What happens when your product isn't ready for its close-up? Phoebe Luckhurst gives her advice to all PRs on how to get spotlight without stylish photography.
Whether it’s Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or just an unremarkable Monday in May, product round-ups are a boon for both publications and PRs.
For newspapers and magazines, they literally pay: readers are always looking for authoritative guides, so by driving a tidal wave of traffic they create valuable affiliate revenue.
In print, rainbow-coloured product pages ‘lift’ the issue and add to the mix of features in a magazine’s run.
Still, not all products are created equal. Your client might be an industry leader, but if the item doesn’t look good on the physical or virtual page, editors won’t include it.
What’s worse is that a journalist may choose to feature your less sophisticated competitor, if they have a product that looks better.
Mattresses, TVs, toasters and bike pumps
Here’s an example from a recent Roxhill event I took part in: one of the members of the audience represented a mattress brand, and she wanted to know how to get her client featured in the Sunday Times Magazine.
Our readers are obsessed with sleep – how much they’re getting, how to get more, and how to sort out their REM cycles, The good news is you can’t get a good night’s sleep without a good mattress. The bad news is mattresses are white, rectangular and do not ‘lift’ a page at all.
Another example? In one of my roles at the Evening Standard, I looked after a technology and gadgets product page. I regularly wanted to feature TVs, but could rarely find a single image that worked on a page.
The same goes for a lot of everyday household items: ironing boards, toasters, fans, and bike pumps. People need them, people certainly buy them. But they don’t really want to look at them.
Every Christmas, the Sunday Times Magazine does a gift guide and we often want to feature subscription gifts – a 12-month coffee subscription, say. But I found that many of these services didn’t have appealing imagery – and some didn’t have any usable imagery at all. An identikit picture of a cafetiere won’t cut it. The picture needs to stand out.
So, if you represent a client who makes a product that isn’t a looker, what can you to do get around it? Here’s how to pitch products that aren’t photogenic.
Make your imagery work harder
My first suggestion is to go to your client and ask them to make their images work harder. In some cases, publications can use a model shot, and lifestyle imagery can also transform how something looks: putting a kettle in a beautiful kitchen distracts from the fact that the product itself is fairly dull.
If you have the ear of a brand, you could also suggest a limited edition of a product – perhaps a collaboration with an illustrator or an emerging designer. A new colourway or pattern works when picture editors are just after a cutout (so a jazzy background wouldn’t be applicable here), and could be the difference between a product making it into a magazine spread and ending up in someone’s spam folder.
That’s not realistic in every case, though. In other cases, you could lean into the story behind a product — where was it founded? Is it sustainable? What is so special about the technology? If it isn’t a looker, make its designers or founders the defining image of the brand instead, and ensure there are portrait images you can share with the publication.
Think laterally
Remember to pitch laterally, too. Product round-ups are not the only way to get a client featured. Think about what a product does, rather than what it looks like. Then, pitch it like you’d pitch any other story: watch the news cycle, look out for opportunities for the founder to comment. Don’t limit yourself to visual-led pieces: they’re not the only way to cut through.
On which note – can the journalist you’re pitching to trial the product? I say this not as a hack trying to get my mitts on freebies (honest), but because journalists are storytellers too. If they have a sense of how a product works, they’ll also be able to think laterally about how to feature it.
They’ll be in meetings you aren’t privy to, and know what stories are on their editorial calendar. Get them thinking too and you’ve doubled your chances of getting a client featured.
Mattresses, kettles, ironing boards, bike pumps – they all have a story somewhere, you just need to be creative (and realistic) about how to tell it.
Roxhill's exclusive events
As a Roxhill client, you'll get access to our in-person and online events with top journalists, so you can start building rewarding media connections.
Roxhill's exclusive events
As a Roxhill client, you'll get access to our in-person and online events with top journalists so you can start building rewarding connections.