While we all appreciate clients are only really interested in coverage, those results land based on the amount of work that has gone in behind it.

Our experience and relations, and the ability to build new and successful contacts, comes from days of work on just one story – or even the fruits from years of nurturing.

You wouldn’t make a house with no foundations – it’d fall over. You’d expect the builders to spend weeks drilling down into the earth to secure a sturdy platform on which they can build the house of your dreams. If you hassle the builders to ‘get on with it faster’, it’s likely that:
1) the house will fall down very quickly
2) the builders will go for a tea break. A very long one.

Same applies to media relations. Foundations are the most important part of a campaign. A release is not distributed (hand picked of course), done and dusted in a couple of days. It takes significant amounts of our time getting it right beforehand, and quite a bit more after the event itself.

It’s no good moaning about clients that don’t understand and give us a hard time. It’s up to us to educate them. Doing this not only helps them understand just what is involved, it also helps us to justify our fees.

Perhaps ‘media training’ needs to take on yet another guise – and be rolled out to demonstrate exactly what goes on in a single example process.