Paul Krupin's Trash Proof Marketing and Publicity Blog

There are several different types of PR firms and they operate in accordance to one of more models.

Pay for Performance
Pay for play
Relationship Based
Retainer Based
Specialty Boutique
Task Based Service Providers
Pay & Pray News Release Distribution Services
Internal PR
Do It Yourself PR

If you want to see the whole article, please send me an email at Paul@DirectContactPR.com

I’m excerpting just the first section, which addresses your pay for performance question.

First we have to recognize what a publicist can do for you.

Recognize that a publicist will spend time researching, writing, copywriting, and devoting their experience and expertise on your behalf. They will study what you have created, evaluate your skills and hopefully identify and leverage what you are best at, then craft copy to be used in persuading media to give publish articles, interviews, and reviews, or producers to feature you and do interviews on their shows. They will then contact media, hopefully the right media, on your behalf, and pitch you and see if you can meet the media needs. They will then try to get you the best type of coverage you seek. They may also train you and guide you so that you do the best article or performance and maximize your chances of turning a profit.

When you hire a publicist, you must negotiate the work that the publicist will do for you. It is best if you clearly understand and have a precise definition of the work that will be performed and when it is completed.

Pay for Performance

Very simply, you will pay for the quantity and quality of the coverage you receive based on a rate that is commensurate with perceived and or prior proven value of the coverage, the market size and importance.

If you think that the “pay-for-performance” is a way to produce guaranteed media coverage you might want to think again. You may fall victim to your own success.

Every pay-for-performance PR firm warns and acknowledges that clients are likely to pay way more than they anticipated, particularly when a PR campaign is successful in a big way. You can negotiate and will pay more on a spectrum that goes from pithy or snappy quotes from you as author or expert, to company mentions, to book or product reviews, to feature stories, to short interviews, to long in-depth interviews.

For example, a single placement in on a major national TV show may cost $15 – 25,000, while a mention in a small newspaper might run you $150 – 300, a radio show in small town America might run you $200 – 500, or in a major metropolitan area for $1000 – 1500 or more. Feature stories will go for $300 to $3,000 depending on market, industry and circulation.

If you sign a contract for pay-for-performance, you will be obligated if you get the interview or if the story, large or small is printed.

Here’s the catch: Whether you sell product and break even on the costs of getting the media coverage is up to you and what you make of the golden opportunity.

In other words, if you galvanize people and your interview and story results in sales, yes, you can do very well.

But if you put on a mediocre or boring performance, then you will still be contractually obligated to pay for the coverage whether you make money or not. You are on the hook and yes, you can be sued if you fail to honor those contractual obligations.

Dan Smith owner of Smith Publicity has posted a great reference case study article on his website.

http://www.smithpublicity.com/2012/03/february-2012/

Here are links to the rate sheets for two pay-for-performance companies:

http://www.payperclip.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/PayPerClip-Rates-7-26-12.pdf

http://www.publicityguaranteed.com/rates.html

Here is a link to an article on the negatives of pay-for performance in Your Business Arizona

http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/negatives-payforperformance-public-relations-4362.html

BTW, I operate a task based services provider company. Hope this helps!