SunnyD Road Trip and Hip Hop Stop Enjoy PR Support Coast to Coast

What comes first: The media contact or the story idea? Like the chicken and the egg, both are important, but does one outweigh the other?

Well great contacts may help get a reporter’s ear, but after that the story will either stand or fall on its own merit. Here’s a good case in point: For the last four summers SunnyD and Wordsworth Communications have traveled together across America on the SunnyD Road Trip. The cross-country tour takes a van on the road to connect with local communities, encouraging kids to engage in fun summer activities and try out samples of new SunnyD beverages.

This summer included two separate mobile tours centered on the theme Move, Laugh, Think®. Each tour executed the theme in different ways. One partnered with COSI (according to Parents magazine the No. 1 science center in the country) to teach science-based games to children. The second featured dancers from Philadelphia's Chosen Dance Company, who showed off their moves and encouraged children to get active through hip hop dancing.

Wordsworth secured publicity for the tours in major metropolitan markets all across the United States. Our checklist for landing great stories included:

Are the SunnyD Road Trip and Hip Hop Stop new, unique, unusual or quirky enough to make news?

Are the SunnyD Road Trip and Hip Hop Stop activities fun, healthy, educational and visual enough to appeal to the media?

Do the SunnyD Road Trip and Hip Hop Stop offer lots of opportunities for the reporter to interact with SunnyD representatives and the audience?

Even without personal media contacts in every city, the agency felt the storylines were strong enough to shine through and earn great placements on behalf of SunnyD. So we hit unfamiliar markets hard based solely on the strength of an interesting and compelling story idea.

If you’re pitching a special event, a product or a service to audiences outside of your local stomping grounds, try using our checklist as a guide for making story ideas great. And check out these great segments from the 2009 SunnyD mobile tour as good examples of spot-marketing: http://bit.ly/2S3m79

Oh, and the answer to the chicken and the egg thing? You’re on your own on that one.