NEWS PROVIDED BY
Standard Newswire
Dec. 4, 2023
WASHINGTON, Dec. 4, 2023 /Standard Newswire/ — The following is submitted by Gary McCullough, Director or Christian Newswire:
A fashion designer’s sales rep is approached by a marketing company. The marketer says he can get your dress in Sears, Nordstrom, Niemen Marcus and over 200 other stores, guaranteed.
The fashion designer’s sales rep hires the company and the next day is given a report, listing as the marketing company promised, over 200 companies that now carry their dress.
The sales rep tells his boss, the fashion designer, “look at all the stores that now carry our dress, and all it cost was a few hundred dollars from this marketing firm.”
Everyone is happy until the owner walks into one of the stores looking for his dress and it is not there. Then he tries another store; his dress is not there either; same with the third and fourth retail store.
The fashion company owner learns that the promised 200 stores do indeed have his dress — each store has one of his dresses, in a box, in the backroom, stacked with thousands of other boxed dresses. In this back room there are hundreds of dresses, but only one, each from a different company.
No one shopping at the stores will ever see these dresses. The store’s dress buyer never saw these dresses, never considered buying them for the store to stock and sell.
But, like the marketing company promised, the store does have the dress.
If such a story about dresses was true; it would be fraud. Don’t you agree?
Yet this is exactly what many press release distributors do all day, every day. It is called ghosting.
Many services will tell their clients how over 200 news outlets “picked up” their press release when in actuality no one visiting the newspaper’s website; no one reading the newspaper; and no reporter at the newspaper ever saw the press release.
Ghosting is a deceptive and dishonest representation of news coverage used when a news release is posted in the background of a news organization’s website. The news release will appear in a web search in the same way the fictional dress can be found in the backroom. And just like the fictional dress; the public doesn’t know it’s there.
PR firms and reps have a duty to protect their clients from this scam.
SOURCE Christian Newswire
CONTACT: 202-546-0054, Newsdesk@ChristianNewswire.com