There’s a common misconception that public relations means media publicity, the development of non-paid, “earned” media coverage – that is, media content written or produced by journalists as a result of receiving information from an organization. While that is a function of public relations, it’s only one tool in the public relations toolbox. It’s also only one method PR professionals use for media partnerships to meet their companies’ or clients’ communications goals.
Our last blog post focused on how PR professionals go about building community partnerships and managing them. Media partnerships in PR are another way organizations can meet their communications needs. If you’re wondering why your business needs media relations, media relations can be a great way to get coverage for your business by improving brand awareness and boosting credibility.
Media partnerships in PR are a collaboration between one or more organizations and a media outlet. The media outlet may be a traditional media organization such as a television or radio network or station, a newspaper or a magazine, or it could be a social media organization such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc.
A few examples of how public relations programs have made use of this kind of partnership will go a long way to explaining the advantages of this tool in the PR toolbox.
In-kind promotional media partnerships
One very common type of media partnership is the offer of in-kind promotional consideration (provision of a company’s product or service) as a prize for a media contest, competition or sweepstakes. For example, a few years ago this author’s PR agency, on behalf of a hospitality industry client, worked with a TV show that featured a wedding competition among several women about to get married. The prize for the winner of this TV competition was a dream overseas honeymoon trip. The agency’s hospitality client provided the honeymoon hotel room at its flagship hotel for one of the show’s winning brides. In exchange, the show provided promotional information to the show’s viewers about the hotel. This popular reality TV show attracted a very large and diverse U.S. audience, and the positioning of the dream honeymoon as luxurious and exciting reinforced the hotel’s luxury image and reputation. This type of partnership is very simple and straightforward. It works well for an organization that doesn’t have a big advertising budget, since the media outlet showcases the organization’s product or service in exchange for the provision of that service to the winner of a contest. Both partners benefit from the arrangement, since it also provides the TV show’s prize at no cost to the show’s production company.
In a media partnership such as the above, the critical factor in the choice of a media partner by PR professionals is how well the media partner’s audience overlaps with the target PR audience.
A key responsibility of the PR team in such a media partnership is to assure that the media exposure received is significant enough to merit the in-kind promotional consideration provided. On one occasion, the agency arranged for a cookware client’s new product line to be a gift to the Oprah Winfrey Show’s studio audience. The show’s production staff told the agency that the audience gift would be announced on air, but then failed to do so. The agency’s client ended up giving away thousands of dollars’ worth of cookware without the national Oprah audience hearing the brand name.
Conference content creation media partnerships
A different type of example, in the business-to-business arena, is a partnership between a conference organizer and a business or trade publication. The conference organizer (which could be a non-profit or for-profit organization) benefits from the media outlet’s promotion of the conference to its readers to help boost attendance, and by guaranteed media coverage of the conference afterwards in the publication. The publication benefits from its high-profile role as a key sponsor of the conference, and from an inside track on publication access to content provided at the conference.
In the above example, the media partner benefits from the conference’s content creation. In some cases, the corporate partner benefits from the media partner’s content creation.
There is one important PR drawback of creating a conference partnership with a media outlet. If the conference is of interest as content to one media outlet, it may be of interest to other media outlets as well. Since the content is usually only published by the media partner, the media company may have an edge over its competitors. This may not be an advantage to the corporate or non-profit sponsor, however, since they are losing out on coverage from competing media outlets. The PR trade-off for losing possible conference media coverage is guaranteed media coverage by the media partner.
Exclusive media coverage in exchange for product and services
A third type of media partnership is the arrangement of exclusive media coverage by public relations professionals on behalf of a brand or company. For example, the PR team for a luxury wallpaper brand, de Gournay, arranged a partnership for the brand with Vogue Magazine and the Metropolitan Museum. De Gournay agreed to design the décor for a gala event at the Metropolitan Museum (using its wallpaper), which was then covered at length in an article in Vogue. The target audience for the brand aligned very well with the magazine’s upscale readers.
Brands pay to partner with social media
Brand partnerships with social media organizations are a common occurrence these days. They are, for the most part, advertising arrangements. An example: Polo Ralph Lauren launched a line of rainbow-colored clothing items to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride. The proceeds of all Pride clothing sales were donated to the Stonewall Community Foundation, which supports LGBTQ+ non-profit organizations and programs. Ralph Lauren paid Snapchat to share images and information about its Pride program with Snapchat’s young user base.
In another campaign, Ralph Lauren developed a “hashtag challenge” to generate content on video social media platform TikTok during the recent US Open Tennis Championships. Polo Ralph Lauren was the official outfitter for the US Open. TikTok users (typically Gen Z) were challenged to create videos with the hashtag #WinningRL, showcasing a real-life challenge they won. The prize for the creators of the three videos that generated the most engagement on TikTok was Polo Ralph Lauren US Open clothing. As of a couple of weeks after the US Open, videos with the #WinningRL hashtag had been viewed over half a million times.
New technology offerings ramp up interest in social media partnerships
In the above Polo Ralph Lauren campaign, TikTok users were also able to shop for Polo Ralph Lauren products within the app. TikTok is not the only app that offers marketers the ability to use shoppable content. Snapchat and Instagram now have this feature, as does BuzzFeed’s Tasty, which calls itself “the world’s largest social food network.” Walmart and Tasty have a partnership that offers customers mobile app-based shoppable recipes. Walmart customers can add an ingredient list from a Tasty recipe directly to their Walmart online grocery carts.
The depth and breadth of brand and media partnerships in PR appear to be increasing rapidly with the onslaught of new app capabilities and new marketing technologies.