Smack my pitch up

Bad Pitch

Sorry about the bad pun headline but I have just got back from the IOW festival where The Prodigy were headlining Friday. A great weekend and good to see some familiar faces from our industry there too.

Back to business. Anyone who reads my Meet the Media series of interviews (next week is Bryan Glick from Computing by the way) will know that one of the biggest pet hates of the press is a pitch sent to the wrong journalist offering something that isn’t relevant to the publication. I can actually sympathise a little on a small scale as somehow this blog has started appearing on some PR agencies media lists.

Interesting when you consider that the name of this blog is Paul Stallard’s technology PR agency blog. I would have hoped the name would have given it away but if you actually read any posts you will also see I talk about the PR agency I work for at any given opportunity. That said I am still receiving pitches from other PR professionals.

Without naming and shaming vendors or PR agencies, my three favourites from the past two weeks were the following stories:
1. leading car buying web site, has revealed its latest abc-e results
2. New mortgage comparison technology launched
3. Company X has announced it is supporting a community project in Peterborough

Not great examples of a targeted sell in. That said, I picked up a great story on Twitter yesterday about an even worse pitch. The Bad Pitch Blog does exactly what it says on the tin and shames the companies that give our industry a bad name. So having looked at the name of the blog and seen its content, what was someone thinking when they sent them (a poorly constructed) email pitch. Worth a read.

So to all those PR agencies sending me your press releases – please continue to do so. It always brightens my lunch break when I check my personal mails. I’m actually waiting for my first invite to a press briefing as I am really tempted to accept and see how long it will take before they realise the mistake….or if they actually do.