How to prepare your spokesperson for TV with Martin Kimber

Alessia Horwich (00:07):

Welcome to you On The Rox, a podcast from Roxhill Media that asks some of the best journalists in the UK for their solutions to the kind of dilemmas that confront PRs daily. We know there’s not a one size fits all way of communicating with journalists, so we’re going direct to the writers in the newsroom to hear how they like to work with PRs and how to stand out in their inboxes. My name is Alessia Horwich, I’m a former Sunday Times journalist, now the brand director at Roxhill. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to prepare your spokesperson for a television interview with Martin Kimber, Business Producer for Sky’s business life. The first thing I want to ask you is about you, Martin. Tell me about your career. Did you always want to be a journalist?

Martin Kimber (00:48):

No. I wanted to do dinosaurs when I was a kid. Not really sure what to do with them. I kind of was aware of journalism. My mum was a journalist for the BBC for a short period of time, and I never really thought I’d get into the industry myself. It looked like a really competitive industry. There are a lot of walls up. It’s become more and more competitive as time has gone on. When I discovered it was a possibility, it was all I wanted to do, and I got very, very lucky. I got a lot of help from some very generous people who gave me a break and gave me a chance, and I’m very, very grateful for that.

Alessia Horwich (01:24):

What made you realise it was a possibility?

Martin Kimber (01:26):

I was doing my graduate diploma in law, which is the conversion course. So I realised I’m probably not getting, get a job with my German degree and I was studying a particularly boring topic within land law one day, and I loved listening to LBC. I love arguments, debates, all that sort of thing. And I emailed Ian Dale and I said, you are my favourite presenter. I think you’re really fair. Do you have any advice for someone who maybe wants to go into media one day when he’s done with doing law? And he said, oh, I’m bad at advice over email, why don’t you come in and shadow a show? Which was like, oh my god. And I went in and I chatted him. He must have taken a good 45 minutes out of his day to just sit with me on the sofa and talk and listened to me and stuff like that. And by the end of the day he said, “oh, I’ve signed you up for some assistant producer shifts”. I said, “what?” He said, “yeah, yeah, speak to Ben. He’ll rot you on.” I was like, “what?” So I finished the rest of my law degree and on the night of my final exam, I did a night shift at LBC answering the phones to the people who ring in and give you their opinion and stuff, and it was the best thing ever.

Alessia Horwich (02:39):

So when it comes to these interviews that you guys do with spokespeople, what is the most common thing that goes wrong?

Martin Kimber (02:46):

Mostly a tech thing. So obviously we used to be based at 10 Fleet Place. We’ve now moved to Sky HQ campus in Osterley, which makes it harder for people to come in because people used to just be able to walk around the corner. We are very conscious that we get blown off air quite a lot by current events – Donald Trump has a press conference or NATO press conference – and the last thing I want, you know, I don’t want to send people all the way to Osterley only to tell them “I’m really sorry we’re off air, there’s nothing we can do”. In those cases, now we do a lot of Zoom interviews again. It’s kind of like the pandemic all over again.

Alessia Horwich (03:24):

Do you think that is deteriorating the quality of the interviews?

Martin Kimber (03:28):

Yes, massively. I have booked international banks, multi, multi multi-million dollar asset managers and their links are awful. There was one massive bank that did the interview from the trading floor to be fair, which is a nice sort of background, but terrible camera and one of these air traffic controller headset things and it makes you look rubbish. It makes you look rubbish, especially because we have a proper set with lights and camera and makeup and all this stuff, and actually big companies should have the budget to spend a grand on some tech to make it work. I always say Hargreaves Lansdown actually have the best down the line studio because they’ve actually built one. We normally have Emma Wall on, behind her is this beautiful atrium. It even says a bit of Hargreaves Lansdown in the background, not too prominent to get us in trouble with OFCOM. It’s really high quality. They’ve invested in the Globe Links connection, which is a high quality than Zoom, which we take. We do live view as well, and they’ve clearly got a proper camera set up and a proper studio. And I would wager that doesn’t come anywhere close to affecting their bottom line, but it makes them look so much better when they’re on CNBC or with us.

