customers. the disadvantage of these events is that the number of reached customers is very limited. Only a few hundred people visit the supermarket per day or fit into the presentation room during the user conference.

How to Manage a Successful Press Conference

at a press conference every journalist represents thousands or millions of customers, depending on the circulation of the respective publication. this makes a press conference so much more powerful than a customer event and at the same time so much more challenging. On the one hand, it is a chance to get a strong message across to a large audience; on the other hand there is the risk that the message is misunderstood by the press and communicated in a negative way to customers. and if that happens, the idea of doing a press conference has back-fired on you. it may be argued that advertising reaches the same audience. it is also considered safer since the advertiser has full control over the message the content is not filtered by a journalist, or dependent on a journalists opinion. While this is correct, it should still be noted that a positive article and even a neutral one is much more powerful than any advertising. according to media analysis research, an article generated by PR is up to ten times more effective with the target audience than an advertisement covering the same space in a publication. the reason is obvious: it is in the nature of advertising only to tell positive things about a product, while a positive article from an independent or neutral journalist is much more convincing.1 the fact that the press is neutral or at least should be is one of the differences between a press conference and a customer event. the press should approach a presentation in a neutral way, be open, but also critical. after having collected all the information, journalists should come to a certain opinion that they then express in an article for their readers. a customer, however, is typically prejudiced. in the case of a user group conference, customers meet who have already bought certain products; they should already be loyal customers. these customers should have a positive attitude towards messages from a vendor at that conference. Presenting to the customer base of your competitor, however, will be significantly more challenging ...

Competition
any conference is also a battle for mind share. in business, you compete with your direct competitors, namely, vendors who address your customers with products and solutions that compete with your own. at a press conference, however, you should be prepared to also compete with vendors from different industries. This is in fact a significant difference between a press conference and those normal conferences where the true target audience is in the room. When you talk to your customer directly, you very openly compete with your direct competitors. You want to sell your product, and they want to sell theirs. But you certainly do not compete with vendors who offer different products to the same customer. if your company, for example, sells Cd players, you would like your customer to buy a Cd player from your company. But since you do not sell Cds, you do not mind which Cds the customer actually runs on your player afterwards. this approach is obvious, but it does not hold true any more when competing for mind share of the media.
1 in this context it is interesting to note that this circumstance makes measuring PR results by ave (advertising value equivalent) or advertising equivalent a meaningless effort. The effect of a square inch of advertising can hardly be compared with the effect of a square inch of an independent article. Even though financial departments like this measure, PR professionals should not accept this as the measure of their success.

Why is a Press Conference Special?

an almost unlimited number of news announcements hit any journalist on a daily basis. the typical scenario is that there are more news stories available than can be printed. this means there has to be a selection and that you compete for space in a publication with any other vendor who wants to reach the same target audience that is reached with that publication in other words, you compete with any other news. a magazine on music and audio would publish news, for example, on Cd players, but also on new Cd releases. so, in this case, a potential article on your new Cd player would indeed compete with articles on other vendors introducing new Cds. in womens lifestyle magazines, for example, the situation is similar. Coverage on fashion designers competes with coverage on diets, and hair stylists compete with make-up artists and cosmetics. in car magazines, car manufacturers compete with tuning companies or the supplies industry. in the it press, computer vendors compete with manufacturers of peripherals, supplies, software or services. in the daily press almost everything competes with everything: politics, sports, society news, technology news, and so on. if your company announces ground-breaking technologies, it may still be overshadowed by an economic crisis or a surprising political development or maybe an unforeseen natural disaster. You should be aware that your own company could overshadow the visibility of announcements. for example, if you make an interesting product announcement on the same day that your CeO is replaced, then your product announcement may not be picked up at all. Your new CeO may make the headlines instead.2

2 it is obvious to avoid competing with yourself. But especially in larger corporations with many independent business units, these uncoordinated approaches can indeed happen.