Producing a TV media tour is usually a time-consuming and costly PR tool.
Traditionally, a media tour requires that a spokeseperson either travel to multiple
cities to do interviews in-studio at each TV station or else sit in a studio to do a series of back-to-back interviews with stations by satellite. The city-by-city tour requires a good amount of time and travel, and a satellite tour is quite expensive to produce because of satellite time charges and studio rental. And few major market stations normally take satellite interviews unless the guest is an extremely high-profile or in-demand person.
But during this pandemic, we've become accustomed to seeing TV anchors, reporters and interview guests appear via Skype from their homes, without the usual top-quality studio cameras, lighting and backdrops.
So we thought perhaps this could work for our client, The National Road Safety Foundation, which wouldn't normally use one of the traditional media tour methods.
We're in the process now of producing a ten-market TV media tour, to talk about teen summer driving, which always sees a spike in crashes and fatalities during the summer months. In fact, the traffic safety community refers to the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day as "the 100 deadliest days."
With an assist Bob Thomas Productions, we have NRSF spokesperson Michelle Anderson virtually "visiting" at least ten markets to do live or taped interviews, getting across important messages about teen driver safety and the role parents can play in keeping their young people safe behind the wheel.
The first spot will air live Monday morning on "The Morning Show" on WXIX-TV, FOX 19 in Cincinnati, followed on Tuesday by a taped interview with the ABC station in Johnson City/Knoxville in Tennessee, with several more in the works throughout the nation.
Will this become a "new normal" even after the pandemic has passed or will we go back to the high broadcast-quality standards of TV interviews? Time will tell, but some creativity and flexibility is working for us and our client at the moment.