Editor’s note: Daryl Toor, who has worked in marketing and public relations for more than 20 years, is founder of Atlanta-based “Attention.” He writes a regular column on Mondays about trends in marketing and communication.Deadline approaches, and a journalist somewhere is trying to file a story about your client. She’s already made the calls, conducted the interviews, and written the lion’s share of the copy. Only one thing is keeping her from filing her article, a small but essential fact – it might be the city where your client is based, or the number of people it employs, or a stock ticker symbol.
She turns to the press release and scans to the bottom, to the boilerplate. Her eyes fight through that big solid block of text, cluttered with baroque sentences, a vocabulary that seems lifted from the technical manual for a nuclear reactor, and promiscuous use of the phrase “leading provider of.” But the factoid she needs isn’t there, and she’s sent back to the phones or a website as seconds tick away.
Moments like this, when a boilerplate assumes importance, may be few and far between, but they do exist. Besides being either a lifesaver or a time-waster to a reporter on deadline, that seemingly innocuous anchor of the press release can be a welcome introduction to one who knows little about your client – and it can save your well-wrought release from the circular file. It can also function in the same way for investors, a sales force, and other elements of the company who need a deft way to describe their wares.
Far too many boilerplates are ineffective wastes of words. The most common complaints are that what should be simple, bite-size descriptions of a company or service are overlong, overstuffed with jargon, unnecessary lists of awards and products, and even unproven assertions of market dominance. The reasons for boilerplate sloppiness are manifold. PR execs don’t take them seriously; others say it’s a misconception of the boilerplate’s function.
A well-written paragraph
A boilerplate should be a really good paragraph you’d like to see inserted into a newspaper or a magazine verbatim, It should be clearly written and truly characterize the company in a positive way. Crafting a successful boilerplate in large part requires a toeing of the line between marketing material and information that can be used in the news-gathering process.
This means cutting the hype by deleting superlatives and listing only easily provable facts. It means cutting out extraneous information, though what that is varies from company to company. And it means eliminating technical terms.
It has to be believable and succinct. It’s not an advertisement, and it’s not a testimonial either.
It’s easier for most experienced boilerplate writers to say what should be left out than what should be included. Most agree on the basics, such as a URL, a description of the market, description of the company, product, or service. But that’s where the agreement ends. Most of the content will be shaped by the characteristics of each individual client, as well as the sensibility of the industry of which it’s a part.
PepsiCo’s, for instance, is short and sweet with an overview of the company’s divisions and a mention of its international reach. Coca-Cola’s runs along the same lines.
Fuji Photo Film, on the other hand, offers a more detailed list of its products, mentions the amount of business it does outside of Japan, and even drops in where its principal manufacturing operations are located.
Usable by many departments
The content will also be shaped by the writer’s expectations of the target audience. For most, this audience is, simply, the media. It should be words people believe in. And these words should be useful outside the realm of PR. In other words, employees in sales, HR, and marketing should all be able to use it.
The tone of a boilerplate varies from company to company. There’s no one answer in terms of tone. It depends on the product and on where you are in terms of life cycle.
A company flirting with a monopoly status may want to soften its voice, while an emerging company will adopt a more confident one. But this comes with making the construction of the boilerplate important, something that’s given consideration through tweaking and re-tweaking. The point is to articulate the company’s strategy and message.
Technique tips:
Attention: www.attentiongroup.com
