Samples from the
Rich Smith mar-com hit-parade

[Click the title of each to view]

• Soft feature press-release. Practice Builders. Sometimes the best way to inform and influence isn't with a standard, tersely written hard-news story but with a long-form news feature, such as this one about a doctor who narrowly avoided a fatal heart attack by turning to colleagues in his own office for help—on the advice of an outsider. READ MORE>>>

• "Elevator pitch" roundup sheet. Nancy J. Friedman Public Relations. This collection of rapid-fire story-idea blurbs—packaged in a single, convenient document—was geared to quickly spark interest among jaded, hyper-busy editors and reporters. My task: cut right to the chase in a short, sweet, sizzling, no-miss fusillade of words, rich in colorful imagery and drenched in hipness. READ MORE>>>

• Corporate citizenship spotlighter. Eide Industries. The company is a Los Angeles-area manufacturer of fabric structures andeager for ways to stand apart from its competition. In this press release, I went about it by positioning Eide as a consumer protection champion. READ MORE>>>

• Story placement. Drucker Labs. Standing between delivery of a client's message and it's receipt by the target audience is the news-media gatekeeper who refuses on principle to publish blantantly promotional materials. Fortunately, I know a ton of tricks for overcoming such objections. Here's a perfect example. READ MORE>>>

• Human-interest press release. Fetching Communications. The client was a Florida-based public relations agency. I was the source of the idea for this attention-commanding piece, as well as its writer, artwork preparer, search-engine optimizer, and distribution handler. READ MORE>>>

• Doctor-to-doctor direct-mailer. Practice Builders. Cited above, This physician marketing agency produces an array of communications tools in support of the business growth strategies devised for clients. Here's one of them, a single-page, dual-sided news alert (always enclosed within a covering letter, not shown). I write these alerts in a way that positions the sender as a thought-leader and source-authority to whom recipients can with confidence refer patients. Very effective. READ MORE>>>

• Print brochure transplanted to Web. Advanced Bionics. One of the two writing excellence awards I won in 2007 from my chapter of the Public Relations Society of America came in recognition for my work on this brochure. But well before that honor was bestowed, the client had already proclaimed it a winner, calling it the most effective promotional piece the company had to date produced. Here is but a small portion of it. READ MORE>>>

• Print brochure. RadNet. Corporate brochures typically suffer from the fatal flaw of self-congratulatory verbiage that touts the company's strengths while all but ignoring the requirement to speak to the prospective customer's needs. That doesn't happen in brochures I write. Instead of a focus on us, us, us the company, the message is aimed directly at you, you, you the reader. That's how to get results. READ MORE>>>

• Making a mundane event newsworthy. Newsdesk365. Forgive me for tooting my own horn with this news item about myself. I offer it only to show how diabolically clever I can be when it comes to transforming humdrum announcements into dispatches that command broad media attention. READ MORE>>>