The controversy surrounding local vs national PSA distribution is
nearly as old as the “science” of public service
advertising itself. Most local public affairs specialists maintain
they have a much better knowledge of the local media scene. And
many of them do. From the national viewpoint, campaign planners
recognize there are weak points in any local placement scheme, and
there are geographic areas of the country too large for personal
placement. From a PSA distributor’s perspective, both
viewpoints are partially correct.
Faced with this conundrum then, what is the optimum method for
distributing PSAs - nationally or locally? We believe a system that
uses the best features of national and local PSA placement results
in optimum impact.
Historically, many PSA campaign planners have overlooked their
field offices when developing their distribution plan.
Unquestionably, it is easier to simply send out PSA materials to
media outlets without the extra burden of working through field
offices. Increasingly, however, PSA program planners are
recognizing the importance of involving their network of field
offices in campaign design and evaluation.
"Would national service companies bypass their
local sales offices?
of course not, that would be marketing suicide."
Your Field "Sales" Force
Think of it this way...would any successful national package goods
company charged with mass marketing a consumer product at the local
level overlook its field sales force? Would national service
companies such as insurance firms charged with selling intangibles
bypass their local sales offices? Of course not, that would be
marketing suicide. Yet many PSA program developers overlook - or do
not fully utilize - one of their most important assets - the people
who can take a national issue and implement it locally. There are
several steps in developing an effective PSA distribution strategy
designed to maximize both national and local outreach efforts. The
first of these occurs in the campaign planning stage.
Step 1: Engage Community Partners.
While it involves some extra effort, it is important to treat your
field operatives as full partners in the PSA planning process.
This is not to say they should have veto authority in creative
matters or message development, but they are -or should be - a key
element in getting your PSAs aired IF they are part of the
campaign planning process from the beginning.
Your local partners should be able to help you transcend the gulf
between national expectations and local reality, but you have to
engage them in your outreach effort and solicit their feedback.
So step one is to inform your field offices about your plans and
provide them with the tools to expand local outreach. E-mail,
intranets, a special space on your website, tele-conferences,
personal meetings and newer tools such as CDs and DVDs can all be
used for this purpose. From the distributor perspective, we
use a variety of different techniques to engage our clients’
community partners in campaign outreach.
First, we have developed mini-websites for client campaigns that
are on a password protected area of our corporate website called
the PUBSANS GATEWAY. “Draft” distribution lists are
posted to the site and broken out by the client’s particular
geographic configuration, i.e. state, chapter, affiliate, etc., so
community partners can easily see the lists that apply to their
area of responsibility.
In an ideal
world, these lists are “actionable,” meaning they provide key
information for local partners to use in their outreach contacts. The
way we do it, is to compile previous PSA usage information for each of our
client campaigns and incorporate that data in all lists posted to client websites.
That information, combined with the Previous Usage Index (our proprietary
tracking mechanism), will instantly show you where your local partners should
concentrate their efforts. As shown here, if there are media outlets
that have not used a client’s PSAs previously (indicated by a
dash in the OU column at right), but are heavy users of PSAs, (a PUI
above 20), those outlets should be priorities for local contact. These
lists contain full contact information and can easily be exported to Excel
or other software packages.
Since local partners may have more current media data than we have
at the national level, we provide them with a “Distribution
List Editor” to change local media lists in real time.
When any change is made to their posted distribution lists, we are
notified via e-mail who made the change, and the nature of the
change, so that information can be verified by our national staff.
Local partners can add, delete or change lists, re-assign media
from one chapter to another, or download data to create their own
local contact list.
For a number of clients, we have produced CDs and DVDs that include
samples of all PSAs, letters and fact sheets that can be localized,
as well as copies of all collateral items, such as TV storyboards,
so local partners can see how materials were sent to media.
For the Corporation for National & Community Service, we developed a
custom website that integrated the reporting function into the CNCS portal
website, as shown by this graphic.
Since we were also
introducing new evaluation software and CNCS community partners would be very
unfamiliar with how it works, we also wrote a Powerpoint tutorial on how the
entire reporting process works and posted it to the client’s portal
site.
In summary, the most important thing you can do is in this phase of campaign
planning is to...
