If you’re on a shoestring budget, pay-per-placement PR isn’t for you.
But if you have the money to spend, it can land you on a top TV show or in a top-tier newspaper or magazine quicker than if you tried to pitch yourself.
Rather than paying a publicist or PR firm a retainer, regardless of whether they generate publicity for you, you pay for every media hit a pay-per-placement firm helps you get.
No publicity equals no fee.
But if they pitch you to a national TV show like “Good Morning, America” and you end up on the show, the fee can be upwards of $10,000. (See “How to Get Booked on the Morning TV Talk Shows.”)
Let’s say several newspaper and magazine journalists see the show and ask you for interviews. Depending on how the pay-per-placement contract is written, you’ll have to pay the publicist an additional fee for each of those articles.
Pay-per-placement, one of the most controversial forms of PR, isn’t for everybody, particularly those on a shoestring budget. Critics say there’s no justification for the outrageous fees. But advocates argue that it makes publicists work that much harder.
I’ve heard journalists complain that overly-aggressive pay-per-placement publicists can make pests out of themselves. I’ve also heard editors say they love PPP publicists who have pitching down to a science and will never waste the journalist’s time pitching lousy story ideas.
The article “Paying for PR–But Only When it Works” explains how pay-per-placement is getting good results for the CEO of a Colorado gift basket company.
If you’re hiring a publicist, don’t interview any candidates until you know the right questions to ask, and you understand how they charge for their services. My ebook “How to Hire the Perfect Publicist” walks you step-by-step through the entire process. It includes a list of questions to ask all potential candidates, shows you how to rank them, how to choose the best one, and how to work with your publicist. The ebook also explains the four ways publicists charge for their services, and the pros and cons of each one.
Hum, pay per place sounds nice, but I don’t think it would be the right direction for smaller firms. They put in too much work into opps that never materialize. You said some editors like PPP PR people? If I was a PPP PR person I would be pitching anything and everything trying to get placements. I guess for some it is worth it.
I enjoyed your article about pay-for-placement. We certainly know the pros and cons and that is why we started the Media Connect Program (http://www.bissonbarcelona.com/media_connect_program.htm). Lower fees for guaranteed connections with the media. If you ever decide to weigh these options again please consider throwing our program into the mix. We are the only company who offers something like this as far as I know.
I appreciate the posting of this article. I would like to offer up a few thoughts on it as a professional who works for a PR firm whose business model is pay-per-interview (placement).
First, this article states that smaller companies on a tight budget would not necessarily benefit from PPI publicity. The truth is we have had many small clients with small budgets, who are looking to make sure their marketing dollars are being effectively utilized. The great thing about PPI is that you know you’re getting coverage for the money. If you hire a traditional PR firm, you’ll end up paying huge retainer fees, hourly rates, etc., without the guarantee that it will lead to positive media coverage. While we obviously cannot guarantee media coverage, we can promise that you will only pay for what you get. That’s something small businesses can appreciate.
Secondly, the article points out that some critics feel PPI fees are “outrageous.” I can address this from two angles. One, add up the costs and fees that traditional PR firms charge and then look at how many placements they garnered on your behalf. How much does it come out to per placement? My guess is quite a lot. We have a set price for placements, so there’s no guessing at what we’re doing with your money. And two, PPI fees are still a miniscule fraction of what advertising costs are, yet we are able to deliver media coverage that is rich in content, and sell it to you in much the same way you would purchase ad space. Ask yourself, “What’s more effective? A 30-second ad, costing tens of thousands of dollars, or a 4-minute news piece, which costs 1/10th of that ad?”
Finally, one thing the article highlights is the efficiency with which publicists work under the PPI model. I would definitely agree that our publicists have pitching down to a science. How does that benefit our clients? We’re able to get them more coverage. Think about it. We know exactly what to pitch and to whom, so we spend less time “trying” to get coverage, and more time actually booking placements. During a given month, our publicists collectively make an average of 30,000 calls to the media, working on behalf of our clients. We don’t waste time blanketing the media with mass press release mailings, because we know they just aren’t effective. Twenty years in the industry has given us plenty of opportunity to fine-tune our skills.
In the end, each business has to decide what will work best for them. Some might be perfectly happy paying huge retainer fees to a PR firm, just to see a few press releases get mailed out. While it might get them a placement here and there, the client ultimately has to pay for both the hits and the misses. With a PPI-based PR firm, you only pay for the hits.
To see examples of just some of the coverage we have obtained, and to see a list of our upcoming placements, feel free to visit us at http://www.publicity.com.
i was a senior PR executive for several years and as many of you , struggle with several PR agencies trying to get them to commit to deliver results. I was basically agreeing to pay a monthly fee for a minumum period of 6 months , so they could try their best. PR is much more than media relations but when it comes to publicity, you either get media exposure or you don’t.
I tried http://www.publicityguaranted.com in the past and it worked great. I only had to pay them for delivered results with no strings attached. Media exposure is a great alternative to get your name out and drive traffic to your site specially in down economy you can pay for delivered results
This is an older article so thought I’d post a reply with an updated response to fees. The $10k fee is higher than we charge and as long as the client can cap their monthly budget, there’s not a problem going up to –and not over the budget a client is willing to pay for their guaranteed monthly media and interviews. Pay for placement publicity is a great way to go for small to medium sized companies! More info on this is at http://www.theprgroup.com
Thanks for the update, Vicki. Pay-per-placement fees are all over the board, depending on the size of the media outlet as well as the size of the PR firm.