All posts by : Amanda Bates

We’re all experts at working from home now. We’ve Zoomed until the cows came home… and sometimes they came home in the background of our Zoom calls. We should all be experts at making our videos and calls GREAT by now, right? Wrong.

There are still many mistakes being made – some because we just don’t care anymore because 2021 is almost as long as 2020 already, but some we were never that good in the first place. It’s not too late – because video calls are here to stay for-EVAH.

Here’s my five step guide to making you look the best you can, without forking out a fortune in Hollywood-studio-grade gear.

Not all lights are created equal

I’m pretty sure shares in ring lights went as sky high as Peloton bikes this past year – but let’s just be clear, while a ring light can offer Instagram-filter-esque balanced glows to many of us, they aren’t a fit for everyone.

If you wear glasses in particular, ring lights can sometimes have the horrific effect of making you look like a mad owl, reflecting those circles into your lenses, sometimes positioned right around your irises,

and completely detracting from anything smart you want to say. The results of a pre-SuperBowl press conference on Andy Reid’s glasses are a perfect example, and memes about him started trending almost immediately.

If you’ve already invested in a ring light and you wear glasses, to prevent a similar issue, you need to put the light up higher than your face – so it’s not shining directly at you – and then angle it down slightly. You can also adjust the brightness on some lights, so play around with that, and make it a softer, less blue light.

The go-to should still be good old-fashioned natural light wherever possible – putting your computer or camera between you and your natural light source. Ideally, avoid direct, bright sunlight – if the sun is out and offers you any more than a full-face, balanced soft light, using sheer curtains can filter that nasty blinding-light, and diffuse the rays so you look glowy, and the way nature intended.

Do You Want Chins With That Face?

It’s a fairly well-known fact that we should never have photos taken from below our eye-line, and the same goes for video. If your work-from-home desk setup is normal, your computer is likely well below your eye-line.

For video calls, put your computer on some books and get the camera lined up as close to your eye-line as possible. Even better, if you have a stand-up desk, crank it a bit higher than your eye-line. A camera shooting down rather than up, will banish extra chins and will make your head into more of an inverted triangle shape, which is more appealing than it sounds.

As well, make sure you know where the camera is on your device! This couldn’t be more ‘page one’, but it’s incredible how many people are still looking at the person they’re talking to on their screen, rather than the camera. This is fine and not super noticeable on a video call, but for a TV interview, your face will be magnified, and where you’re looking becomes more apparent.

How You Sound Is Just As Important As How You Look

Terrible quality audio will probably be the worst legacy of all the videos created during lockdown. You can obviously hear yourself in your room perfectly well – but honestly MOST of the videos and calls I’ve been on this past year, and many of the videos and podcasts I have listened to, have had awful telephone-quality audio, which can be caused by a number of issues.

Firstly – your microphone. You might have a really great computer, but that doesn’t mean the microphone is equally fantastic. Use an external mic wherever possible – and this might be one that is built into your headphones. You will need decent headphones though, so invest in something decent if you’re doing this a lot. Know that anything nearer your mouth will be better than a further-away computer mic that picks up all the sounds around you.

As well, your wifi is going to be really important when it comes to the audio quality. Of course we only really think about the wifi quality when we can’t SEE people due to technical issues, but it can also really affect the sound without us realizing, because – see above – we can’t hear what we sound like to other people. For live calls, it’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world, but if you’re making videos that you want to last longer, invest in some audio gear that will enhance the quality of your voice.

Background Check

There’s a lot been said about the backgrounds we’ve all had to show to our co-workers this year, and if your video is going to be seen by a wider audience, there’s the danger that something you’ve left lurking on a shelf could lead to a swift cancellation of your career.

Be aware of what’s behind you, test out your video beforehand by setting the camera to selfie or video mode, and then move ANYTHING that could detract from – or worse, become the focus of – your on-camera performance.

Now, I’m not Keith Baldrey’s boss at Global BC. But if I were, then my first order of business would be permanently clearing off the shelves of books he’s untidily promoting during a global pandemic. Sure, we’ve all been straining to see what’s in the living rooms of our favourite celebrities for more than a year now – but it can look messy (especially if the books are falling over like in this photo), and cheap.

Be aware that your background can become more interesting than you, and know that your face, and what you are saying, competes with every single thing around you. Check your background before you click the Zoom link.

Oh – and number five – don’t forget to smile!

Have questions about marketing or communications? Schedule a quick call with us today!

Newsrooms the world over seem to change week to week. Not only are there fewer and fewer people working in them, but there are less of them in general, thanks to a drop in consumption of traditional media formats.

