Brainstorming Develop a Big Idea around the Zen Pillow mentioned. Give it your best shot. Remember, the idea is only half of the work. The other half is showing how you will get publicity for your Big Idea. You only need a written page to make your Big Idea come to life, for this exercise.

Information and explanation about "big idea given below, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO READ ALL OF IT

The Big Idea The Big Idea is something that PR people are famous for coming up with. You should always be striving for that Big Idea. Its what makes this business fun. Sometimes a Big Idea is a series of small great ideas. Either way, dont get stuck in a rut of just doing Media Relations and press releases. Think outside the box. A really good Big Idea will allow for a series of things: 1) Events 2) Publicity and Media engagement 3) Product demonstration 4) Customer involvement Whenever you start a PR plan you want to have a brainstorming session. The more brains the better. Go for an hour or so. There are no bad ideas. Write down

everything and then sort through the ideas later. Circle the ones with promise and build upon them. Start with small things first, like story ideas, and then build up to the wild and crazy stuff. Dont criticize outlandish ideas. You never know where the crazy idea will lead maybe to The Big Idea. The Work: The Instant PR Plan In this next section we will create what I like to call The Instant PR Plan. The company and product is the Zen Pillow Company and its new product, the Zen Pillow. Imagine, for a few minutes, that you are the PR account person that has been given the assignment for the Zen Pillow new business proposal. They are looking for a PR plan and they have given you this short briefing document. This is all you know and have to create some kind of plan from it.

The Zen Co. Briefing Document (provided by Zen Co.) Zen Co. is a new company that is revolutionizing the pillow. Our new Zen Pillow guarantees sounder sleep, fewer neck problems, and better overall health. Tests have shown that users of the Zen Pillow are 50% more alert during the day than those who do not use it. Our goal is to market the product first to the trade, then to health care practitioners and then to the public via direct sales through infomercials. Our vision is to have the Zen Pillow on the front pages of every newspaper and all major morning talk shows. The ultimate goal is to get Zen Pillow on 60 Minutes and have reporters demonstrate it in real life. We expect that in achieving this goal we will sell 1 million pillows in the first year. The product sells for $39.99. Our strategy for press releases is to have them come out four times a month to targeted groups, such as fitness experts, nurses, doctors, chiropractors, moms and key media influencers. We see television and the Internet as the major strategic sales points for our product. These will be our shops before we go retail. We expect to be in stores in the second year. Another goal is to have people try the product on a mass scale. We have a proven, patented technology and experts to back it up. Our goal is to get our experts out in front of the public to tell our exciting story. We believe we are the only

experts in this category of sleep products and that everyone should look to Zen Co. as the true leaders in helpful sleep products. Okay, thats it. Having limited information is often the case in PR. You have to go with it sometimes, or at least in this exercise. Now, its time to work your creative planning PR muscles. By the way, when you read through the Zen Co. briefing did you spot the Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics? The briefing is intentionally mixed up. Some Objectives were actually Tactics and some Strategies were Objectives. In real life, you often get this kind of confusing, mixed up brief. Its up to you to sort through it and figure out what the real Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics are and then to organize them. The next slide gives you an idea of what they could be and how to structure them in a PR Plan. The Zen Co. Objective is to be The Leader in its market. You see that in the top corner of the Plan. The first Strategy is to Build Awareness. The arrows relate to the Tactics that will be under that Strategy. Those Tactics are Packaging the Story and Media Relations. This is not a real plan. The purpose of this set of slides is to get you comfortable with how the various sections, from Objectives to Tactics, relate to one another. If we were doing a real plan, we would go into great detail on each one of these and we would structure the Tactics differently. But lets keep going. By the end of this process you will see how it all comes together into a professional PR plan. The next Strategy is to Educate Health Club owners. The Tactics that fall under that Strategy are Special Events (our Big Idea might be part of that section) and a special Health Club Programs. Again, we will need details on each of these later on. But as you can see below the Strategies are short and to the point and the tactics for each are connected. The third Strategy is Involve Customers. Quite often Tactics will work for several Strategies, but in this case both Special Events and a Customer Test Program tactic work for this Strategy, too. Budgets This is just a quick look at how a PR plan is broadly structured, but one of the most critical sections of any Plan is the budget. There are two categories of budget: Professional Service fees and Out of Pocket expenses or OOPs. This often gets a laugh. If you work at a PR agency, your Professional Service Fees are the cost of salaries (multiplied by three or four) and overhead. However, many company in-house PR departments are structured like outside PR agencies and must bill hourly rates against projects. The OOPs are all the expenses associated with getting the job done, from printing to postage to airplane tickets, and some are marked up between 10 and 15 percent. You have to think ahead and budget for all these items if you are going to have an accurate

budget. Its okay to put in ranges or tag them as estimates, if there are too many items that are undetermined.

Timelines Timelines can be simple or complex depending on your work environment or client. Some managers require detailed timelines that can be put on a wall and referred to during the year or projects lifespan. There are specialized project management software programs and tools you can get for this type of timeline. Generally, PR managers use a simple month-by-month timeline with check marks showing where key program elements fall. In this format, one would list the Tactics