Here’s an almost exact replication of an email conversation I had with a PR recently that has still left a sting while I was trying in less then 16 hours (including a night) to put together a double page spread for a paper.
Me: Hi, I urgently need to get images and a release of your best selling X Product.
They: We don’t have a release. I’ll cut and paste something from the website.
Email arrives with a cut and pasted one line that says nothing relevant about the product at all, but I think started with, ‘Wow’.
Me: I need more than this – I have to write something about your product. Maybe you can tell me some ingredients; emollients perhaps?
They: I’ve had a word with our head of X, and they say it isn’t about the formulation, it’s about the colour.
And that my friends, is when it all gets just too hard. I think if the client knew they’d been dropped from a mainstream media feature because that’s the best their PR could do, they’d be absolutely horrified. I know I was.
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