‘98% of PR fails’: Australian Traveller Media managing director
Australian Traveller Media managing director Quentin Long has said that editorial inboxes are proof that 98% of PR fails.
Speaking to travel marketers, Long said that a lack of resources and availability means editors don’t get to run the stories they would like to the majority of the time, which is why native content is more successful.
Quentin Long, Justin Jamieson, Helen Demetriou, Jayne Andrews, Trudi Jenkins, and Vivienne Kelly at 2019’s Mumbrella Travel Marketing Summit
It’s a fair point raised by Quentin.
Do PR’s have the discretionary budget to engage commercially in native content marketing?
I dare say many don’t, in which case the decision for native rests with someone from marketing to understand, value and play the native content marketing game….
Some PR’s may cringe at having to ‘pay for play’….
Why would publishers run content that PR Agencies push? Half the time its irrelevant sales content that would otherwise take up precious realestate that could be sold to advertisers who wanted to run native content.
The fact that Quentin thinks PR is just media relations highlights the issue. The PR industry has allowed this narrow view to permeate.
That’s media relations not the whole PR function. It’s time journalists stopped commenting on the 10% of the modern PR strategy that they’re now only part of.
P.s. Nice play for media dollars too.
Having worked from the PR side with Quentin for years, and talked at length with him about this on more than one occasion, here’s what I know:
a) The volume of shit his crew’s inboxes take in every day beggars belief. They’re not alone.
b) Those contributing to the Augean Stables-like levels of manure do not represent what I do.
The blind sending of crap content to an unfiltered database isn’t PR. I can understand Q using the descriptor, though; most do. It speaks volumes about our sector’s reputation, if that is what defines it.