My Senior Campaign Manager, Tony Panaccio, wrote a great piece the other day about the state of TV advertising and I thought it was so interesting I wanted to share it with you.

The Nielsen Company tracks the audience viewership of TV programs so that programmers and advertisers can get a handle on how many people are watching certain shows. Programmers take that data and figure out how much they’ll charge to advertise on their shows. Of course, they pay attention to key demographics and more granular statistics, but at the end of the day, this is the data that helps them figure out that they’re going to charge $3 million per minute to advertise on The Super Bowl broadcast and $1 – $3.80 per minute on reruns of the recent reboot of Hawaii Five-0.

I think I’ve got that right, but now Nielsen is tracking ratings for shows people record and watch on their DVRs later. They even have it segmented to track people who watch shows on the same day they record it and up to 7 days afterward. I just have one question, and forgive me if I seem obtuse here, “Why?”

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Most people fast-forward through the commercials when they watch their favorite show on their DVR. I know I do. Even Nielsen acknowledges the phenomenon. They reported in 2010 that of the 33 percent of Americans that own a DVR, 56 percent fast-forward through commercials. Of course, this was not a survey of general Americans, but rather of Nielsen families who are accustomed to keeping an electronic diary of their viewing. So maybe they’re on slightly better behavior than the rest of us.

The key thing I’m wondering about is how much longer does the TV commercial have as an advertising tool? The trend is clear that the DVR is becoming more common and that people are typically using it to avoid the constant barrage of advertising they are subjected to every day. Billboards on the highway, commercials on the radio, banners and pop ups on the Internet, people are simply tired of the constant assault of advertising on their senses. So they use the DVR, they switch stations on the car radio when the commercials come on and many even choose more scenic routes for their morning commutes.

The upshot is this, as people reject advertising more and more, what happens between the commercials becomes more important. That’s why PR is still the best value for the money, because no matter what technology people come up with to block or ignore advertisements, they only do so because they are far more interested in what is happening on the shows they watch and listen to, and the publications they read online and offline. Moreover, advertisements lack any kind of third-party verification, and consumers have become so media savvy, they know the difference between an ad and a show. They know advertisers pay big money for those spots on The Super Bowl and on their favorite shows, and they understand that they control their messages. They also know, and generally trust, the editorial side of the media. That’s what they read online, what they listen to on radio and what they tune into when they watch TV.

You can’t buy that kind of trust with an ad and the only way you can get on the air or in editorial print coverage is through PR.

So don’t mourn for the TV commercial just yet. But feel free to wave as you pass it by on your way to your TV interview.

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Not a day goes by that I don’t hear this same question from people who contact me to help them market their books: If I do PR, how many books will I sell?

This seems like a straightforward question at first, until I start asking some questions myself: Do you have a Web site? What’s your marketing plan? Is your book available online? What’s your message?

At the risk of demystifying what I do for my clients, let me make it abundantly clear, there is NO magic wand that will help you sell your book. PR, advertising, promotions, Web sites, social networking, none of it will guarantee you a bestseller. However, I think it’s imperative that I point out a few things which, if absent, will practically guarantee barely any sales beyond family and friends.

It’s important to understand that leaving out key elements of book marketing will make any of the tactics you use ineffective.

1. No Web Site: If you don’t have a Web site for your book, you’re missing one of the most basic elements of book marketing. According to recent stats on Foner.com, about 48 percent of ALL books sold in North America are sold online. So, if nearly half your potential customers are buying online and you don’t have a Web site, how do you expect to attract potential buyers and make sales?
2. Poor Web Site: Having a Web site is a step in the right direction, but if it doesn’t effectively market your book, it’s almost worthless. The good news is that researching effective book Web sites isn’t difficult. For starters, look at the Web sites of your favorite recent book purchases. Also, look at the Web sites of a few bestsellers and see how they do it. I’ll bet you find the same basic elements (synopsis, about the author, excerpts, testimonials), but more than that, you may gain valuable insight about marketing tactics to implement on your Web site that can also work for you. The bottom line is in order to be effective, your visitor has to have a reason to want to buy your book, and your Web site has to give it to them or you lose the sale.
3. No Book Marketing Plan: Marketing plans don’t cost anything to create. Even if it’s your first attempt at marketing, having a marketing plan in place is essential. Even an elementary one is far better than having no marketing plan at all. And, to take it one step further, even if you’ve developed marketing plans in other industries, it’s important to realize that marketing your book is like nothing you’ve done before. So, while researching the topic of book marketing, look for ideas you can apply to your own book marketing that have been successful for other authors and publishers.
4. No Publicity Plan: Books are not magnets. They’re made of paper, for the most part, and as a result they won’t inherently attract anyone to buy them if the public isn’t aware they exist first. Being interviewed as a guest on radio and/or TV or having the book mentioned in newspapers and magazines is the first measure of awareness your book will receive. Will it sell 100,000 of your books? Not by itself. Will you sell any books without it? Not likely.
5. No Amazon or E-Book Availability: We’ve already mentioned that about half of all books sold in North America are sold online. Moreover, the e-book is a growing category that is beginning to chart some serious numbers. If you aren’t listed on Amazon and you don’t have an e-book, you are literally telling more than half of your potential customers that you don’t really want them to buy your book.
6. No Message: Every book has a key message intended for the reader to walk away with. That key message is undoubtedly the passion that drove you to write the book in the first place. That’s why your ability to communicate the essence of that message is an important element to selling your book. I’ve seen it happen all too often where the author thinks his message to the consumer is “buy my book.” That doesn’t work. You’ve got to give them a reason. You need to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” What will the reader know after reading your book that they don’t know now? What problem might it solve? What will they learn? Without identifying the answers to these questions, your marketing and publicity plans will go nowhere like engines without fuel.
7. No Budget: The old axiom of “you get what you pay for” is 100 percent true for marketing a book. At the very least you will need a small budget for things like hiring someone to build your Web site (ideally you hire a pro who can program AND understands marketing), buying books from your publisher to send out to the media, support material for book signings, travel expenses, postage, and working with a PR pro. Even if you don’t hire a PR firm, you still need a budget for purchasing the media lists in order to perform your media outreach. Whether you are published by a traditional publisher or self-published, these are real expenses that will need to be accounted for. So plan in advance, because getting that first shipment of books from the publisher is not the end of the race. It’s just the first milestone.

