If you think audio news releases are just another tool in the PR
toolk it -- and a relatively boring one at that -- think again. A
new generation of ANRs is proving to be a powerful and extremely
cost-effective method of extending your PR messages.
"We get reports, and when we hear that 11 million audience
members heard this, that is an impressive number to tell my
superiors," says Pam Willenz, manager of public affairs at the
American Psychological Association. "People listen to the radio.
They are in their cars a lot, and they also are listening at work.
They listen to their radios more than they read."
News Generation has the numbers to back it up. Executive VP Lynn
Medcalf offers some heavy duty statistics: 600 million radios in
use in the Unites States, with radio broadcasts reaching 96 percent
of people 12 and older.
Producers of ANRs in turn boast some impressive figures. They
say that depending on the story and depending on the vigor of the
pitch, an audio news release may get picked up by 30 percent to 60
percent of the producers to whom it is pitched.
Do-It-Yourself Approach
In early January, Joan Cear, SVP with G.S. Schwartz & Co. in
New York, was busy promoting Anheuser-Busch's consumer awareness
campaign with a range of tools, including a VNR.
The reel included an excellent sound bite from country star Tim
McGraw, and Cear decided to make the clip do double duty as an ANR.
Rather than hire one of the traditional ANR production companies,
she hired a sound studio down the street to convert the sound bite
into an MP3 file. It took an hour and cost a couple hundred bucks,
as opposed to a couple thousand dollars for a full-service ANR
production company.
With the MP3 format allowing for easy file transfer, "it proved
to be a very cost-effective way for us to include radio as an
important part of our proactive media outreach for this client,"
says Cear. "It also gave us multiple uses for a video news release
that had already been shot."
The spot was carried heavily, especially by some of the major
networks. "American Country Countdown" on the ABC radio network
reaches 600 stations, while Westwood One has 7,700 affiliates
nationwide. Both networks picked up the release.
Of course, Cear's do-it-yourself approach won't work in all
cases. She already had the sound bite, after all, and she needed to
send it to a particular set of radio stations -- mostly those with
a country format. There are many good reasons to use a traditional
ANR firm -- especially in cases where a fuller range of services is
needed.
Traditional production firms also are increasingly offering the
MP3 format.
Flexible Format
Besides convenience, MP3s also give PR professionals a new
degree of flexibility in the use of the ANR, says Tim Bahr,
president of MultiVu, a division of PR Newswire. These days,
MultiVu is sending out not just the finished news item, but also an
electronic version of the central sound bite, along with the
script. The idea is to give news programmers the widest range of
options. While a radio station may want to play a news story three
or four times over the course of a day, "they don't just want to
play the same 60-second clip over and over again," says Bahr. "It
is very important that you allow the radio station to use it in a
number of ways."
The MP3 format also helps PR professionals to make some headway
against the ANR's perennial bugbear: tracking.
With no concrete clippings to count, tracking the success of
audio news releases has been an especially thorny problem in the
past, and while MP3s don't solve the problem, they certainly
help.
"With the Internet we can at least tell who is downloading the
stories and taking them. Then it is much easier to follow up and
find out who is actually using it," says Bahr.
Also, typically the services that produce these news stories
offer tracking as a part of their service, and while the tracking
of Internet downloads may be more readily available to the
do-it-yourselfer, many who pay for the service say they get their
money's worth.
Take for example Willenz and her coveted 11 million hits.
In guiding PR at the American Psychological Association, she
puts out four to six print news releases a month. Typically, one of
those goes into service as an audio release to be distributed by
two news services and to a hand-selected group of journalists.
Willenz's criteria for the audio release is simple: Of the month's
half-dozen possibilities, the audio release "has to hit a wider
audience. It has to be a little less academic and more widely
interesting," she says.
"Also, it needs to be something you can sum up in two
sentences."
Those two sentences are increasingly lively, says Lynn Medcalf,
EVP of PR services firm News Generation, which specializes in
offering products for radio. "There is a more lively use of
language, as opposed to just having a flat voice saying, 'A study
was released today by so and so and these were the findings,'"
explains Lynn Medcalf, EVP of PR- services firm News Generation
Inc., which specializes in PR products for radio. "There is a
change toward making them more compelling."
While few would take issue with livelier copy, there are those
who have been reluctant to embrace such advances as the MP3, in
spite of all its reputed advances.
As communications director for AARP in Georgia, Bill Brown uses
ANRs several times a year in support of AARP's federal and state
advocacy campaigns -- and he is in no great rush to go digital. "I
certainly don't want to get too far behind the technological curve,
but from everything we have seen, we continue to have a 95 percent
take," he says. Of those who take a news items, about half give
them actual air play. "So at this point I am thinking: If it ain't
broke, don't fix it."
MP3s Create New Generation for Radio
Want to work with a traditional ANR production company but still
take advantage of the benefits of MP3s? Many of the major ANR
production companies have moved to offer the MP3 format along with
the more traditional mechanisms of ANR delivery, such as magnetic
tape or delivery via telephone. This comes partly as a result of
format changes at the radio stations - changes that open the door
for the possible use of downloadable news stories. "Many stations
have now moved to digital platforms and are no longer using analog
tape for their production purposes," as a result of which, radio
producers are increasingly willing to turn to the Internet as a
source of downloadable content, says Lidj Lewis, VP of media
relations at Medialink Worldwide, Inc.
To tap that Internet interest, Medialink and Businesswire have
recently broadened the embrace of Newstream.com, a multimedia Web
site created in 2000 to cater to online journalists. A
password-protected site with some 5,000 registered members, the
site has been reaching out to radio and other traditional media,
and has seen a growing demand for MP3 clips, says Lewis. But for
those who do want to try the MP3 approach, a word of caution:
Unless the file is very small, experts say, don't send an
unsolicited MP3. If the file is too big, you can crash the
recipient's system, and that won't win you any friends.
A better plan is to team with a firm that hosts a bundled Web
site (such as http://www.radionewssource.com
for example) where producers can go to get the files they want. The
pitch the stations individually with the script, and send them to
the site to satisfy their digital needs.