Nata PR School (EN)

Since the NATA PR SCHOOL adventure began, I’ve been thinking about the public relations profession. I’ve already covered the relations part of “public relations,” because it's really the most important word in everything we do, even as the internet—in addition to the diversity of the markets we deal in—has expanded our horizons and multiplied the number of our contacts, which is constantly growing.

Before influencer was a job description, when we were hosting new product launches to the media and so on, we were happy if a dozen journalists from a key sector showed up, but today you have to have 30 or 40 influencers. We sometimes arrange two types of events: one for journalists and another for influencers. My partner has worked with an agency specialized in experiential marketing, where more than 70 influencers confirmed their attendance at an event held for a well-known hockey player.

What I still like so much about everything we’re doing today is the fact that the rules from before the advent of the internet that apply to journalists still exist, and that we’re still just as free to exercise our creativity in product presentations and product launches to get our influencer friends interested. Journalists want to know the facts, the basis, the ingredients, and the brand’s history. Influencers want to have an experience – to find themselves in different places where the product is in context, where they can test the product while sharing the experience with their fans, in stories, on TikTok, and so on. The “I was there” aspect is often what gets influencers involved.

However, the watchword is still relations, which for me goes even further when we add connection to it. I explain to my students and my employees that we’re lucky to be able to connect with journalists from all around North America, and now in Europe where we work with some of our clients. We’re broadening our connections every day, and all it takes is a meeting, a coffee or a one-on-one product launch with a journalist for the communication to last, and then continue virtually through our online connections, e-mails and mailings.

Even today, there’s no substitute for meeting face to face. We’re human beings, and connection is the reason we’ve evolved and survived. It’s still so vital today to making progress and preserving our mental health. Connection is a vast subject. I’m sure I’ll come back to it in future podcasts. I want to stop here by sharing a quotation from Cathy Englebert, Commissioner of the WNBA (Women’s Basketball Association):

“No matter what technology and shiny new tools we use in our business, we should always come back to relationships.”

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What is public relations for? You can set yourself plenty of targets, like raising your profile or getting known, but the ultimate goal – the most important and the one that every public relations campaign is about – is getting people to talk about you, to feature you.

But how do you achieve that goal? What makes a journalist or influencer decide to give you an interview or agree to talk about you?

Getting talked about boils down to six super-simple steps, which we teach as part of our NATA PR SCHOOL program.

Step one is to figure out why anyone would talk about you. If you’ve developed a better car than Tesla, for instance, step one is following in the footsteps of whoever routinely talks about Tesla.

Take the time to do some research and find out what the current trends are, because that's what will interest journalists. Know that you’ll find EVERYTHING on Google, which has even become its own verb. On your marks, Googlers!

Many of our clients spend so much time developing their product or service, but don’t put any thought into how they’re going to promote their creation before it’s ready for launch.

And yet:

Tell yourself it’s a privilege if a journalist gives you an interview or agrees to talk about you. Nothing is forcing them to do it.

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As many of you probably know, time is a strange concept that seems to pick up speed as the years go by. One day, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday and I asked myself, how is this possible? Yesterday I was 35, and now here I am 15 years later.

I still remember it like it was yesterday – I was the youngest employee at the Opéra de Montréal. I was 24 years old and, after a bachelor’s in music, I’d just finished my graduate degree in arts management at Concordia University in Montreal. My role models were musicians, pianists and politicians, who were 20 years older than me at that point.

After a bout of depression the day after my 50th birthday, I wondered, was I still loving my career in public relations? The answer was yes, because my two deepest motivations are still the same:

1- I love learning new things.

2- I love discovering new ideas.

Public relations is a constantly changing universe, fuelling novelty and new ideas, which are the engines that drive this business forward. So yes, I still have just as much love for this marvellous profession, which is about getting businesses and visionary leaders known and launching new products.

I have to admit, there are fewer and fewer people from my generation – the fifty-somethings – doing launches or new product events. Many, probably the last ones to receive generous pension plans, have left their jobs as journalists or executives, opting for early retirement. And the pandemic has only sped this process up.

