I have got a weird idea that I thought should be shared among my PR kinds. It is that I was wondering if we could use our press releases to carry advertisements and earn good revenues out of it.

Not jazzy colourful ads, but at least text ads just like in Google. We can call it PR Adsense.

Think about it, our press releases go on the newswire services, are flashed by wire agencies, faxed, emailed and hand delivered to journalists. What better way than this to reach out a message to the journalists?

For instance, say we are issuing a press release of a mobile phone service provider company, like Airtel. The press release will reach all telecom beat journalists in mainline dailies, financials, business magazines, trade publications, onlines, TV, wires, and maybe lot of regional media. Now in this press release, we can include an ad text of another company, say a handset manufacturer like Nokia.

Now what would Nokia want to advertise about? Could be many things. Like a new handset feature that could go well with an Airtel service, or that Nokia is hosting a press conference after some days, or that it is running a promotion. Now here, Nokia is sending out its messages to the same set of its target journalists, but it didn’t have to issue a release on its own and bear the PR agency fee, Newswire fee, etc. It can alternatively just a pay a little for inserting an ad.

Nokia can use text ads like this whenever it wants to send out a message that is not so important enough to issue a full-scale press release on.

Now who can place ads on the Airtel’s press release apart from companies providing complementary services like Nokia. Let’s say Market Research firms. They could have huge amounts of market information related to the telecom industry that they want to sell to journalists. How about writers’ resource providers, journalist clubs, encyclopedias, and other media houses on the lookout for hiring new journalists? Or in short, whoever wants to sell their products to journalists.

Who is going to manage all this and decide which ad goes in which press release? Of course the PR agency. There could be new departments in PR agencies that would sell PR ads and manage the whole PR Adsense business.

Do we take the permission of our clients before we place ads on their press releases? Or do we take a commission and share the ad revenue with our clients? These are other questions we can discuss next.

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