Now why would a PR firm do this?

Germany's economy ministry has fired its public relations company, saying the firm offered to buy advertising space in a newspaper in return for the paper running stories on ministry policy.

The brief news item about this is available here, courtesy of The Toronto Star.

Their reasons for this pay for play scheme might have been:

1. They can't really influence the media the old-fashioned way anymore, although this sort of thing has been going on for years;

2. They are billing a huge retainer and getting no results via traditional means, although this has been going on for years;

3. They are seriously ethically-challenged, although this has been a widespread problem in the PR industry for years.

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If you sell a product or a service for the 15-to-24 year old set, and if your PR and advertising campaigns are still focused on reaching people through the traditional mainstream print media, 80% of the young peple you're trying to reach will never see your ads or read any stories about you in the newspaper. Why? They don't read newspapers.

In this story, in which News Limited chairman and chief executive John Hartigan insists on making the point over and over again that newspapers are not dead, reporter Richard Gluyas of The Australian Media drops this one liner toward the end of his very interesting piece:

The need to adapt, though, was exemplified in the steady erosion of newspaper readership among 15- to 24-year-olds. Only 20 per cent of that age category read newspapers, down significantly from 65 per cent in 1972.

So how much time and money is still being spent, for example, by small and medium-sized privately-held companies trying to garner a mere mention in The New York Times? Folks, the era of 'influencing the influencers' is rapidly coming to a close. It's the age of going direct.

Meanwhile, readership tastes aside, I ask you how in world can a traditional pint newspaper compete with Google's latest news announcement, as noted and explained in this item by Danny Sullivan on search engine land:

Google News is asking people who are in news stories to email them comments about the story, which will be associated with those articles…

Now when or if the print edition of The New York Times writes about you and/or your company and they get it wrong, or they miss the point, or they slant a story for reasons unknown, or they don't spell your name right, what are your options? Pull your advertising? Write a letter to the editor? Call the publisher?

Don't be silly.

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First, when they start publishing this stuff in the traditional media you have to know it is not as 'far out' as some would still insist. Here's an item — a contributed column, actually — appearing in The Appleton-Post Crescent based in Wisconsin. It's by Kathy Fredrickson. She's a small-business marketing consultant and the director of development and marketing for the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh College of Business.

She's saying if the establishment old-timers in marketing today don't get with it soon — and at least indulge some of the new ideas of the up-and-coming Generation X employees — the elders will lose their leadership edge… they'll be pushed into the background. Key take away: want to stay young and relevant? Get with the program.

She offers a great line which I think perfectly summarizes the old way of doing business and how the newest generation sees it:

Gen X marketers are old enough to remember boomer mentors teaching them how to market during a time when media relations was a dialogue with reporters, photos were meticulously airbrushed by artists and the only commercials on television were crafted by agencies.

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