While most of the rest of the world is focused on the Winter Olympics, the NY Times covered another high stakes event earlier this week: the Westminster Dog Show. More specifically, the article was about PR (or so it seemed). The headline "Best PR in Show" did its job and reeled me in (note: as often happens, online NY Times articles get different headlines than their print versions for some reason).
Apparently, some spend big bucks on lavish multi-year campaigns to try to draw attention and influence the judges. As the article says:
Among breeders, owners and handlers, it’s understood: you can’t just
turn up with the paradigm of the breed, if such an animal exists, and
expect a best-in-show ribbon. To seriously vie for victory, a dog needs
what is known as a campaign: an exhausting, time-consuming and very
expensive gantlet of dog show wins, buttressed by ads in publications
like Dog News and The Canine Chronicle.
The cost of a campaign can add up fast… Altogether, a top-notch campaign can easily cost more than $300,000 a year.
However as above implies, most of the focus is on ads. Despite the headline, I could not find mention anywhere in the article about PR. This is another example of how the field is portrayed inaccurately in the news.
One would think that at least some of the campaign investment and effort would go towards true PR programs. Don't people read Dog News for the articles? Doesn't Canine Chronicle have any actual chroniclers? Apparently not, it is all about ads:
Most magazines are struggling with a downturn in ads. Not Dog News.
It’s about 75 percent ads and runs as long as 600 pages in issues
coinciding with big shows. Prices vary from $250 for a full-page
black-and-white ad to $4,000 for the cover…
Judges are the main target — they are sent the magazine gratis — and
they star along with the dogs in most of the ads. There’s a tradition
at shows of taking a photograph of winning dogs along with the judges
who selected them, and most of the ads are little more than that photo
and a cutesy tag line.
