Vista’s expertise is divided into three specialist teams, Media, Content and Strategy.

Account Directors with a minimum 15 years experience oversee the strategy, partnerships and creative to integrate and deliver multi-channel campaigns, reaching consumers at various touchpoints with the same, cohesive messaging. This set-up was mapped from the advertising agency model after witnessing the issues with the traditional PR agency hierarchical model.

Vista’s unique set-up enables the specialist Media and Content teams to focus and deliver excellence. Each client account has weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual targets to keep the teams empowered and driven to deliver.

Here we focus on our Media team set-up and how they run an exceptional press office.

Media relations is the bedrock to any successful PR agency and Vista’s team sustains media coverage month after month, delivering backlinks, awareness and improving SEO.

Here, Stan presents Vista’s guiding principles to running a successful press office – the key is to drive efficiency at every opportunity.

Tapped in

We continually monitor the media agenda, breaking stories, trends, opinion and are tapped in to media requests specific to our client sectors so we can react quickly for clients and maximise opportunities for coverage. The media team works hard to develop strong relationships with its Tier 1 media that are mutually beneficial and pride themselves on being highly responsive to all opportunities that present themselves. Vista delivers finely targeted, rich placements where the client/brand role is acutely relevant and apparent.

Contacts

The foundation of any efficient press office is based on a mature contact list consisting of a breadth of maintained, mutually beneficial relationships. The maturity of the contact list is achieved by keeping a very close eye on initial engagements with new media titles and contacts. Those that are quick to correspond, clear in what they can offer and what they require from you are then chalked on to a master list of contacts that can be plucked from month after month to ensure a consistent stream of quality coverage. Being scrupulous over details such as reach, engagement and coverage quality vs. time/product cost of the collaboration is essential also and should be monitored on a consistent basis.  

More specifically, those in the agency that are managing the press office are familiar with the list to a point where, when called upon to provide ‘quick’, ‘high-reaching’, ‘product-focused’ or ‘specific to X demographic’, a portion of the contacts can be put up for proposal without the need for trawling.

Alerts

Having an organised alerts system in place is vital for autonomizing what can otherwise be some of the most laborious aspects of compiling monthly reports. Utilising software that picks up use of keywords and/or the brand name is essential for picking up coverage, especially from titles we work on features with but who may not report back that their article has gone live. Press clipping services are not always as thorough as you need them to be. Mail alerts for services that allow media to promote feature callouts are another great way of ensuring that the ‘meat’ of your press office is guaranteed for your clients. Use of this third-party assistance alongside manual checking via search engines means that reports are compiled to give a highly accurate account of the press office performance.

Media Space

Whilst alerts have your press office covered with regards to detection of opportunities and results, a compartmentalised media space is essential to deliver on all types of requests in an efficient and time-effective manner. This can be conceptualised as any database or file system that is readily available to the agency that stores approved copy, images, client quotes and campaign materials. Further still, creating and maintaining a live resource that both client and agency can access to approve and access materials from one another is useful for cutting down on time lost through long-winded email correspondence.

Live shared activity reports

Much like having a live resource to make assets readily available, Vista keeps a live activity report for each client updated with day-on-day progress made, as well as where the effort is being focused without the need for emailing. A religious attitude should be taken to keep track of all conversations and opportunities being pursued for the account as it ensures that all parties involved understand the actions which are taking priority in order to deliver on monthly targets. It also acts as a very useful time report. When some delivery takes longer than expected, live reports can easily draw a client’s attention to an issue. They act as a transparent and honest account of the hard work behind the results.

Ongoing Research

The press team assures that when all arrears are in place, there is still time left in the week to allocate towards proactive research into new or growing titles and content covered, to bolster our contact lists. Constantly striving to expand the pool of contacts future-proofs new campaign focuses and new clients with a prepared set of contacts that can immediately be contacted, rather than relying on expensive bought in press lists that are frequently unreliable (surely the biggest pressure point of any journalist / PR relationship) reactive pitching and research to procure results.

Reporting

We use Ace Media to report media coverage to our clients. The platform is tuned to support the AMEC principles and encapsulates the month’s coverage in both a user-friendly dashboard and an index of all the pieces with the ability to ‘click-through’ to the live coverage. Ace Media tracks for keyword delivery, audience reach, brand mentions, engagement, tone, product focus, follow and no follow links. It also facilitates the PESO model of reporting. The Ace Media dashboard provides a user-friendly overview of the monthly delivery and reports can be merged to take quarterly and annual view on delivery. Whatsmore, Ace Media is a live platform so clients can access coverage as it accrues day to day. 

Case in point: Back-to-school with Start-Rite Shoes

Following this press office model contributes massively to the agency delivering a successful back-to-school campaign for Start-Rite. Over a 6-week summer period, there is an intense focus on Start-Rite shoes. Year on year, Start-Rite is featured in between 100-150 pieces of coverage during this period. It is the busiest time of year for the agency. In spite of this, we are able to simultaneously deliver for all our client accounts without a hitch, or without feeling any strain, and this is due to our professional commitment to running an efficient press office process.