British glam rock band Wizzard once sang ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ and while that might be some people’s idea of heaven, in the press and PR world planning for the festive season gift guides can take up most of the year.
Why? Well other than the fact some longer lead titles are already close to putting their guides to bed – yet another reason why our Summer Showcase event in July holds so much value – it’s the most wonderfully lucrative time of the year where the average British adult spends around £500 on Christmas gifting and roughly £25 billion is dropped in entirety.
Whether you’re an agency pitching in or a publication compiling submissions, creating Christmas gift guides can feel a bit like groundhog day, which sparked a bit of a debate at the coop – who has the harder job; PRs or journalists? In the red corner, senior account manager and serial Christmas coverage queen, Tabitha Grove. In the blue corner, James Day, a Christmas gift guide veteran compiling lists for Metro, The Gadget Show, Stuff, Enki and more. Round one… fight!
Tabitha Grove: The PR perspective
We begin talking about Christmas focuses with clients before summer even kicks off. Christmas in July events have that name for a reason because it’s when journalists are starting to think about gift guides and all things festive. The super long leads (Good Housekeeping, Prima, WIRED, Woman & Home etc.) begin inking from the end of September and work on roughly three months’ lead time – you do the math. Products need calling in for shoots, styling, editing, pages need designing. Publications have whole Christmas strategies in order to cash in.
Planning for Christmas involves working with clients on their focus as well as wining and dining journalists over the summer to build relationships with those compiling. That’s the tip of the iceberg. We carefully craft snappy pitches that communicate product USPs and why someone would want it for Christmas, there’s a lot of detective work to find out who is compiling, what the themes are, and what their deadline is.
From there? Pitching, pitching, pitching, followed by chasing, chasing, chasing. It’s the only time of year when you can’t consider confirmed coverage as confirmed coverage – don’t believe it until the mag is in your hands. Then it’s all about following up to build relationships throughout the next year for the following year’s gift guide. Eat, sleep, gift, repeat. Gift guides are researched all year. Last year’s prints filed, spreadsheet after spreadsheet made of previous themes and journalists, weekly planning sessions, and an hour-a-day minimum spent on outreach for almost five months.
We pick products on merit – what looks nice? What will journalists like? What would you want to give or receive? – and on relevancy – is the price point right for the publication’s demographic? Does it fit with their themes? There’s no point putting energy into something we know isn’t going to get pick up just because a CEO thinks people will want to unwrap it on Christmas morning, while clients will also advise us on what they have stock of, what’s new, what the business objectives are, and finally we come to an agreement.
Sometimes we’re really surprised by what journalists love, but it’s an opportunity to get clients where they would never usually expect to be and create memorable coverage to wow them. The Job isn’t done until we wake up on Christmas morning (and even then, you’re met with the ‘what to buy yourself if you didn’t like your gifts’ gift guides going live from Boxing Day onwards). Ready for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and every seasonal occasion you can think of after that.
James Day: The editor’s perspective
Festive planning starts in the summer for journalists too and begins with working out which Christmas in July events we can or want to attend. Speaking as a tech journalist, summertime is already mad enough for major launches and the mayhem of Amazon Prime Day, so trying to engineer time away from your desk is harder than you think. You have to be strategic about the events you attend and usually this boils down to whether the brands are any cop and whether you like the PR – those personal relationships really do matter.
Now, take the effort Little Red Rooster puts into finding out who is compiling the gift guide; what’s the deadline; what are themes; and what your price points are – then multiply that by every other PR agency in the land doing the same thing (with wildly different degrees of competence it has to be said). The result is thousands of extra emails and phone calls for journalists to deal with, and that’s before they’ve even clapped eyes on a fully formed pitch.
Whether you’re an editor steering the ship or a freelance hoping to get the call-up to compile someone’s guide, your inbox will soon be overflowing with Christmas pitches and what should be one of the most pleasurable features of the year to produce can quickly descend into total drama if you don’t get a grip early on by wading through the hundreds of emails and separating the wheat from the chaff.
In print, we also pick products on merit and what will look nice, but we have a tricky balancing act on our hands. With only so many pages at your disposal, you have to be ruthless about what goes in. Try not to duplicate brands or device types; don’t be overly generous to one PR agency over another; make sure there are enough affordable choices in there. If you’ve gone down the route of different themes do you have enough variation to fill all of those gaps? It’s a genuine headache, especially if you have an editorial team breathing down your neck fighting for their favourite products to make the cut.
Online is slightly different – the internet isn’t restricted by pagination after all – but it comes with its own pressures. Ultimately, what will search well and how time-consuming will this be to put in the CMS. Increasingly, websites are going down the route of affiliate marketing with their gift guides, meaning the only merit products are being picked on is whether they’ll make the publishing company any extra coin. The game’s the game.
That’s a wrap
We’ll leave you to work out who has the harder gig when it comes to gift guides, but hopefully sharing some insight from both sides of the fence has increased the empathy for what we’re all about to ensure in the coming weeks and months. Journalists; you’ll be hearing from us very soon with the gift guide pitch to end all gift guide pitches, but if you’re being super organised and would rather cut out the extra emails and phone calls, feel free to let us know what you’re doing for Christmas so we can tailor our pitch precisely for you by emailing everyone@littleredpr.co.uk.
