A recent survey by PR Newswire looked at whether the press release was dead, particularly in light of the growing use of AI to access information.
The findings were illuminating – and perhaps in ways that the study authors didn’t fully intend.
We’ve had many conversations in the past with clients about press releases and how long they should be. Our standard answer is “as long as it needs to” – there is no set length, as long as it gets across the information in a useful and helpful way.
A client once told us that their website people had told them that a press release could only be 300 words, otherwise it wouldn’t fit properly on the webpage, which gave us all a good laugh. After all, the point of a press release isn’t to fit nicely on a webpage, or showcase an expensively designed logo – it is to give information to journalists that they can use in a news story.
So it was interesting to see the study talk about how to make a press release more likely to get picked up by search engine optimisation tools (SEO) and generative AI. Discouragingly, respondents in the survey said they had increased their use of SEO keywords in releases, with APAC leading this practice (27 per cent) compared to North America (21 per cent) and EMEIA (18 per cent).
Globally, more than half of respondents (57 per cent) said they are using generative AI to help craft a press release while just 13 per cent said they had no plans to.
The study also looked at what kind of information people are using press releases for. Interestingly, APAC led the way in using press releases for thought leadership or education (56 per cent), compared to 42 per cent in North America and 43 per cent in EMEIA. Those regions were more focussed on product or service news, followed by company growth. While we agree that press releases have an important role to play in communicating this kind of news, it seems a missed opportunity to primarily focus on “product flogs” through press releases rather than market or industry insights.
We are always very aware that journalists receive hundreds of press releases and pitches every day. Our view is that a press release must have something to add to the discussion or news that is taking place in the financial services industry, and also that it must be able to stand on its own two legs – we don’t believe in following up a press release with a phone call to see if the journalist is going to use it.
We also push back on clients who include press releases as a KPI – such as the goal of distribution a set number of releases a month. If there is nothing to say, then there is no point in sending out a release, but if there is lots to say then there may be half a dozen of media releases in a single month.
It’s also important to be discerning in sending out a media release. It’s not a job for a PR junior on their first day in the role. Knowing which journalists might find it useful is critical – and a surefire way to get your emails blocked is to spam every journalist you can think of. Likewise, it is essential to get the timing right – sending a media release to a journalist on a daily newspaper at 4pm is a waste of everyone’s time and goodwill.
Other ways to annoy a journalist include:
· Quoting someone in a media release who then isn’t available for follow-up questions
· Press releases that are thinly-disguised advertising – if that’s what clients want, then they should simply take out an ad
· Using a style or format that journalist don’t use – such as capitalising job titles.
Overall, media releases have to be factual and benefit the client – but they need to appeal to journalists. Releases can’t simply be overblown jargon-ese, full of superlatives that sound important but are really only of interest to the client, or heavy on the sales pitch. The basic aim of a media release is to explain “who, what, when, where and why”, in a way that is useful to the media.