Writing a book is an arduous task, to be sure. And, I don’t want to mislead you into thinking this is ALL there is to do. There are other components that will determine the total effectiveness of your book promotion efforts, but these are the crucial ones that ALL authors must have as a bare minimum. Honestly, without these, it’s naive to think you can reap the wonderful rewards from having written your book.

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Over the years, I’ve always advised my clients that if you want to get in the news, you have to watch and read the news. I know it sounds a little like “bumper sticker” advice, but it’s really not meant as a sound bite. In fact, we use a practical application of that advice every single morning at our agency.

It’s actually a very simple list of easy steps that anyone can do, and it can get blockbuster results.

• Read the Feed (or watch the news) – A daily routine of following breaking news and popular stories is the first and most essential step in my formula for how you can get interviewed by the media. If you are Internet savvy and prefer to get your news digitally, tracking news trends will be a breeze. There are many online news outlets, such as Yahoo, MSN, CNN and AOL, that prominently feature on their sites the most searched and significant news events each day. There are also other online services, such as Google Alerts, Digg, and others, that allow users to stay on top of the hot topics. If your preference – like me – is to watch the news on TV and/or read daily newspapers, those are also effective methods for keeping up with the news cycles. Whether you prefer traditional or digital news, the key thing is to establish a news-tracking routine and stick to it. It will orient you as to which news topics are getting the most attention, and will be a strong predictor of which stories are most likely to have a longer cycle on TV news outlets.
• Identify a Hook – As you follow the news each day, think creatively about how your company or your expertise could be applied to comment on news events of the day. I’ll relate something that happened this past month, and how we applied it. We have a client who is a world-class financial advisor. He is a former Wall Street player who made himself very comfortable through that life, but felt another calling for himself. Now he works as a financial planner for families in trouble, and he’s extremely passionate about it. We were looking for news hooks other than the typical “Tips for the Rough Times” pitch that has been making the rounds since 2008. As we were doing that, it hit the wire that the IRS was going to be taxing the claims being collected from BP Oil by the workers displaced by the disaster. At the same time, we had just finished watching a clip of Anderson Cooper of CNN on the ground in Louisiana, covering the crisis. At that point, it rang like a bell – we’d send our client to the Gulf Coast to help those hardest hit by the disaster. So, in a matter of minutes, our team went from, “This is a great hook,” to implementation.
• Develop your Angle – Taking my client example from above, we developed an angle for him using the BP oil story as a launching pad. We emailed him to see if he had any specific tips for the Gulf Coasters, and he came through beautifully. We cobbled his tips into the pitch, and it flowed like this: 
  

  A Guide for Gulf Coast Victims of the BP Oil Spill

  Financial Expert Offers Tips on Getting Through the Worst
  Gulf Coast workers displaced by the BP oil spill have had to deal with losing their jobs, losing their businesses and many are losing their homes. But there are ways that they can protect themselves right now from further damage. Money expert (name deleted, because we’re still pitching him and we don’t want to jinx anything!), has a slew of creative and practical tips for those affected by the disaster.

