A backwards glance shows seismic shift in the PR world

By Robert Wheatley

It was without a doubt one of the most powerful PR campaigns I’ve ever been associated with. An entirely new product category created from scratch off a compelling, dynamic public relations strategy. Yes, I said PR — not advertising or sales promotion. Over $100 million in sales (and that’s in 1994 dollars) was achieved and an 84% share of market within 16 months of launch. It was the introduction of First Alert brand carbon monoxide alarm products.

Recently we heard from the Wall Street Journal that futurist Richard Dawson believes newspapers will be irrelevant by 2022. The reference point for this incredible shift can be more fully appreciated by briefly looking backwards to a moment in time when conventional print and broadcast media were popular and respected sources of news, information and influence on consumer behavior and public opinion.

Here’s the story of PR campaign media strategies that were built from a full-scale deployment of earned media tactics.

• And the approach is no longer as relevant. New businesses are now developed in an interactive, narrowcast environment without push-button scale-ability

The lesson: the old rules no longer apply. New media protocols, planning processes and program strategies literally demand a transformation of our beliefs about brand building, PR strategies, how PR firms are put together. Thus how we look at messaging, outreach, measurement and evaluation of ideas is different than it was even 10 years ago.

When editorial media ruled!!

It was 1993, the firm I owned at the time, Wheatley Blair, was hired by First Alert, the leading home safety products brand in the US. They had invented the residential smoke alarm category and literally owned the retail market for them. Rich Timmons, now principal and President of Wheatley & Timmons, was the global marketing chief at First Alert – a marketer who had followed conventional paths focused on TV advertising and who was going to do something unprecedented: launch the next biggest thing to come along in his company’s history through PR.

A new category: Carbon Monoxide (CO) Alarms

We were awestruck the moment we learned that CO poisoning was the largest source of accidental poisoning deaths in America.

First Alert had created the first affordable residential detector for this previously unseen and little understood hazard that claimed at least 1,500 lives every year and injured thousands more.

The Silent Killer

How do you convince Americans to protect themselves from a hazard you cannot see, taste, smell or touch? And after all, headaches are common and ubiquitous, right? We created a theme that dramatically defined the threat.
• Poison center physicians, indoor air quality experts, leading fire service officials and others were recruited to help explain the problem and support the solution
• We built the Carbon Monoxide Information Bureau to house the scientific and medical evidence
• Brought together consumers who had lost loved ones in CO accidents to personalize and make the hazard tangible and real

Launching a Media Tsunami

Media tours were conducted with CO survivors and coordinated with local fire department representatives. We booked medical expert appearances on TODAY, Good Morning America and all of the network news programs. Placed in-depth hazard education features in national newspapers and virtually every major daily in the US. Similar treatments on family protection were secured in women’s service, lifestyle and DIY magazines. We assembled an in-house TV news production department that was producing a regular flow of 90-second video news packages.

Our tracking on consumer media impressions within six months topped 700 million and grew to over a billion. There were 6 o’clock news stories in major markets about lines outside stores exclaiming that First Alert alarm products were sold out. A major trade publication featured a quote from a senior buyer at Walmart who described First Alert CO alarms as the “cabbage patch doll of the hardware department.”

A business was created. A category established. First Alert doubled in size. Thousands of lives were saved in the process. Importantly, editorial media in virtually all channels was the instrument of awareness, education and motivation. The decline of traction, audiences and the splintering of media into hundreds if not thousands of platforms of self-interest make this story simply a reflection of a another age in media communication.

The same product launch, repeated today would be wholly different and geared to empower individuals to spread the word as much as media properties are addressed to influence the influencers.

For First Alert we constructed a media machine that hummed and produced and delivered editorial attention. That is no longer the way communication operates. Yet many still attempt to apply the old rules of quantity thresholds to a world now devoted to the quality and personalization of encounters with communication.

Nine years after we began, the agency moved on to represent Kidde, the other leading category brand. We helped them secure the number one market share position. This dramatic video PSA was part of the effort:

How would you launch the CO alarm category today?