Alessia Horwich (04:45):

Does that mean that you are more willing to use them as well?

Martin Kimber (04:47):

Yes, absolutely, because we don’t want, you know, it’s television, we don’t want it to look like a kind of A level media project, and there are some pretty big banks out there that look like that. Terrible.

Alessia Horwich (05:01):

I mean, that is astonishing really if you’re thinking about finance and banks, the kind of budgets that they must have.

Martin Kimber (05:06):

Especially them. I mean, look, we had an SME on a few months ago to talk about Northern Ireland trading arrangement. They sell fabrics to Northern Ireland. I’m not expecting them to invest a thousand pounds in something, but if you are one of the big banks, there is no excuse.

Alessia Horwich (05:22):

Yeah.

Martin Kimber (05:22):

No excuse.

Alessia Horwich (05:23):

I mean, I guess the ideal scenario is come to you.

Martin Kimber (05:26):

Yes, but I mean with us specifically, I can completely understand if they don’t want to come all the way out to us.

Alessia Horwich (05:33):

If they did that though and they committed to doing that regardless of what happened with the events, does that carry favour in the future with them? Are you more likely to go back to that person and say, because they’re reliably willing to put the effort in

Martin Kimber (05:45):

A willing volunteer is always welcome back.

Alessia Horwich (05:49):

Yeah, and then the second best thing is some decent setup at their place.

Martin Kimber (05:54):

I think it just makes complete economic sense as well, because you’re not just going to be doing TV, you’re going to be doing podcasts. I mean, this one right now is being filmed as well. So it’s a good investment, right? You’re going to be in the emergence of new digital media, newspapers, websites are now going video first, it makes complete sense to be able to do an interview in high quality and not have to go to the office of wherever. Especially if you’ve got a spokesperson with a really busy diary, maybe on earnings day, they don’t have time to whoof it all the way to a studio. So do it from your own little studio set up. I know of people who are currently moving jobs to content roles at financial institutions to pump out written and video content as sort of creators. So the creator economy I’m seeing with my own eyes is definitely coming to in-house comms departments.

Alessia Horwich (06:52):

That’s quite interesting. What should these people be wearing?

Martin Kimber (06:54):

I think in the age of 4K, it’s not as important anymore.

Alessia Horwich (06:57):

Oh, right okay.

Martin Kimber (06:58):

Darren was told, my presenter was told recently by a member of management, “don’t wear that jacket again, it’s strobes”. But on the whole, it doesn’t make that much difference anymore, I don’t think.

Alessia Horwich (07:07):

What does make a difference

Martin Kimber (07:09):

Clothing wise?

Alessia Horwich (07:10):

Or background wise?

Martin Kimber (07:11):

So backgrounds are an interesting thing because they have to say something about the interview that you’re doing. So for example, if you are a chocolate producer, can you do it from the chocolate factory with a big one of those mechanical arm things that turns the chocolate? Are you a car dealership? Can you do it from the dealership floor? Those sorts of things. If you’re in insurance, I’m not going to say that you’ve got to do it from a factory floor, but that is also where Hargreaves Lansdown get it so right, because they’re an asset manager but they work in offices, but somehow they’ve made it look nice. So with a little bit of lateral thinking, you can always arrive at a nice background, shout out to the PR who told his client a couple of weeks ago that she should buy artwork for her house to do an interview with us so that it wouldn’t just be a white wall behind her looking like a sort of mental institution. I was like, yeah, that’s good effort.

Alessia Horwich (08:10):

How do you feel about spokespeople doing interviews from their homes?

Martin Kimber (08:13):

That’s up to them. I mean, look, we’ve got a culture of hybrid working now. That’s not going to change. I don’t think. It might evolve, but it’s not going to go away. I also think we actually interview some pretty important people, CEOs, CFOs, C-Suite, they don’t have the time to move plans around massively. All you need for a broadcast interview is like 15 minutes, 10 minutes to be on the link for ready to go, five minutes on air done. And if it means the difference between getting a spokesperson and not getting a spokesperson, I’d much rather have them down the line than not.

