‘98% of PR fails’: Australian Traveller Media managing director
Australian Traveller Media managing director Quentin Long has said that editorial inboxes are proof that 98% of PR fails.
Speaking to travel marketers, Long said that a lack of resources and availability means editors don’t get to run the stories they would like to the majority of the time, which is why native content is more successful.
Quentin Long, Justin Jamieson, Helen Demetriou, Jayne Andrews, Trudi Jenkins, and Vivienne Kelly at 2019’s Mumbrella Travel Marketing Summit
“98% of PR fails. If you’ve ever seen an editor’s inbox, it [the story pitch] just cannot get up. About 20% of that failure is stuff we would love to run, we would love to do it, we just can’t fit it in,” said Long.
“We don’t have the resources. Native is where that plays a role, that’s the tell as opposed to the advertorial sell. We’re the experts at that.”
Long said good native content sits in the place between a great angle and a good writer. Readers don’t necessarily care if something is sponsored, so long as its engaging and entertaining, according to Long.
“I can engage people. We’ve just got to get the right story and give it to the right people and then consumers won’t care about it being advertising or client funded, as long as it is useful or entertaining. And hopefully both. But it has to be at least one.”
There was a time when publishers lost sight of their place in the travel content ecosystem, said Long. When content was available across a whole manner of platforms, in the rise of bloggers and branded content, editors had to find their USP to be able to continue to run viable businesses.
The secret, according to Long, is engagement, which is where experienced and skilled editors stand apart from bloggers and other content producers.
“We’re the experts at that. When you live or die by how you well you can get a bunch of Australians to consume content about a country called Australia that they’ve dismissed, you get pretty bloody good at it. That’s what we found is our expertise,” said Long.
It’s a fair point raised by Quentin.
Do PR’s have the discretionary budget to engage commercially in native content marketing?
I dare say many don’t, in which case the decision for native rests with someone from marketing to understand, value and play the native content marketing game….
Some PR’s may cringe at having to ‘pay for play’….
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Why would publishers run content that PR Agencies push? Half the time its irrelevant sales content that would otherwise take up precious realestate that could be sold to advertisers who wanted to run native content.
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The fact that Quentin thinks PR is just media relations highlights the issue. The PR industry has allowed this narrow view to permeate.
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That’s media relations not the whole PR function. It’s time journalists stopped commenting on the 10% of the modern PR strategy that they’re now only part of.
P.s. Nice play for media dollars too.
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Having worked from the PR side with Quentin for years, and talked at length with him about this on more than one occasion, here’s what I know:
a) The volume of shit his crew’s inboxes take in every day beggars belief. They’re not alone.
b) Those contributing to the Augean Stables-like levels of manure do not represent what I do.
The blind sending of crap content to an unfiltered database isn’t PR. I can understand Q using the descriptor, though; most do. It speaks volumes about our sector’s reputation, if that is what defines it.