A few years back, around this time of year, I received a plum pudding in the mail. From Australia.

It frightened me. It was intended to compel me to write about a new kids show, and as I recall there was some content tie-in to the promo pudding. Plum pudding isn’t attractive to begin with; send it around the world and its unappetizing demeanour takes on new toxic qualities. I was dubious about touching the accompanying release for fear of contact/osmosis food poisoning potential.

This year I was startled one morning by a pie on my chair (only couriered from within Toronto, but nonetheless unnerving). It was sent to announce the opening of a new food-focused retail promotion agency. While there is a Web company that specializes in sending pies as a corporate gift (see ‘Tricky, but not impossible,’ p. 16), to me it seemed inedible and an odd choice of item to impress with. Maybe I’m just picky about where food has been (we even throw out the NASA-calibre hermetically sealed samples that come with the newspaper).

Strategy associate editor Duncan Hood got a fancy (and comically smushed) cake sent to him in honour of a paint co.’s 50th anniversary, and it too was deemed dustbin material. And those are just a few things that have passed over the transom in the pastry category alone.

In other ominous mailings, I once received an arm of a toy with a cryptic ransom note-style message. And then, way back, there was the Bottle of Blood (cheap red wine) touting a vampire show. So, we remember the unusual promo items. But often not in the way intended.

These reminiscences of strange promotions were sparked by reading the feature story in this issue’s Premiums and Incentives special report, wherein Sara Minogue interviews journos to discover what kind of impact such items have, and which backfire (see ‘What writers want,’ p. 11).

Since PR can be a potent marketing weapon, and since there continue to be very odd techniques in practice out there, it struck me that a little elucidation on PR do’s and don’ts in relation to successful press gleaning might be in order.

Keep the pie. If you want ink, have a good story, then pitch it to the right publication at the right time. Like any other marketing exercise, begin by considering the target consumer’s wants and needs. I may look like I want pie, but what I really want is a good story for our readers.

While there is a tendency to recycle news – features you read in the The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal have a habit of popping up in localized versions later in other dailies around the world – most publications covet stories that have not previously been covered. So sometimes a mass press release, no matter what attention-seeking doodads accompany it, is a surefire way to get ignored.

Beyond exclusives, an awareness of lead times is also key.

Curiously, we still get a constant supply of deluxe media kits sent at considerable expense to inform us about ‘news’ that happened last month, or sometimes even farther back in history. That would be old news. Sometimes the people with old news also fax and e-mail it, and then call to make sure you got it. A simple call a few weeks prior to the much-ballyhooed event would yield a much better ROI.

The other things that not everyone is aware of, are the policies in place at many media organizations that prevent writers from accepting graft. Recently, when asked to judge some marketing promos, I hemmed and hawed a bit while considering my time commitments, and was told that there would be a basket of sport merch to thank the judges. When I explained that here, such things would go into a charity auction, the chap was surprised (must be an American thing). This is pretty standard policy, especially at major dailies where there are very stringent guidelines, which is why many of the higher-end creative PR efforts end up raising conflict of interest hackles, as implicit in every corporate gift is a wink and a nod and a nudge, or the potential appearance thereof.

However, the majority of such efforts are done with no thoughts to any nefarious influence considerations, just the honest desire to attract attention to a particular press release with some kind of clever tchotchke. Because, sometimes it works. A box is more fun to open than an envelope. And, due to this universal tendency, Brunico raised over $1,800 for the Sick Children’s Hospital in its holiday silent auction, selling off the many weird and wonderful (non-perishable) stuff – from review copies of films to cocktail shakers and signed hockey sticks – all sent in to the publications over the last year, and also donated items to holiday toy drives.

So, while the loot goes to a good cause, if you really want to get attention for your news, pretty much across the board best results will come from spinning a good yarn, and providing the media timely access to deep and useful information for their readers. Sounds simple, but journalists’ inboxes across the country attest to the fact that common sense is not all that common.