Football Media

Written by Chris Nee, the editor of twofootedtackle Blog Network and a social media planner at Porter Novelli.

Many of you will have come across PR people in your football writing careers and may have developed positive or negative perceptions of the industry and its people based on those experiences. Here at Football Media we’d like to help you make the most of your relationship with PR.

Public relations is the marketing discipline which looks after a company, brand or individual’s contact with – and image in – the media. While the digital age has ignited a frantic landgrab between a number of disciplines, PR can be said to own many of the key areas including media relations and, increasingly, blogger relations. It is also making strides in search, social media and other growing areas of the new marketing mix.

PR and you

The PR industry is ever-evolving and becoming increasingly versatile and complex. But from our side of any partnership with public relations, it effectively has two roles. First, it should respond to incoming requests for news, comment, review items or content. Its second role is proactive and is the “selling-in” of news items or feature proposals to media titles. Within both there are nuances, but most contact with PR (outside genuine relationship-building activity which is all too rare) falls into one of these categories.

The football media being as it is, it’s most likely that you will be contacted proactively on most occasions, and this is where PR’s perception often suffers. It can involve cold-calling and blind emailing – it’s not sales, because they want you to write rather than buy, but it can feel obtrusive nonetheless.

However, unless you’re interested in commenting only on events on the field, you’re probably better off cultivating a good rapport with at least a few PR contacts. Despite their job dictating that they must send you an unsolicited email once in a while, the vast majority are very sharp, very smart and – whisper it – very useful (disclosure: I work for a global PR agency, but not in a media relations role). This is because they can send you a note when they have juicy content and also because of their reactive role.

PR, Football Media and you

With that in mind, it’s good to know who you might want to get in touch with and who might want to get in touch with you. But just to make matters a little more complicated most brands of all sizes will be looked after by an agency, and this is no different for football brands. Often there is no easy way to work out which agency looks after a company’s PR, so to make things run more smoothly we have decided to open a collaborative database for brands and their agencies.

You can view the document here, and it has also been embedded below.

The first column is a list of brands which are either directy involved or somehow synonymous with football. The next two columns contain the names of PR agencies which look after those brands. In most cases these slots are currently occupied by either the global or UK agencies, but it is important to be aware that there may be other agencies involved. It is a complex industry characterised by complex structures.

Just to add another layer of confusion, we’ve also included a column for media buying agencies. These are the guys who buy your advertising space and get you involved in affiliate marketing. Again, we think this information is useful.

Caveats

Please note that this list is not perfect. It does not contain every football brand, a few of the agency details will be out of date (companies change agencies all the time, for a variety of reasons) and in some cases the brands will have different agencies for each area of their business. As such, amendments to the list may be required. There is also the issue of geography, and having been initiated in the UK the list will contain mostly UK or global partners. There are also many gaps, left in as “would like to know” items. Sorry about that.

The simple fact of the matter is that the only way to guarantee the veracity of this information is for it to be added as a result of recent and up-to-date experience. It’s not easy to accurately find out which PR agency a company uses for its football brand without (a) it having recently changed, (b) having been contacted directly already or (c) just knowing. That’s where you come in.

Why, with imperfect information, have we gone ahead and published the spreadsheet? Because we think this will benefit from being a collaborative effort. We can only add in what we know from having been contacted and what we could establish from the very sketchy information available from educated Googling. So let’s help each other. You can edit the document above with changes or additions, and we’d be grateful if you did.

How to update the grid

Here is your step-by-step guide to adding your information:

1. Sign into Google. If you don’t have a Google account, you really should sign up. It has some superb tools for bloggers and writers and definitely comes with my seal of approval
2. Click on this link to access the spreadsheet. Everybody with a Google account has editing rights
3. Add/edit the brand name in the first column, the PR agencies in the next two, or the media buying agency in the fourth. If you’ve been contacted directly by any of these brands, please state “In-House”
4. If you are adding a brand, please add your name to final two columns. If you are editing an existing item, please add your name to the final column only
5. Click “File” and then “Save & Close”
6. What’s in it for you? The bottom of this post will include a (hopefully) growing list of acknowledgements. When you edit the spreadsheet, please leave a comment here and we will add your chosen site to the list. Furthermore, you can be satisfied in the knowledge that you have helped others

We hope this document can develop into a really useful tool for football writers everywhere but we can’t do it without you. If you have any comments or suggestions, please get in touch. Happy hunting!

Posted by: Guest Authors Posted under: Football Business, Promotion