For those of you that have been following along with our case study on running a cause related marketing campaign in a business, this post is for you.

Our past posts have talked about how to select a cause to get behind, and some activities to get started with promoting the cause and getting some media attention. You can check them out here:

• Cause Related marketing – the Beginning
• Case Study Update – 5/11/08

We have been successful with a media release. One of the local papers read the release and decided to run the article in their newspaper. This was great news for us here at Creative Junction and for the other businesses that are involved in Movember 2008. A photographer came out to the offices last Wednesday and took some pictures of the team for use with the media release that was published Wednesday this week.

Now for the not-so-good news with this campaign. The result of the media release was not as I had planned. It was great that we were included in the paper, but frustrating that the article published was quite different to what was sent to the paper. This meant that the publicity we had wanted for the other businesses involved – Wordware and Zesta Kitchens – didn’t happen. Also, we had hoped that any donations made would be made through the link on our site so we could track the performance of the campaign. However, the paper elected to reference the main Movember website instead.

Lessons

• Media releases, when accepted, are not guaranteed to be published as you had hoped or planned. The journalist and editor will almost always change the release to suit their needs, space etc.
• Celebrate the times your business is included in any Media. It may not be in the format or wording you had hoped, but if your business is mentioned in a good light in a newspaper – an unbiased resource of information– then this bodes well for you.

Our next stage is to send out details of our efforts to clients and suppliers of Creative Junction. We shall update you on the outcome of this part of our cause related marketing campaign and let you know any lessons we learn in the process.

Have you had any experience with media releases? Care to log in and leave them here?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 7:51 am and is filed under Marketing, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.