Sunday 10 January 2010

Different mindsets...???

I was being a PR geek and browsing YouTube for public relations videos when I came across some advice from Duncan Shaw, KCNC-TV executive producer. In his video he talks about how you tailor your client's story for different media, a very well known PR tactic.



However, I could not get my head around the last point he makes. He says that the way in which something is reported in the morning is different to the way in which it is reported at night because audiences are in different mindsets. Mindsets? What does that mean?
Surely you tailor stories for different channels because they have different audiences who want different things from their chosen channel regardless of the time of day. For instance, a news story on BBC1 will surely be reported in the same way at 9am as it will at 10pm, but it will be different to the type of story reported by Channel 4.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Beth,

    I think the first comment to make is that the audience of a TV channel, for example, is very different depending on time of day. For the BBC, for example, the Jeremy Kyle audience probably doesn't watch Panorama.

    The second point is that we do feel differently depending on time of day. Ever sat thinking about life in the evening, making plans that seem audacious but great, only to wake and see things differently in the cold light of day?

    I remember in the marketing module of my MBA, there was a lot of discussion around "mood based marketing" - the idea that the way to shift product is to focus on an emotional response, and that to do that, you first need to identify the likely mood of an audience. And obviously for mass media, such as TV, that may well vary by time of day. For example, the Sunday Night James is pretty much always tired, so a news story that requires a lot of thinking about is probably going to get ignored. Whereas in the morning, when i am driving to work, i quite like to listen to opinions about breaking news, not just the news itself.

    Hope that makes sense.

    James.

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  2. Yes, that makes sense. I understand what you mean, I just don't think it's the most important point he could have made when talking about tailoring stories in PR. If you tailor a story for a gadget show, you will surely use the same angle whatever time of day for that type of program.

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