PR Technique: My Best Pitch

July 2002

PR Technique: My Best Pitch

Name: Sadhana Pendse
Role: Senior Consultant
Company: The Hoffman Agency

“My best pitch was a publicity campaign that we had to carry out for a US e-consultancy that was setting up shop in Singapore.

“This exercise was carried out in the glorious days of the dotcom boom when a whole new species of companies called the e-consultancies were burgeoning. Competition for space was intense and every editor was getting at least three calls a day from e-consultancies looking for coverage.

“Amidst this clutter and confusion, the challenge was to introduce this e-consultancy (unknown in Asia) and create a publicity campaign through a series of concerted pitches.

“The fact-finding mission began. All the interesting elements were unearthed; right from who built the first Web sites, what the business of creating Web sites entails, how consulting differs from mere site building, and the ROI is for companies wanting to go online. We even carried out research on employee backgrounds, the architecture and design of the office space. These facts were then strategically pitched in a timely synchronized manner. Our methodology was based on the same fundamental question – what makes for interesting reading? What was it that would hypnotise the editors?

“The back-to-basics approach was what made this one of the best pitch strategies I have ever worked on. The results were staggering and over a period of six months, a series of articles started appearing exactly as planned with the exact messages we identified.

“The media wrote about our client being one of the forerunners in the e-consultancy space having created some of the world’s first and most exciting sites. From the business perspective there were write-ups on the holistic nature of its services. It’s employees were featured as exceptional people, many of whom started getting requests for feature interviews, the office which was a ‘new economy’ one with a unique interior grabbed the attention of some prominent design columns; the women employees got profiled for their career success stories, and so on. Almost every targeted vertical was reached through this strategy.

“Remember, the basic rule of thumb is that every company worth its salt has a unique story to tell however basic it may sound. And it is up to the spin-doctors to find that element…find that element and every pitch is a game. Get the spin right and the game is yours!”