This means it can be difficult to get organic coverage of your business or your story in a newsroom where resources are scarce, and where timelines are ALL the time (rather than working to the older deadlines of broadcast and print) as reporters file stories and updates online and via social media, and where assignment editors are having to incentivise teams to cover more each day than the one-story-per-reporter-per-day of old.

How does a newsroom work, anyway?

Here’s how things generally work in newsrooms though, regardless of the sands of time stripping out elements such as morning meetings, midday check-ins, and filing to deadline.

Many newsrooms have two areas of focus – the day-of news, which is exactly what it sounds like; and feature items, which usually take longer to cultivate and have a timeless element when it comes to when they run. Unfortunately most PR pitches are feature items which are, nowadays, at the mercy of the day-of news resources. This means a pitch you’ve been working on for weeks or sometimes longer, can be cancelled or postponed at a moment’s notice because a big day-of story happened, and all the newsroom resources were reassigned to cover it.

One example of that is a pitch Curve worked on a couple of years back, where we had a specific week we had scheduled the CEO of a busy new cannabis business to be available for media interviews. We had several of them lined up, plus we were going to do week-of and day-of repeat pitching just to make sure we had any last-minute reporter or camera availability sewn up.

Our pitch week turned out to be the same week as a horrible news story where two teens from Vancouver Island went on a terrible shooting spree, which then turned into a cross-Canada manhunt. Understandably, all the newsrooms in the country were suddenly focused on this huge story, as the search for the two continued. Also understandably, our booked segments and interviews were mostly cancelled.

You can’t help what happens in the world of news, and that’s why we always tell our clients that PR is the coverage you pray for, and advertising is the coverage you pay for. You can have every single media outlet in the world lined up for an interview, but if there’s a big news story that week, you can end up losing every one of them.

So how do I get my story to the newsroom?

For the most part, newsrooms will connect with their assignment desk in the morning – whether that’s for a full online or in-person meeting, or more usually nowadays, reporters are individually assigned a story remotely and they either work from home, or they meet a camera at an interview location.

1) Find a specific person to contact

Reporters, producers and assignment teams do get to pitch story ideas to their editors – and if you have a specific day you want a story to go out (say for example a press conference or the day something is opening or launching), the best thing to do is to find a specific person who has covered that type of story before at their outlet, and reach out directly to them with lots of lead time.

They will always tell you they’ll try their best, and that they can’t guarantee anything if news happens, but at least if you’ve connected with them personally, it’s harder for them to say no, and it gives you a chance to repitch it on a day when nothing is happening.

2) Be flexible with your schedule

A better idea is to give a reporter a range of days when you are available, so it gives them more options if something happens on one of those days. In the case of the Canada-wide manhunt, it lasted the entire time the CEO was available. Luckily he was very understanding about the difficult situation, and he was pleased we were still able to get him an interview on a national radio show.

Probably the best option of all is to work one-on-one with a reporter for a “timeless” story for which you are able to be interviewed at any time, and which can run at any time, giving the reporter flexibility when it comes to setting something up.

The downside is that you can’t offer the pitch to multiple news outlets, as some don’t like to run a story if their rival has already done it; plus you never really have a “launch” date that coincides with the piece running. If that isn’t a big deal, then this is the ideal scenario.

3) Make your story as compelling as possible

If you do have a story that MUST run on a certain date, you have to make it as compelling as possible to ensure as much day-of coverage as you can. Think of your story as that big day-of news event. What is the absolute number one thing people need to know about it?

If you’ve heard the expression “burying the lead,” this is where it comes from. You DON’T want to hide the main point of the story when you’re pitching it – so make sure your press release, or your call to the newsroom, or your direct email or social media pitch to the reporter gives ALL the details, in as FEW words as possible, in the FIRST sentence. Reporters are busy – they won’t read past that first line – I guarantee it – so you have to make every word count.

If your first pitch didn’t stick, it’s worth following up just to check they got the email and that it didn’t get caught in their spam. But make it friendly and quick – don’t become a thorn in their side. You don’t want to be “that person” who is constantly bothering the writers or editors, because if you are, they will ignore all future pitches.

Also, don’t call every phone extension in the newsroom to make your pitch, one call after the other. Those phones are likely all within a 10 metre radius, and they will know what you’re doing, and OOPS, you become “that person” again.

One final thing when it comes to newsrooms in 2021 – and it’s actually a depressing one: check social media before you pitch, just to make sure the person or the outlet you are looking to reach out to is still there, that there haven’t just been layoffs, and that they are still doing local news.

It’s a really sad thing to say, but it happens so often these days, that being aware of what an outlet may be going through… or may have just been through, is just respectful, polite and shows you care. If bad stuff has happened, don’t pitch. If everything is fine, pitch away – because tomorrow or next week, more changes may be on the way.