For a few years there, our clients were fixated on the Millennials (Generation Y): there wasn’t a single service offer or PR strategy that didn’t put them at the bullseye of the consumer target. And since they’re now becoming the new thirty-somethings, it’s time for our clients to start obsessing over Gen Z: the next wave of potential customers.

The youth cult was still everywhere, but nothing kept me from looking elsewhere… but where?! When I saw Jane Fonda on the cover of ELLE Magazine, and a few months later as the cover girl on the ultra-famous Paris Match, it was a revelation. Fonda is known for her commitment to the environment and now, at over 84 years old (she was born in 1937), she’s more active than ever. One of her latest accomplishments is her role in the wonderful Netflix series, Grace and Frankie, which is now in its seventh season.

More recently still, the French paper Le Monde told her story in a series of five articles. So, might our clients be interested in something other than young people?

*Baby boomers are the generation born between 1946 and 1964. Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, and Gen Z arrived between 1997 and 2010. So, generally, Zillennials are 40 and under. Curiously, no one seems to be paying attention to Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980.

Taken from the following article:

https://www.lapresse.ca/societe/2021-02-18/la-generation-z-a-la-conquete-du-monde.php

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* NEW MEDIA CANADA: https://nmc-mic.ca/2021/12/02/digital-newspaper-readership-continues-to-grow-research-shows/

A few weeks ago, we were presenting the results of an annual campaign for a client in the tea business. Before the pandemic, in 2018-2019, we’d also completed a one-year contract for the company's 20th anniversary. We got excellent feedback, because for any company, a 20th anniversary is a noteworthy achievement, and plenty of media outlets were sharing the story of this tea house.

Once our 2021-2022 report for that client was finished, I was able to do a comparison with the previous contract. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the results had increased tenfold, with virtually the same number of articles and mentions.

So, I took the time to break down our results – which suddenly seemed unusual. Had we made mistakes in our math?

No indeed! No mistakes. We usually only compare our results with the previous year, so it’s rare for us to do a comparison that goes back two or three years, as we did in this case.

Here’s what I learned:

This probably seems obvious to you; we all know that internet use exploded during Covid. Still, I hadn’t accurately measured the difference: a growth factor of 10 for this agrifood client.

I also made some comparisons with clients in the beauty sectors, where some companies increased their readership by a factor of more than 10.

According to the most recent Vividata* study, released in October 2021:

For those who read and listen to us regularly, you know I often say that public relations are a very powerful tool. And there’s no better way to boost your search engine optimization (SEO). So! Now you know that PR is more powerful than ever, and major media outlets are seeing more and more readers access their content on a mobile device. Here’s what Vividata revealed:

59% of Newspaper Brands readers access newspaper content on a mobile device.

I love looking at the major media’s social media, where I can see their content at a glance. Forbes, The New York Times, Le Monde and others are using Instagram and TikTok really creatively to draw readers to the articles published on their websites.

And for all those reasons, nothing can replace public relations. And it makes me happy to see that our clients are also benefiting from online growth thanks to our services.

Join me and sign up to our lists and training sessions where I show you step-by-step public relations tactics that you can implement immediately.

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* NEW MEDIA CANADA: https://nmc-mic.ca/2021/12/02/digital-newspaper-readership-continues-to-grow-research-shows/

As you know, I enjoy talking to you about the challenges our agency NATA PR faces. Quite often, we’ll be asked if we can work on a project basis rather than full-year.

Here are four reasons why investing in a very short-term contract with a public relations agency isn’t the best decision you can make:

If you retain the services of an agency just so they can invite the media and influencers to your event or launch, you’ll most certainly be denying yourself the major benefits of publications that might talk about you after your event, simply because the journalist in your section wasn’t free to attend your launch, or maybe that influencer who’s crazy about your product category is on vacation or unavailable for personal reasons.

