A recent issue of PR NEWS mentioned New York-based production company Medialink's top-performing video news releases for 2000. Below, L.P. Phillips, a manager at VNR-1
Communications in Dallas, takes issue with how the company measures viewership. Medialink's response, from Associate Vice President Susan Macaluso, follows:
Point
Our competitor recently boasted in a news release that they got 683 million viewers for a video news release on highway safety. 683 million! In a country of around 250
million! OK, we're using U.S. census data and they might have missed a few hundred million (with televisions) here and there. But hey, even those otherwise uncountable Russian
soldiers supposedly hiding in a bunker under Lake Superior have a right to watch a VNR.
Reading further down into the news release, I was clobbered with guilt. Real guilt. The mother-inspired-kind of guilt. A VNR on Mid-Size Inexpensive Cars Crashworthiness 2000
received an audience of 101 million. If you take away infants and guys who constantly orbit cities on cell phones, that amounts to almost half the country.
Come on. There has to be a more standardized reporting of audience figures that can be verified, not estimated. Clients deserve to know how many viewings a VNR really got, not
some pie-in-the-sky guess. If you don't believe me, ask any of my 1.7 million co-workers at VNR-1.
L.P. Phillips
Media Relations Department
VNR-1 Communications Inc.
Counterpoint
Please read the press release before you send any letters out in the future. We were very clear - and have always been very clear from our first Top 10 VNR list almost 15 years
ago - on the numbers garnered by each individual video news release. Our release never stated that one VNR received 683 million hits; it clearly stated that it was a combined
total for 6 VNRs for the Institute for Highway Safety.
From our very first days, Medialink has given our clients actual Nielsen audience numbers. We're proud of our record and hope you'll work with us to ensure that everyone in our
industry follows such scrupulous reporting procedures.
Susan Macaluso
Medialink
Letters to the Editor may be sent to the editor:
[email protected]