Alessia Horwich (08:49):

Yeah. What is the bare minimum tech wise then? Is it literally a laptop with, well, if someone’s in their home, that’s the thing.

Martin Kimber (08:56):

I don’t want to push bare minimum. I want to say, get one of these nice cameras that you’re using to record this. Plug that into the laptop to use that as the webcam. Get it. You don’t need something as nice as this microphone, but like a clip on mic or a proper dedicated microphone is good. Lighting is important. Even a bad camera, you can make everything look a bit better if you light them better. Again, shout out to the PR that massively over lit their asset manager when I said maybe improve his lighting a bit, and he sort of started looking like Casper the ghost. So there is a way of doing it, of doing this too much and the wifi is patchy, if you can, wire in.

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Alessia Horwich (10:36):

So these are all before the person has even said anything. Is this the stuff that needs to be prepared a week before, a day before, the morning before?

Martin Kimber (10:45):

So it was sort of week before, given lots of interviews can be booked in well in advance, especially if it’s an ONS stat release, you know, that GDP is coming out on that day.

Alessia Horwich (10:55):

Do you often do that? Are you trying to be more, well, trying to be organised around things like that?

Martin Kimber (10:58):

Yeah, if I know something is going to be a big deal, like jobs figures the other day came out. They weren’t fantastic, couldn’t have anticipated them being as bad as they were. But I mean, that’s something that you could easily book something in a month in advance on. So like a week before, I would say tell your client to watch the show, to familiarise yourself with it, familiarise yourself with how long the segments are, what the interviewer style is. I was asked by a PR actually to send them Darren’s show reel at some point, which blew my mind.

Alessia Horwich (11:30):

Is that legit? That’s fine.

Martin Kimber (11:32):

No, no. I was like, I said,

Alessia Horwich (11:35):

Darren, turn on your tv.

Martin Kimber (11:35):

No, I was like, “Darren, do you even have a show reel?’ He like, “no”. Just watch all of our episodes back. catalogues are on YouTube. Just do the slightest bit of research. So tell them to watch the show because that’s going to really tell them what’s going to happen. Make the logistics clear to them. Are they going into a studio or ask them to start thinking about their Zoom backgrounds and stuff like that because I know it takes people a long time to order stuff off Amazon and all that kind of thing and give some kind of rough parameters around what they’re talking about. So this is the press release we’ve sent, prep for this, we’ll check in later. Then I’d say sort of a day before, restate those logistics, restate that address. You don’t want to be any later for an in studio interview than 15 minutes early. I would say, especially for our show, a very, very, very famous business influencer came on, Ian King, live once and arrived actually late for his interview. Luckily, he was so disarmingly charming that we were all right, can come again. But I mean it was very, very, very stressful and annoying. So the day before, check that Zoom link, make sure, you know, be the TV producer, and check does the background look good like this one here with a nice bookcase behind us and a fern. I don’t think it’s a real fern, but it looks nice.

Alessia Horwich (12:55):

Only one.

Martin Kimber (12:56):

Check that internet connection. Make sure there’s no drop-offs in wifi or anything. Can we get a really long ethernet cable to connect to the computer, all that kind of thing? Try and make it look as good as possible. Pay attention to the news agenda the day before. If you’re pitching us an interview that you think from a client that you think is going to be very relevant to the news agenda, check that news agenda. Please don’t ask for the questions in advance. It’s not something that should be done in a country with free press. If you want an advert, pay for that. It’s slightly insulting as to the sort of journalistic integrity of it. It also actually kind of ruins the authenticity of the interview, and it degrades the value of the interview. Why do you earned media if you’re kind of setting your own agenda for it? So don’t ask for questions.

Alessia Horwich (13:46):

How often do you get spokespeople who turn up ready for their interview who have no idea what it’s about and are not prepared?

