Promo - March 2008 - (Page 38)

The party cost $50,000. Call in Europe president Patrick Gentemann wonders if the press came only for the free sushi bar and cocktails. No articles came out of the do, and the PR firm was dumped. FREE INK You Had To Be There. Call in Europe, a new international phone company, threw a press party last December at a New York nightclub. It drew 70 reporters from outlets like Financial Times, the New York Times, ABC News and PC magazine. The telecom hoped to garner press for its 39-cent-per-minute rate for calls from France to the U.S. So it plied its guests with drinks and hors d’oeuvres, and handed each one a Motorola MotoFone and SIM card. Better yet, it invited them to stay after 7 p.m., when its own part of the evening ended and co-sponsor French Tuesdays started. What did it get for the $50,000 it paid for this shindig? Not a single column inch of copy. And fewer than 10% of the reporters activated the free cell-phone service by the Jan. 31 deadline, according to president Patrick Gentemann. “It was a nice party,” he says. “But I think they were there for the sushi bar more than anything else.” This did not sit well with Gentemann. He dismissed PR agency SS Public Relations, whose president Steve Simon says the feeling was mutual. “We didn’t want to work with him again,” Simon notes. “[Gentemann] was never satisfied. Our job was to bring 80 to 90 people to a press party on a cold night right before the holidays, and we delivered.” He adds that it wasn’t SS’s job to follow up on coverage. What went wrong? Maybe it was a bad press list. Perhaps Call in Europe’s message got confused with that of French Tuesdays, a networking party company for the Francophile community. Or it could be that Call in Europe can’t rely solely on publicity in the United States as it does in France. Then there’s the worst possibility: That the news being offered wasn’t compelling enough, despite Gentemann’s claim that “I think I have a good story.” And that’s the challenge for any marketer doing PR. How do you get a journalist or a television talk-show booker to agree that you have a good story? CHARLES ROULLET 38 March 2008 / WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM / Promo http://www.promomagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Promo - March 2008

Promo - March 2008 Editor's Note Girls' Club New Eco Regs? They're Not Going Anywhere Spreads Easily RFID Ramp-Up From Backyard to Broadcast Commentary VROOOM! Stuff We Can't Do Here Yet Q&A: Measuring Up Free Ink The Agency Center Resource Center Promotions 2.0 Index of Advertisers

Promo - March 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.