Category: Press Releases

NFL Referee Edition: Marketing Ripped From the Headlines

Here’s a terrific example of a medical practice capitalizing on current events:

A Green Bay Lasik doctor is offering free lasik surgery to the replacement referees who blew the “touchdown” call at the end of the Packers/Seahawks game. Dr. Christopher Smith of Optivision Eye Care in Appleton told WFRV-TV, “The referees obviously had some vision issues, so we decided we could help them with that.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that none of the referees are going to accept the offer. But it will get Optivision an enormous amount of free publicity, both locally and nationally.

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Swipe-and-Deploy Marketing: Shelter Borrows From the Car Dealers

I’m one of those who’s come to the conclusion that there are no new ideas. Sometimes when you’re looking for a hook, the most “creative” thing you can do is move a technique from one industry to another.

Multnomah County Animal Services in Oregon, recognizing the fact that there is more demand for kittens than for full-grown cats, has come up with a nice little bit of swipe-and deploy: the “Certified Pre-Owned Cats” campaign.

With hundreds of cats crowding the Troutdale shelter, the county plans, effective immediately, to temporarily eliminate adoption fees for mature cats (over one year old). The “Certified Pre-Owned Cats” campaign aims to place as many cats in homes as possible in the upcoming summer months.

Multnomah County took the concept a step further with this inspired touch:

All Certified Pre-Owned Cats adopted from the shelter come with a free “multi-point inspection”: the cats have received a complete health exam, all their current vaccinations and a microchip, and have also been spayed or neutered.

There’s nothing particularly newsworthy about an overcrowded shelter; and because the older a cat gets, the less likely it is to be adopted, reduced-fee adoptions for older animals are fairly common. Meanwhile, certified pre-owned programs are a-dime-a-dozen in the car business.

But when an animal shelter borrows the certified pre-owned concept from the car business, it becomes a “man bites cat” story.

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A New Press Release Tool Treats The Symptom…

… but perhaps not the underlying problem.

My friend Rita Radostitz recently sent me an article from David Henderson’s blog. Henderson, a PR consultant and former CBS News correspondent, writes about David Meerman Scott’s new Gobbledygook Grader. The Gobbledygook Grader is an online tool designed to ferret out “gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words.”

Copy your press release, paste it into the Grader, and Scott will email you a report and a grade.

Helpful, says Henderson, but it may miss the point:

…press releases are generally not focused on providing legitimate news but rather are infused with meaningless promotional hype that few people care about. Press releases are today less about giving the media something to report and more about promoting something. Today’s press releases have become sales flyers.

If your company has news of genuine interest, and you want it covered, Henderson has some good suggestions in the last paragraph of his post. Read the full post here.

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