That’s why we always recommend several months, even for a store opening, because that’s how you’re going to maximize your visibility and your investment.

So, you can work with PR agencies on a non-annual basis, but if they’re trying to sell you one month’s services, don’t fall for it. You’ll be disappointed with the results.

With media relations, you can make sure you’re being talked about by a third person (journalist or influencer), which will give you credibility. Advertising can’t play that role, although we do believe in targeted ads that bring you sales.

One of our clients, who we did PR for when they opened their first store in Canada, is still getting mileage out of several articles that appeared in major papers in that market for weeks and months after the store’s unveiling. While some customers see these articles and then go to the store, others discovered our client in fashion magazines that covered its new store after the opening.

If our job had just been to announce that opening, our client wouldn’t have seen any profit from those major after-effects, which often appear in publications weeks after the launch or, in this case, the opening of a flagship store.

Time is extremely important for public relations. Even though we sometimes get a winning hand and can generate appearances and spontaneous coverage, it’s not generally the case.

Public relations is a very powerful tool for ensuring your credibility over the long term. PR isn’t a substitute for advertising, and advertising is no substitute for PR.

The best recipe is knowing how to blend them. Pairing public relations and social media is the first step, if your budget is limited.

Join me and sign up to our lists and training sessions where I show you step-by-step public relations tactics that you can implement immediately.

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In this episode, we talk about brands and trademarks that use surnames and designer names.

I’ll be speaking with Claude Laframboise, a content creator and events expert, stylist, columnist and expert in design and fashion. Claude started and directed magazines for many years and he now collaborates directly with brands to promote them. He’s also a long-time friend, and in this podcast we’ll be talking about brands that are named for their creator.

The idea came to me when Claude mentioned that the bracelet I’d received as a gift was an Elsa Peretti. “Unlike the American designer Halston, Elsa didn’t sell her name, and she had a very prosperous career with Tiffany’s,” he told me.

If you want to watch a great series and find out more about how Elsa Peretti got her start at Halston, check out the Netflix production, Halston, from 2021.

You can find Claude Laframboise on:

LINKEDIN

INSTAGRAM

And at NATA PR!

HALSTON

https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/80245103

Reach out to me so we can continue the conversation!

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In this third of three episodes, I’ll be talking about the most recent years in my career, which led me to found the NATA PR agency in 2000.

For the youngest of our listeners, who are wondering where to start looking for your first job, this is a good example. I believe that non-profits that are in the arts or serving a good cause offer young people exceptional jobs. Take the time to find out about the public figures sitting on their boards and how they’re involved in the organization. Looking back, I realize that I had the good luck to start my career off on a very solid footing, because some board members were very committed and involved in the Opera. Because the chair of La Presse was a member, I got to negotiate and create ad campaigns with the biggest French-language newspaper in North America. I created all the campaigns, their strategies and the advertising material (posters, brochures, subscriber documents), working closely with a major ad person from the BCP agency, which later merged with Publicis Groupe.

I could tell you a great deal about those four years, when I learned the basics of everything I'm still doing today.

After that, I held marketing & communications positions for a theatre that was building an entirely new space. I was really missing music, so I activated my contact network and discovered that the classical label ANALEKTA was looking for a marketing director. I spent four exciting years there, during which the CD was still a really popular format. The label could still sell more than a hundred thousand copies of some of its titles. And that was a tour de force for classical music.

Next, I moved briefly over to TV production, still in the communications & marketing department, until the day a friend told me about a colourful character, Salvatore Parasuco, who was also looking to fill a marketing director spot.

It was my entry into the fashion world and, for two years until the fall of 1999, I put together a marketing & communications department for a company that badly needed one.

Today, you'd describe the employee I was as an intrapreneur, because without knowing it I was creating departments from scratch within the company framework as if it were my own. I hit my mid-thirties just before the year 2000, when they announced that the Y2K virus was going to fry computers around the world. There was a whiff of doomsday to it. I began to feel limited in what I could do within companies. And though my energy and talent were recognized, I was restricted in what I wanted to deploy.

