When it comes to generating earned media for product and brand stories, the bar can be quite high. Media outlets typically are leery of touting a brand’s promotional message, and even when they deem it newsworthy, rising above the noise of other news is a challenge. Corinne Gudovic leads the Ketchum account team that has developed award-winning PR programs for the Friskies cat food brand two years in a row. Here, she explains how creativity can drive news coverage.
If a creative idea is truly novel or big enough, that alone can be enough to drive news. But more often, creativity needs to move from simply being different to addressing a need or solving a problem. What worked so well for the Friskies cat-cam program was that the creativity behind it drew on a true insight that struck a chord with cat owners and other consumers, including members of the media.
“The creativity was that it drew on the media’s own comments, as well as comments from their readers, so members of the media served as ambassadors for the story to their editors.”
Our team arrived at this insight by studying the target audience: cat owners. We did extensive online research to see what people were saying about their cats on places such as Twitter. A lot of what we found were questions and conversations around people wondering whether their cats whiled away time sleeping, eating or playing when no one was around. That insight became the impetus for a PR program that allowed the brand to answer a burning question for cat owners: What does my cat do all day?
The program attached mini-cams to the collars of 25 cats and the cats became roving “repurrters,” with the cameras snapping a photo every 15 minutes. This problem-solution approach, along with the idea of findings from a feline focus group, resonated with media.
For the second year of the program, we knew we needed both a creative idea and creative approach to media. So, this time, our research focused on reactions to the previous year’s news articles. We read every single reader comment on the online articles. And there were hundreds, if not thousands. One thing that stood out was this comment at the end of an article by an AP reporter: Will the cats get movie cameras next? Readers wondered, too. So, that question not only sparked the idea to outfit the cats with video cameras and turn the footage into a movie, but it also became part of the media approach.
The creativity was that it drew on the media’s own comments, as well as comments from their readers, so members of the media served as ambassadors for the story to their editors. Once the second-year story was out there, “newness” did not drive it. Instead, it spread quickly through social networks because it fit into conversations people were already having. It’s online popularity then bubbled up to traditional media. Similarly, any brand can drive news when its creative ideas speak to topics its target audience wants to talk about.