If you want to chat more about PR, and how to navigate a newsroom, head over to our contact page. We’re happy to chat.

Marketing, Parenting, and Pandemics

Amongst all the sourdoughing, online yoga and Zoom calls, all the “omg it’s soooo rewarding to spend this time with my family,” and the “let’s use lockdown to appreciate the relationships we have, the people we love, etc. so that hugs will be so much more meaningful in the future”s of 2020, I honestly can’t remember much about anything from March of last year to today. That is, aside from trying to homeschool while at the same time trying to pivot to help our clients (and ourselves) survive whatever fresh hell this has been, and of course pouring myself a large bowl of wine at 5:01pm – sleep and repeat…

There may well have been a pandemic in 1918, but I don’t remember the book those poor souls wrote on running a marketing company during a global shutdown, so that’s why I’m here now. Depending on which news outlet you believe these days, the next pandemic could be next Tuesday, or in another hundred years. In case it’s sooner than later, I thought I would write a handy future best-selling guide on How To Manage Your Marketing Agency While Homeschooling in the Next Pandemic.

1) You are a parent, not a teacher

Recognize that you did not choose to go into teaching for every single reason that properly-trained and educated teachers DO go into teaching. You do NOT have a general awareness of all (any) topics, nor a desire to teach said topics to young minds who may or may not be interested in them.

Furthermore, you are not capable of imparting correct information without Googling it first (and the right answer isn’t always on the first link you see – hey – that’s a little something I learned from marketing!) Oh – and you don’t really like other people’s kids. While many found, during “The Great Pandemic of 2020-to-what-feels-like-2099,” that they developed a new appreciation for all teachers, I also developed a new appreciation for the fact that I am not one.

2) Learn to balance marketing plans and child management

You will find that you can flush 12 months of marketing planning down the toilet with one hand, whilst simultaneously creating multiple new plans from scratch in minutes, not months, for a variety of clients who are having to switch their entire business models to online, e-commerce, delivery, etc. etc. – but you CANNOT teach a child to get their own glass of #$*!@! water so they don’t dehydrate and pass out in the next eight minutes – nope, you are gonna have to do that shit yourself.

3) Best laid plans are nothing to the harshest critics

Prepare for the fact that your beautiful Google sheets, Excel docs and wall charts (or whatever virtual, airborne system of witchcraft you now use to plot the future), long the envy of co-workers as a means to plan, document, and keep track of myriad campaigns, ensuring delivery is on time and on budget (and most importantly so that you see when anyone has a fun holiday coming up), will be viewed with utter disdain by your offspring when created in the form of a lesson plan.

They will scoff at your efforts in the same way a restaurant critic would react to an old cheese sandwich only fit to file your nails with, and they will walk away as you beg them to take a look… just one tiny look… because you worked so hard… you even got a pointy stick…

4) Wear all the hats, spin all the plates

As you juggle your clients with the skills of a plate spinner trying to set a plate spinning world record, while at the same time – in true marketing style – not letting any of the plates know that there are other plates, it’s perfectly acceptable to feed your child a bowl of dry Froot Loops for lunch.

5) Time management, don’t let time manage you

Regular school may end at 3pm, but homeschool ends whenever you goddamn say it ends.

The point is this – and it’s something we as marketers are guilty of (because if we can’t PR ourselves, who can we PR for?) – sometimes it’s all too much.

If we’ve learned anything in the past 12 months (apart from the fact that pandemics spawn a bafflingly large appreciation for words like “unprecedented,” “together,” and “now more than ever” FFS), it’s that memes telling us to be kind to ourselves, to go for a walk, to appreciate the good things, aren’t realistic when you are a business owner dealing with uncharted waters for yourself and all those you represent.

Amongst all the online advice on how to homeschool, and the (sometimes laughable) social media triteness to not sweat the small stuff, this is the post I’ve found the most relatable and realistic, and I hope that THIS is the message that survives above all else, and is shared by Marketing Moms in the next pandemic and beyond:

Parents: what we are being asked to do is not humanly possible.
There is a reason we are either a working parent, a stay-at-home parent,
or a part-time working parent.
Working, parenting and teaching are three different jobs that cannot be done at the same time.
It’s not hard because you are doing it wrong. It’s hard because it’s too much.
Do the best you can.
When you have to pick – because at some point you will – choose connection.
Pick playing a game over arguing about an academic assignment.
Pick teaching your child to do laundry rather than feeling frustrated that they aren’t helping. Pick laughing and snuggling, and reminding them that they are safe.
If you are stressed, lower your expectations where you can,
and virtually reach out for social connection.
We are in this together to stay well. That means mentally well, too.
– Emily W. King, Ph.D.

You’ve finally launched your new business. Congratulations!Now, it’s time to make people aware of your presence, as well