Make your field representatives feel like they are a full partner
in the entire process of campaign design, not just agents in the follow-up
phase.
Step 2: Coordinating Media Outreach & Localization.
Just like politics, all PSAs are local. While we at the national
level think nationally or globally, what or how we think of an
issue is meaningless to the local community affairs director - the
gatekeeper you must deal with to get your message on the air.
She is thinking about how your issue impacts her viewers, on her
station in her community, first and foremost. Remember, to
generate increased advertising revenues - the lifeblood of local
stations - the community affairs director must find ways to build a
stronger franchise with her viewers. If your PSAs help her
accomplish this goal, your PSAs are likely to get aired. If they do
not, they won’t. So you and your creative team
should be thinking locally, not nationally, from the moment
the first word of the script is committed to paper.
In fact, the decision to make tagged versions must be made early in
the creative stage to allow room for the tags during the creative
development process. There are a lot of different ways to
localize your issue and some of them include:
- Producing locally tagged spots
- Producing a national spot with a "donut" where local spokespersons can be inserted
- Complete localization - either of the first two techniques combined with production of localized letters on local affiliate stationery, personally signed by local staff, local labels and local statistics on your issue
- Radio PSAs with scripts which can be read by local stations as well as pre-produced radio PSAs with localized tags on CDs along with the national PSA messages.
- Newspaper PSAs with a space for local copy inserts
- Outdoor PSAs with a space for local snipe
Typically, tagging is done for TV and print only, because there are special
challenges for tagging radio. Most radio stations want to use their own on-air
talent to tag PSAs, as it permits them to brand the campaign for their station,
making it more difficult to coordinate locally tagged PSAs.
Local tags can use the “donut” technique as shown
herewhich had video inserts for 32 state insurance commissioners.
More
common are TV end tags as shown here for the Corporation for
National & Community Service.
One final point about tagging….you may want to use an 800
toll-free number in the tag as shown here for several
reasons. First, in many TV markets, there is signal
spillover, meaning the TV signal may reach people in another city
or even another state and the viewers would be calling a number
that may not be appropriate in their jurisdiction.
Also, by using a toll-free number in the tag, calls can be traced
and reports generated on the source of the calls, which can be used
as part of the evaluation process.
The next step is to determine how and where materials will be
distributed (local versus national), and the areas where local
partners will want media materials tagged for their
jurisdiction. This requires very close coordination with your
distributor who ultimately will be the one to coordinate all these
details and make sure the right materials get to the right people
in the right format.
First you have to elicit feedback from the field in terms of the number
of media outlets to be contacted and the tape formats for each outlet. Each
organization has a different way of accomplishing this step, but email or
fax surveys work well.
Assuming
all of these procedures are in place, once the tagging information is fed
up the pipeline, the national office sends the quantities and formats of localized
TV PSAs to the distributor. In our case, we have software that creates
a dub format worksheet broken out by geographic territory, the preferred tape
format for the station and the tag that is to go on the tape.
An important step in this phase is to ensure that you are not tagging PSAs
that are distributed to networks, as those reach national or regional audiences,
and thus should have national, not local tags.
Step 3: Making Local Contacts.
Obviously the skills of your community partner network will differ
widely from experienced PR pros, to the novice. As the
national coordinator, you must assume everyone will need some
degree of assistance in making placing PSAs locally as it is a very
specialized field. It is not the same as calling the local
news editor….the person you call, what you say and
what you present are all different. To assist local community
partners in this process, we have written a primer on the entire
process entitled: “How to Place PSAs in Your
Community,” which can be viewed at:
http://www.psaresearch.com/ssareports/articles/psaprimer.html
It covers everything from the definition of a PSA, to a brief
bibliography of additional resources. This article, along with
others that can be helpful, are posted to each of our
clients’ mini websites.
Assuming that your distributor has sent your community partners the
media materials in the formats desired by local media, you should
also remember to send your field offices a VHS viewing copy of your
TV PSAs or perhaps a DVD with your radio and print PSAs. If
your local outreach staff has a laptop, it may have more impact to
present broadcast PSAs to public service directors in full motion
and sound by playing a DVD on the laptop.