Martin Kimber (13:53):

Now that was quite an interesting one. I’ve had a couple come on not realising it’s live, despite the name being Business Live. I was reliably informed after I booked in an interview with one client that the client didn’t even believe this op was real. Apparently they’d been leaning on the agency to “please get this, get anything or we’re going to fire you”. So they sent me a good pitch and I booked it in for Sky News and apparently the client did not believe it was a real op until she was on the Zoom link connecting with the gallery ready to go on. Hadn’t read the briefing sheet, hadn’t prepared for it, just did not believe this was real until she ended up on television.

Alessia Horwich (14:39):

How does that make you feel? It makes you cross?

Martin Kimber (14:42):

I mean, there’s no reason to get cross about it. It’s not something I can control.

Alessia Horwich (14:49):

No,

Martin Kimber (14:50):

I was pitched a good thing on a good topic. I took it.

Alessia Horwich (14:53):

How did it work out in the end?

Martin Kimber (14:55):

It wasn’t a very good interview. I would argue, not necessarily my fault.

Alessia Horwich (15:00):

Do you guys have flexibility within your interviews to make them run slightly longer if they’re great or not? Or is it the five minute slot and that’s that.

Martin Kimber (15:06):

One of the best interviews I’ve ever booked for business live was Ross Gerber, who’s an early investor in Tesla who was basically, it’s really great when people flag breaking news to you in their interview, and he says, “I’ve never said this before in any other interview, I’m going to say it now”. And I’m like, “oh yes”. And people are saying, “right, time to wrap, we need to get onto the next thing”. And Darren’s like, no, no, no. You’ve got to keep going with this. At the same time, if the next guest doesn’t show up, you could end up being on for twice the amount of time.

Alessia Horwich (15:37):

So you need to be ready for that right? To carry a 10 minute interview as opposed to…

Martin Kimber (15:40):

Yeah, and there are some people that can’t do that. And there are some people who can, and the people who get invited back again and again, you know who you are. They are people that we trust to be able to occasionally fill time if we have to because people haven’t showed up.

Alessia Horwich (15:56):

Is that also the ability to, like you were talking about being aware of the news agenda, it’s not just talking about the topic that perhaps they’ve pitched to you and that subject. It’s being able to take the conversation a bit wider.

Martin Kimber (16:06):

Yeah. We have a regular market slot, which we try to do most episodes most days, and the best market reviewers that we have can really roll with the punches. For example, recently Michael O’Leary hit his share price target, and I think you got the biggest corporate payout in European history because it hit the share. You made a hundred million euros or something. And I was in the gallery and our market reviewer, I think it was Anna was up and said, “Anna, you’re about to go on there in about 30 seconds. By the way, this breaking news has just happened, mind if we ask you about that?” She said, “yep, no problem”. And that’s why they are the best. They’re so good.

Alessia Horwich (16:41):

What else can go wrong?

Martin Kimber (16:44):

So people can just sort of freeze up. I’ve had it before where people give sort of one, two or three word answers to stuff. Those are pretty disastrous.

Alessia Horwich (16:53):

What would you advise a PR to mitigate that?

Martin Kimber (16:56):

Pre-interview them practice? Practice is the most important thing. And actually it can be quite detrimental sometimes when a media trainer says, “keep your answers short”. Yes, interviews have never been shorter than they are today. A lot of ours end up being four minutes long. You’ve got to hit your talking points and your message and all that stuff, I get it. Be authentic. We know you’re not being authentic when you give a two-word answer because you’ve been told to keep it short.

Alessia Horwich (17:26):

Are there other tells for an inauthentic answer?

Martin Kimber (17:29):

Yeah, I mean, you can always tell when someone’s being straight with you, and I think that truth permeates both corporate comms and political trust in politics and politicians varies, let’s just say that. I think the public have become, because of the internet, very aware of spin and stuff like that. We can tell when a business leader is saying something because they don’t want to upset the government or they don’t want to upset shareholders or whatever. Authenticity, in my opinion, is fast becoming the most valuable commodity on planet earth. And the best spokespeople are the ones who can give a share price friendly answer in a way that you believe, in a way that is believable. And there are certain performers out there who I won’t name, but there are certain performers out there who do it particularly well.

