A good friend of Publicity Heaven has just launched a stock photo gallery.
Paul Lashmar is a very experienced former press photographer based in Northamptonshire, and has launched this new gallery.
You can buy images online to use in your work. Plenty of Northamptonshire ones in there which is very handy.
This is my absolute favourite shot Paul got of MP Ann Widdicombe.
Managed to tear myself away from the Barack Obama inauguration coverage for another fascinating episode of Big Chef takes on Little Chef last night.
Again the people running Little Chef came over badly.
At the end of programme Heston – surely the UK’s most amiable chef – was threatening to walk out because there was no sign of any commitment from Little Chef.
He had redesigned the famous Olympic Breakfast and was quite fairly asking them to commit to five test sites instead of just one. Heston’s biggest fear about the project was that they were using him for publicity and not to really make a long-term change to the menu.
With one programme still to go, it increasingly looks that way.
At every turn the chief exec of Little Chef came over as insincere and false. His mouth was saying that he thought he had a real connection with Heston, but his eyes and actions were saying otherwise.
When the Little Chef board trooped into Heston’s restaurant to taste his new menu, they looked like a board. A bunch of suits who had lost touch with what was really happening in their restaurants.
If Little Chef’s goal for this was to reach people like me who haven’t eaten there for years and show me how much they’ve changed for the better (or are starting to change) – then so far they’ve failed. Let’s see what if tonight’s final episode turns this PR disaster around for them.
There was a fascinating programme on TV last night about the roadside restaurant chain Little Chef calling in Heston Blumenthal to help it revamp its menu.
Heston is best known for running the world’s best restaurant, The Fat Duck in Bray, and for being particularly inventive with food.
On last night’s programme he failed to introduce a good enough new menu. In the words of one customer, it was “too poncy”. I’m looking forward to see how he changes it in tonight’s programme (and can’t help but think that Gordon Ramsey could have done a better job, with the common touch he displays in his programme Restaurant Nightmares).
From a PR point of view however, Heston won last night. The Little Chef chief exec came across as closed, unsupportive, and unwilling to compromise. At one point he put the phone down on Heston mid-call, because he refused to give him gross profit figures for their food. Was he really interested in Heston’s help, or did he just want the publicity?
Good PR must have a grounding in being real. It would have been a PR coup for Little Chef had they genuinely wanted help from a top chef updating their menu, with the resultant attention helping to drive a new era of growth. If they only got Heston in as a stunt, this was never going to work.
Will Little Chef realise this in time? Apparently the food trial is still continuing right now at a branch in Hampshire. Can’t wait to watch tonight’s episode and see how it turns out.
According to a newsletter I’ve just received, the average editor gets 215 press releases a week.
And some journalists on national papers get more than 2,000 a week! No wonder it’s hard to make your story stand out.
Here’s the full story from the new PR Success Monthly newsletter from New Venture Publishing (a PR training provider):
Ever wondered how many press releases an editor receives in a week? The answer is 215, according to a survey of 89 editors and senior journalists conducted for the Perfect Press Release Masterclass.
But some get far more – one personal finance writer on a national newspaper says she receives 2,000 a week. She stopped counting long ago, so that figure may not be completely accurate. Even so, editors of major titles often receive between 500 and 1,000 releases a week.
And here’s the rub. More than four out of five of the editors say that most of the releases they receive are irrelevant to their needs. Nearly four out of five say the releases they get contain no useful news. And three-quarters say that too many of the releases contain off-putting self-promotion and puffery.
But don’t give up yet. If you get your release right, you can hit the jackpot in terms of big media coverage. Nearly half of the editors in the survey (43 per cent) said they had found at least one big story as a result of a press release.
Pretty stunning stuff. When I was the news editor of a radio station, I received probably no more than 100 releases a week, but this was before the station accepted releases by email. I bet they get hundreds now.
So you’ve got a dream holiday island and you want to promote it?
Why not offer a job looking after the island - £70,000 for just 12 hours work a MONTH, mostly on the beach watching wildlife.
The only catch is you need to blog about your experience and do media interviews.
This job on Hamilton Island is a great publicity stunt, and even though it’s only a six month position I am sorely tempted to apply!