So, at the end of 1999, I made the big leap: I became an entrepreneur, providing marketing & communications services to businesses in the music and fashion industries. You’ve got to remember that back in those days, becoming an entrepreneur was not trendy, and didn't inspire admiration the way it does today – quite the opposite! We were still far away from hit shows like “Dragon’s Den” and “Think Tank”. People who dared to venture out and create their own business were seen as incompetent employees who couldn't land a good job. Starting a service company was dubious… just goes to show you how things change.

Creating a business is an adventure in self-discovery, but I knew nothing about that when I was doing it – and yet something inside me compelled me. The unconscious? Maybe. The more time passes, the more fascinated I am by our amazing brains. They drive us to invent and create activities, human enterprises of all kinds.

NATA PR was started in 2000 in my living room in Montreal, and later expanded to Toronto and Miami. Today, we operate in all the North American markets, from Vancouver to Los Angeles to Toronto to New York to Dallas… and the list goes on.

And here I am telling you the story in a podcast, which anyone in the world can listen to. So you see, you never can tell what's going to happen.

www.nat

In this second of three episodes, I’ll be telling you about my early career at the Opéra de Montréal, an important and fundamental step that would eventually lead me to create the NATA PR agency in 2000.

Episode 1 (102) ends with me accepting the paid internship at the Opéra de Montréal. For me, it was a dream job, where I learned the ins and outs of a non-profit like the Montreal opera. For the first few months of the internship, I had to spend four weeks in each of the departments that needed help. I went from accounting, where I learned what a subsidy application is, to ticketing, production, attendance, staging and communications.

Next, I spent a month in the communications department under Marie-Hélène Gay, who was a dynamic young marketing executive. It was in the marketing-communications department, as they were called back then – well before the digital age – that I learned the ropes. It was a light bulb moment for me, when I was finally able to apply the marketing and communications I’d studied. After four exciting weeks in that department, Marie-Hélène was recruited by the prestigious ad agency Cossette for the Quebec office. She was going to leave her Montreal position empty. I jumped at the chance and, since this was more than thirty years ago, I don’t remember how I convinced her to support my application for the position to the ‘big boss’ at the Opera.

She must have seen something in me that, nowadays, I see in some of my employees: talent, passion and commitment. She convinced the ‘big boss’ to give me the job, since I’d already done my training there, during my four-week internship.

What a joy for me! I still remember the amazing feeling that overcame me. And I owe a debt of gratitude to that young woman who had the courage to take another woman under her wing, in an era when ‘girl power’ was not at all the fashion.

I spent four years at the Opéra de Montréal, where I like to say I learned everything – at least in terms of my career now, since public relations are the nexus of all good communications. I also have the advantage of understanding my clients, the marketing directors and their bosses, because I held similar positions with the same responsibilities for a decade before creating my agency NATA PR in 2000.

I can’t recall those thrilling and demanding years without thinking of Jacques Sauvé, who was the right hand of the head of BCP, the agency that has since been absorbed into Publicis Groupe. Mr. Sauvé was an uncommonly intelligent, calm and elegant man, at a time when advertisers were all super-stressed and operated at only one speed, overdrive. Jacques Sauvé was the complete opposite. He was cool as a cucumber and uncommonly kind. He took me under his wing for four years, where together we developed all the ad campaigns for the Opéra de Montréal. I even created the very first public event: l’Opéra dans la rue – opera in the street – and the first club for young adults: Opéra 18-35.

I got the Opera’s first telemarketing campaign off the ground, which meant calling subscribers and prospects to renew their subscription or sell them one. This was totally new at a time when, just a few years earlier, everything was still being done by mail. I loved the years I spent working there.

Coming up in episode 3, I tell you about my professional experiences that led me to found NATA PR. After my four years at the Opera, there are six more that I tell you about in the next episode.

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NATA PR – Who is NATA of NATA PR?

