One thing PR agencies and Tourism Authorities are often short on is experience in niche areas (wind surfing, climbing, sailing, cycling, diving etc), which is why I always get them to ask what I believe is a critical question of the ground contacts at any destination I'm about to visit. For my niche area this is:
What is the diving like during the proposed travel period?
The reason I always make sure this question is answered prior to travel?
Several years ago Tourism Australia arranged a three week trip to cover the diving in Tasmania as part of their Visiting Journalist Programme. They have an all too common rule for visiting journalists, you must visit two states (A few years ago I had an assignment to cover the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba, I also had to visit St. Maarten and Statia due to their 'three island rule' for visiting journalists). And so we spent a week on Heron Island in Queensland, followed by a pleasant four days of travelling down the South Queensland coastline. None of this was of interest to DIVER magazine, the assignment was to write about the kelp forests of Tasmania.
When we arrived in Tasmania the first question the dive operators asked was, "what an earth are you doing visiting now?" The weather was fantastic, but the visibility was awful. We tried to find somewhere along the coast where the plankton wasn't blooming, but everywhere we went the visibility was down to a very cloudy two to three feet. It was the end of the summer and the kelp was doing the underwater equivalent of shedding its leaves, so even if there were no plankton in the water, the kelp looked really ugly.
This experience came as a surprise as Australia Tourism are usually an extremely professional and thorough organisation - I didn't think to question their planning.
By the way, if you go to their website you'll find invaluable marketing intelligence - very useful information for journalists. It's always worth checking this kind of website prior to a pitch to an editor as documents such as the March report for the UK:
Download tourism_australia_uk_mmr_apr08.pdf
will tell you if the idea has been covered already, as well as whether Australian Tourism would be interested in supporting you.
It's interesting to note how Australia Tourism are still using Equivalent Advertising Value as a measure for evaluation purposes. I would hope they are also supporting this with qualitative analysis of the media coverage to ascertain if their marketing objectives have been achieved.
Back to the assignment - Australia Tourism provided us with: business class seats on Singapore Airlines, a limousine meet and greet at the airport, excellent hotels, tables at superb restaurants, hire cars, internal flights, ferries and all diving services. We also met with their regional representatives for dinner on the day of arrival in each area. All very professional and perfectly choreographed. However, as I only write for DIVER (I'm subject to an agreement not to write for other magazines) it was a marketing disaster.
This wasted journey (but what a wasted journey!) could have been avoided if I had asked just one question of Tourism Australia in the planning stages. In evaluation terminology (I have a Masters in Education where I specialised in this subject) their efforts had merit, in that everything they did for me, as a visiting journalist, was of an extremely high standard. However, the overall trip had no worth as there was no resulting media coverage. As far as value was concerned, there was no ROI.
So - don't be afraid to ask what may seem to be obvious questions of any PR / Marketing firm or tourism authority. Trust me, they'll thank you for it.
Keep writing...
Brendan
P.S. If you are interested in the field of evaluation for PR and Marketing purposes, Michael Scriven's definition of evaluation will apply to the majority of projects: "the systematic determination of the merit, worth and value of the evaluand."
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