On Sunday we had the media launch for the new LiveLighter TVcommericals, which was an important learning experience to say the least!
We’d hoped to get as many Perth metro news outlets to the
event as possible for an advanced preview of the new TV commercials, as well as
presentations and interview opportunities with health and nutrition experts. We’d
hoped to secure a lot of media coverage around the new ads so that viewers
would see them and go “oh – these are the ads that everyone’s been talking
about” and watch them more actively. We had also hoped to get some public
discussion going about Australia’s junk food consumption and some follow-up
media elicited by the initial news stories (talk-back radio often repeats
stories that are in that day’s newspaper).
The media launch event really drove home to me how
unreliable the media can be. We originally had four media outlets confirm that
they were coming to the event, but channel 7 were the only station that showed
up. The West Australian couldn’t make it, but asked for a voice recording of
the presentation (alongside the general media release). Here are some photos of
the media launch set-up:
Prop from the filming of the new advertisements made a great feature decoration
Our display of situations where people often eat junk food (eg, had to stay late at work, 3pm pick-me-up, etc.) to show frequency of Australians' junk food consumption
Set-up of the room for the media launch
In the end we got a couple of media mentions from the launch:
a short piece on Channel 7 Sunday night news (which has a very high
viewership), an article on page 7 of the West Australian (below) and an online article on the West’s website on Monday morning.
It was interesting to see how the different news outlets
went with different news angles based on the same media release and launch –
channel 7 focused on the new ads being shocking and “graphic”, whereas the West
Australian went with the new link between fatty liver disease and obesity as their
angle. I think the way LiveLighter’s PR manager wrote the media release was
highly effective, as there was lots of newsworthy content within it, which allowed
different equally-newsworthy angles to be used by the media. This is a
technique that I’d like to employ in my future media release writing.
Immediately after the media launch, we had a photoshoot with
a family we were hoping to have as the focus of a Sunday Times article about
ways families can avoid junk food. It’s true what they say: don’t work with
animals or kids! It took around an hour to get the shot we needed because the
kids couldn’t keep still and were getting very bored and impatient. We ended up
getting the shot, but not needing it because the Sunday Times now wants a story
about a family going on a “challenge” to quit junk food, rather than a family
that’s already very healthy. Again, working with the media can be somewhat
frustrating at times. I wrote the pitch for the Sunday Times article, so am still pretty stoked that the PR manager liked my work enough to pitch it to the media.
I'd love to hear about other people's media experiences so far, feel free to leave a comment.
Until next time,
Bec
1 comment:
Hi Bec
Your internship sounds really interesting and that it is giving you a really good learning experience. You said to leave comments about the media experience that other interns have had and overall I have mixed feelings about reporters in particular. I was involved in a number of media callouts during my time at the placement and on some occasions the journalists were accommodating and friendly, other times they were quite pushy and would throw around negative and unrelated comments/questions. I suppose this reinforces what we have learned at university about nurturing our network particularly in the media because it will contribute to positive messaging in their stories.
Good luck with the remainder of the semester, Tegan :)
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