Imagine you're a homebuilder hoping to win the confidence (and pocketbooks) of house hunters on the market. Would you show them your extensive collection of hammers and
circular saws...or take them on a tour of your most beautiful houses so they could experience the construction for themselves? Duh.
With this metaphor in mind, we had to snort at the logic (or lack thereof) behind a press release we recently received via snail mail: "In a move that provides full Internet,
advertising and PR capabilities under one agency roof, Gellman Public Relations Co., Inc. has announced a business alliance with Leo J. Brennan Inc. in Troy, Mich. The agencies
now offer full conventional and new electronic marketing communications services to clients..." With the release came the 8x10 glossy reproduced at right - a shot of the two
agency heads in front of the tools (servers) of their alleged new trade. When PR NEWS contacted Marv Gellman, president of the eponymous PR shop in the equation, he
defended his firm's traditional mail approach with the argument that many clients and journalists still prefer paper - although recipients who specified a preference for email
ahead of time received the release and photo electronically, he said. (We were never contacted.)
As for the partnering agencies' prowess in the online arena, we checked out both of their Web sites, which, we're sad to report, read more like scanned-in brochures than
robust, experiential branding destinations. Bullet points and staged photo-opps do not an interactive practice make. Our advice: you shoulda spent more time on the back-end (and
we don't mean hardware) before you hustled to make an announcement that wasn't newsworthy. No sale.
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