For the next three episodes, I thought I would tell you about my personal and career stories, to answer the questions of everyone who’s wondering how someone starts a public relations agency that’s now been in business for 20 years.

In the first of these three episodes, I’m taking some time to tell you about my educational background and training.

My name is Natalie Bibeau. I was born in the United States, and my parents chose to live in Canada when I was still very young. I did my schooling in French, my native language, in Quebec Province in Canada. My first name is spelled Natalie, without the ‘h’ the French use, because my godfather admired Natalie Wood.

It took me a while to find my way, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I’ve always envied my friends who knew when they were very young that they wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. Since I liked math and music, when I was finished with 11th grade at the age of 17, I decided to enrol in pure sciences at the college level so I could go on to study engineering at university.

After a year in that programme, where I wasn’t enjoying myself the way I had in my science and math courses, I started to question whether I wanted to be an engineer. I realized that there were only guys in my classes. Yes, you have to remember that in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the engineering profession was still mostly men. I was often the only girl in my class. I quickly realized that if I stayed on that path, the guys I was studying with—and had very little in common with—were going to be my colleagues in a few years. It was a real wake-up call. So I knew I didn’t want to work in that world.

But what could I do? Change programs? But to study what?

Today, whenever young students ask me what program they should enrol in, I always tell them to choose what they love before choosing a program. You like to write and discover authors, so why not choose to study literature? Writing and news are your passion, so maybe you should pick journalism.

Since the advent of the internet, everything has been changing so fast and so there will certainly be new professions popping up. For example, when I was a student, there were no social media managers. But we know that speaking a language and loving to learn will always be core human activities. Studying the arts, literature, languages and writing might seem old-fashioned, but they’re in demand today and will certainly be in demand tomorrow.

For me, it was my love of classical music that guided me. Today I know that human beings perform once they figure out what it is they love. So, the key is finding what you love and then matching it to a program that appeals to you.

I’d been taking piano lessons since I was eight years old, and the happiness it gave me pushed me to look for that state of joy and pleasure.

At 18, I’d transitioned from private piano lessons to what the Vincent d’Indy Music School, a major music school in Quebec Province, called the Lauréat II. So I was easily able to change programs and enrol in music at the college level.

And that’s how I studied music at university, five years in all: two in college and three at university. I loved those years of study. They inspired me and gave me a reason to get up in the morning and keep challenging myself.

In the next podcast I’ll tell you where that first job took me, and how life provides so many choices and possibilities.

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Bonjour, Hello!

Welcome to this episode of the NATA PR SCHOOL podcast.

Public relations: 6 keys to knowing when to use it

As you know, I like talking to you about the challenges our agency NATA PR faces. Very often, we’re asked how to tell whether and when public relations is useful.

Here are a few ways to be sure it’s time to talk to a public relations professional to get their advice:

1. It’s no accident that your competitors are getting talked about. They’ve probably retained the services of a public services agency.

2. The more a brand gets talked about, the more exposure it gets, the more its CEO speaks up, the easier it will be for them to sell (think of Elon Musk).

3. Your suppliers will also lean toward the brands they know. There’s nothing more human than reordering what seems familiar to us or what we’ve heard about.

4. Your employees and sales agents are having a hard time opening prospects’ doors when they’re told: “I don’t know you, I don’t know your company and I don’t know your products.” Here, too, public relations can be helpful, giving you more exposure and making work easier for your sales force.

5. It will even be easier for you to hire new talent if you’re more in view and people can easily find articles about your company and your products.

6. Some of our clients had already had some success because, many years ago, they were lucky enough to be talked about at a product launch, or because they’d invested in an ad campaign that stuck with people, but after that they weren’t talked about anymore. We’d call them the “one-hit wonders.”

Public relations is a very powerful tool for ensuring that a brand will last. Quite simply, including communications in your marketing plan is vital. But as my partner would say: first, these brands actually need a marketing plan.

I hope that you enjoyed and were inspired by this little public relations break.

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