In the local outreach toolkit, you may want to develop a local
contact form which local public affairs staff can complete when
making media contacts. This form is returned to the
national office to ensure that materials actually got delivered
locally. This is a very important step because if the materials are
not delivered to media, not only are you wasting resources, you are
missing exposure opportunities which could amount to tens of
thousands of dollars. Finally, you need to provide
instructions on how to order additional materials, and how to tag
materials locally if that is a requirement. All these
materials can be placed on a DVD such as the one shown above.
Step 5: Campaign Follow-up.
Once the campaign has been distributed, the next step is to share campaign
results with the field. For nearly a decade Goodwill Communications
has been using the Internet as a reporting platform, as it is ideally suited
for sharing information with people irregardless of where they are located.
Our new reporting software permits users to develop PSA usage reports “on
the fly” and to sort the data by any means imaginable, including a particular
geographic area, such as chapter or recruiting district.
Our new software can create an intuitive map showing the PSA
coverage by media type for a state or DMA market, and a range of
attainment that is color coded to show the degree of media
penetration. The user simply rolls their PC mouse over the
region they want to see, and the stats show on screen. They
can then double click on that region to “drill down”
for more finite details of PSA usage. For those clients that have
been distributing PSAs for a number of years, the software also
permits us to establish market-by-market benchmarks over a three
year period showing the current year’s attainment
vis-à-vis previous usage. This makes it very easy to
spot the markets where more work is needed.
However, if local community partners fail to act on what the data
is telling them, then evaluation becomes a useless exercise. Both
national staff and local public affairs specialists should use
these reports as the basis for follow-up action. The follow-up
activity accomplishes two purposes: sustaining and expanding
current usage; and converting non-users to users.
For the first category - current or previous users - the local or
national office can prepare letters or certificates of appreciation
which can be sent or personally presented to local gatekeepers. If
you walk into most radio or TV stations, you will see many of these
certificates proudly displayed on office walls, meaning they are
important to the station. You may want to present networks, or
media outlets that have provided an inordinate amount of support
with special plaques or a high-quality premium.
For non-users, as we indicated earlier you need to use the posted distribution
lists to determine two classes of media outlets: those outlets which used
your PSAs previously, but are not currently using your materials,
and those outlets that have never used your PSAs. This
intelligence data provides an excellent reason for contacting media outlets
soliciting their continued support, and remember a local call to media
gatekeepers will probably get through, while a national call will most likely
get screened out. That is why it is so critical to engage your
partners at the local level.
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There are several things you can do to possibly get your
campaign on the air:
- Place calls to the public service director (as stated earlier, these should come from the local community partner, not the national office)
- Write follow-up letters and send to media with a copy of your storyboard or radio script
- Produce and send reminder postcards, mailgrams or some other direct mail device to stations
- Have your local executive director or someone important from the local community (hopefully a big advertiser) contact the station on your behalf. This may give more impetus to the contact.
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Many media gatekeepers - particularly TV public service directors -
regard PSA follow-up calls as a nuisance, and some of that attitude
results from the way the call is made. Rather than asking if your
PSA is going to air, see if you can find a way to sell your
issue, rather than just your PSA. For example, maybe your
organization has other resources to share with the station such as
video news releases or b-roll footage. Or, see if you can get an
editorial placed on the station...perhaps they would be interested
in having one of your representatives appear on a talk show.
Maybe they would be interested in collaborating with one of your
special events such as a Walk-a-Thon. You may be able to involve a
local corporate partner who will purchase airtime or print space
for your organization so your PSAs will air in better time slots or
appear in a better section of the newspaper.
It is vitally important to develop an ongoing relationship with the
media outlet, rather than just asking them to air your PSAs.
As the demand for future PSA air time and space intensifies, it
will be important to develop distribution and placement strategies
that serve both national and local interests. By
soliciting feedback from the field, developing a two-tiered
distribution strategy, and sharing evaluation results with your
community partners, you can accomplish this elusive goal. And, oh
yes, don’t forget to say thank you to the media that provide
all that free support.
About the author: Bill Goodwill is CEO of Goodwill Communications,
a firm specializing in PSA distribution and evaluation.
He has many years of field experience with the U.S. Navy, National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Make-A-Wish Foundation,
Peace Corps, Marine Corps, the Social Security Administration,
Volunteers of America, the Internal Revenue Service and Canon,
USA.