Alessia Horwich (18:22):

Yeah, I mean those would be people you’ll ask back again. But it’s the opposite of that, people, will they get a black mark against their names?

Martin Kimber (18:29):

No, I mean, if you’re the chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, we’ll still want to hear from you even if you’re a bit dull. But I mean, Michael O’Leary is actually a good example of someone who speaks, very frankly, is quite controversial sometimes to some people, but does not care. And the share price holds up and well, he runs a successful business.

Alessia Horwich (18:52):

Well, that’s his brand, isn’t it?

Martin Kimber (18:53):

It’s his brand. He’s an extreme example. You don’t have to be Michael O’Leary.

Alessia Horwich (18:58):

So golden rules, authenticity. Any other golden rules for a successful appearance?

Martin Kimber (19:03):

Always try to add value. Try to say line up about three talking points in advance that you want to get in. Three things that the viewer is going to think, “oh, I didn’t know that”. And if you can hit that, then the journalists come away thinking, “oh, that was worth listening to”, rather than just repeating the facts. So analysis rather than description. Working in personal experience really helps with that, so I booked a lawyer on once to talk about the escaped prison person who escaped on the bottom of the van out of Wandsworth. He was on the run for a bit. The lawyer I booked on, he was really good. He said, “well, when I visit clients in HMP Wandsworth, there are all these doors and all these keys and it’s hard enough getting in, let alone getting out and stuff”. And that was a really good personal touch to it that people can identify with.

Alessia Horwich (19:55):

I’m so interested about spokespeople appearances, but largely from the point of view of disasters actually. So can you remember any specific disasters that you’ve had in a live interview?

Martin Kimber (20:06):

Specifically to us? I booked an SME on once that was a half American, half British company, and it was just after Donald Trump did his Liberation Day tariffs. They manufactured in China and operated in the UK and America. Perfect case study. Darren asked, “well, what’s the worst case scenario here?” And me personally, I would’ve said something like, “well, in business you always face challenges, but it’s about how you overcome them and blah, blah, blah”. What this guy said was, “well, I guess we could go out of business”. And we were like, “wow, we appreciate the radical honesty from you, thank you very much”. But yeah, there was some raised eyebrows at that one.

Alessia Horwich (20:51):

Is that because that wasn’t very helpful in terms of commentary on the wider situation?

Martin Kimber (20:57):

I guess so. It’s also very rare for a business owner to say we might go out of business because it tells your shareholders that for your investors that you’re probably upper creek without a paddle. It’s very, very rare that people are that honest. But it’s true. That is the worst case scenario that you do go bust. No, well done to that guy for being very honest. We appreciate that.

Alessia Horwich (21:20):

When you arrived here, you were talking about how booking the guest is one portion of your job, the admin bit of your job, but actually the bit for you is the interview itself, whereas you think the proportion of their time that they’re spending on getting the guest over the line is more than preparing them and that’s out of kilter for you.

Martin Kimber (21:39):

Yeah. I get a lot more questions about pitching than I do about this. I feel like a lot of PRs have KPIs to meet and I know that they have a very full plate and they’ve probably got too many clients and too much work to do, and they just need to tell the client, I’ve got this op for you. And then very little actual effort goes into making it look good or making sure that they have something intelligent and useful to say. It did actually strike me when you suggested doing this podcast because I was like, “oh, hang on a minute, I very rarely get asked about this stuff”. And there is a lot to do it, and I wish I had more time in my job to spend making every single interview look as amazing as possible, but I don’t, because I have quite a lot of booking to do. Booking is the biggest part of my job other than writing scripts and stuff like that. I just trust that some of these PR agencies get it right, and it’s amazing how few do.