  He says that uncertainty on when the spill will be stopped leads to the uncertainty about long-term economic activity and its effects on employment, consumer spending and housing prices. So, he is advising people to do the following things:

  • Be Prepared. Prepare for the worst case scenario. Build up a cash position equal to 3-6 months living expenses. Keep a significant amount of cash in your house in case you may be forced to evacuate due to a storm or adverse environmental conditions. Keep enough gasoline on hand to be able to fill your vehicle.
  • Stock Up. Build up a supply of food and water in case a sudden evacuation is ordered or if city water sources are deemed undrinkable.
  • Get Trained. If your livelihood is based on fishing or tourism, consider getting training in industries not dependent on the fishing or hospitality industries. If worse case scenarios develop, jobs lost in these areas will not come back for many years.
  • Fill Out the Forms. Apply for all aid and compensation available from both BP and state and Federal government. If income has stopped or decreased significantly, apply for food stamps and other social assistance.
  • Watch the Real Estate Market. Be prepared for lower real estate values for some time to come. Even if the spill stopped tomorrow, the ecological effects will be felt for years. Gulf Coast real estate, both commercial and residential, is falling dramatically and will not rebound anytime soon.
  • Stay Well. Monitor your family’s health as there have been reports of mysterious sicknesses in Gulf residents and cleanup workers.
  • Read the News. Stay informed as best you can. In addition to traditional news sources, read blogs, where you may find reports that are not widely available to the public. BP and the federal government have not been fully forthcoming in informing the public of the extent of the disaster.

  Thanks for your consideration – let me know if you’re interested.

• Blast it Out – Once you’ve read the news, identified a hook and written up your angle, it is time to launch your effort. When you pitch something that is hot in the news, you also need to call producers individually to follow up, ensuring they received and read your email. Many national producers won’t take phone calls, so at the very least, send your emails with a return receipt so you can track that they opened it.

To follow through with the effort we began earlier this month, we have booked two national TV interviews and six local TV interviews across the Gulf Coast, with the campaign continuing all through the month. So the bottom line here is that by doing this daily exercise, you will enable yourself to take advantage of these kinds of headlines. And who knows? You might even be able to fold yourself into the national news cycle.

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Why Getting On the Show Is More Important Than Ever

Commercials used to be the time to get up and stretch the ol’ legs, get a snack or let the dog out. Today, they are the signal to hit the fast forward button on the remote.

The advent of Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), often referred to by one of the leading brand names, TIVO, has finally given the viewer a break from the background noise of television advertising. Instead of being screamed at by local car dealers, pitched on the ShamWow or told repeatedly to not squeeze the Charmin, many consumers who subscribe to cable TV these days just zoom past the commercials without ever giving them a second look.

Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay, the creators of TIVO, don’t even view their creation as a consumer product. They call it a “public service.”

The consumer backlash against advertising has been building for years, and it is in all sectors. Even as advertisers shift their budgets from traditional to online media consumers are feeling empowered and fleeing advertising at every turn.

But don’t take my word for it.

A study published late last year by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) makes it very clear that advertising industry insiders are running for the hills. The writing is on the wall when the ANA itself reveals that, “More than 80 percent of advertising executives believe that DVRs will have a serious negative impact on the effectiveness of TV advertising…changes in DVR penetration and DVR usage will result in changes in commercial viewership and changes in the cost of TV advertising. These changes, in turn, will affect the effectiveness of TV advertising, requiring a continuous revision of the tailored strategic response to maintain advertising spending efficiency.”

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With consumers finally in the driver’s seat as regards their exposure to TV ads, savvy marketers are looking at the alternatives to expensive TV spots, especially when the penetration of paid TV advertising continues to be eroded by the growth of the DVR.

And that brings us to the point I really want to get across.

Today it is more important than ever to actually be IN the show, rather than have your message relegated to a few seconds in between the show’s segments, lost in the fast-forward blur.

So what does “in the show” mean? It means you or your company’s CEO or spokesperson booked as an expert guest on talk shows, or interviewed as an expert commentator on the news story du jour. It means you are part of the entertainment, not just another commercial spot—boring at best, most often annoying.

Being a part of the entertainment, instead of the interruption, delivers tremendous value in several other important ways. The most important of these is that people trust the news far more than paid ads. The tacit endorsement of a TV talk show host or news reporter carries much more weight with consumers—a favorable interview is seen as an implicit endorsement for your products, services or book.

A great example of this value is now known as “The Oprah Effect.” Ten years ago, Oprah chose Spanx shapewear as one of her “Favorite Things,” and sales boomed for the Atlanta-based clothing company that manufactures the line. Countless authors, companies, and even other television personalities (anyone heard of Dr. Phil?), owe their good fortune to Oprah’s endorsement.

Now granted, there is really only one Oprah, but interviews on other television talk shows can have a similar effect on the market’s perception of your products or book—even if it is not quite as drastic as an Oprah endorsement.

Is it time for you to look at how the increased media coverage of a good PR campaign could give your product or service a competitive edge? Next time you sit down to watch your favorite TV news or talk show, think about how the guests and expert commentators on the show appeared. If you watched the same “expert” pitching his product in a TV spot, would you have been as convinced of its value?

More to the point…would you actually have watched the TV commercial? I personally don’t think I could actually sit through another 30 seconds of the brunette selling Progressive Insurance…hurry, where’s the remote?

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