Right Before Your Very Eyes

Sometimes an idea, an angle, a story, is staring you in the face - literally - and you just can't see it.

Back in the early 90s, when I was chief reporter with a national news agency, I bought a sheet of Perspex to cover my desktop so I could put contact numbers and photos of loved ones where I could see them without cluttering up the space. And of course over the months I'd put funny bits and bobs under there too; headlines and cuttings that tickled me.

One which always made me laugh - from the Grocer magazine if I remember rightly - was a full-page ad for a company called Midlands Pet Foods, which featured a photograph of offal beneath the strapline "Tripe - It's the Real Thing". Being a Northern monkey in a southern town it never failed to raise a smile. It was also a daily reminder not to take myself seriously in the world of tabloid news.

Then, one quiet news day - actually it was the 13th of May 1992 - it struck me that I had been missing a trick. It was a story.

It came to me because I asked myself, for some reason, 'who would NOT find that strapline funny?' and found myself answering - 'probably Coca Cola'. This is my opportunity to offer extremely belated apologies to Midlands Pet Foods because I'm sure it was a real pain in the arse for them at the time - but it was a potential 'row' (rhyming with 'how', not 'low'). All I needed to do was run it past Coca-Cola, to check their response to someone "appropriating" their world famous slogan.

It worked. The story went out - complete with Coke chiefs "frothing" with fury - and made several national papers. There was zero - in fact probably MINUS PR value in the exercise, but I was a red-top reporter then and the story itself was the point. Plus of course it earned a couple of hundred quid for the agency.

Fast forward to September 2007, and I'm working closely with Travelodge. At a brainstorm with their key PR staff, including human dynamo Shakila Ahmed and head honcho Greg Dawson, I suggested that it would be great PR if we could find a customer or customers who had stayed in a Travelodge for a long-term period; I was envisaging a couple who had sold their home and bought another property but had become temporarily stuck in limbo, perhaps for a few months, perhaps even a year.

The Travelodge team went back to their managers and regional managers and sent the message out on their internal comms system and I went back to work.

A couple of days later I received a call from the PR folk. They had good news, and they had good news. They had found a couple. And the couple had been living in a Travelodge for ... ahem ... 22 years.

The rest was straightforward - a couple of interviews with the guests, a photo session, knocking the piece up into news-style copy and deliver it over the newswire to the nationals, big provs and TV sofa shows at 8am for the following day. The result: widespread coverage that took in all nationals, key regionals, radio coverage, TV coverage, massive digital and overseas pick-up ... all from a story that had been sitting there, like the tripe tale, for years and years.

Like the ad on my desk, it was just a question of taking what was already there and examining it from a different angle. And this time, there was huge PR value in the exercise.

Asking 'What if ...?' is often the most valuable question you can ask of your client or your business. And don't be afraid to ask the most obvious questions. Journalists aren't.