AIMS OF FINANCIAL PUBLICITY

In the realm of investor relations, the value of visibility through the media is high and warrants the specific effort that must go into achieving it. Its ultimate aims are:

• To achieve and sustain visibility for the company, its management, its products or brands, and its activities.

• To project the company’s capabilities in ways that demonstrate its ultimate ability to appreciate the invested dollar.

• To demonstrate specific capabilities about the company—its abilities to earn, the abilities of its management, its research and development, its future plans, its grasp of its industry and markets, its ability to control costs and ultimately increase its margins, and so forth.

• To demonstrate the consistency of the company’s performance, as well as the credibility of its management in the veracity of all its representations of the company in the past.

It’s rare that a company, by virtue of its positive performance alone, will generate sufficient interest to warrant ongoing and continuous appearances in the financial media. A company in trouble, if the trouble is flagrant and the effect of the trouble is significant enough to a large segment of the financial community, has no problem in getting itself broadly covered by the financial media. Witness Enron, Tyco, HealthSouth, and so forth. Since few companies purposely generate this kind of interest, professional efforts for the healthy company must be used to discern those elements about the company and its operation that are consistently newsworthy and valuable to these publications. This material must be presented to the publications professionally.

Financial publicity on a consistent basis is at least a hard sell, best performed by experts, with full knowledge of not only the techniques of dealing with the media, but the individual requirements of each publication. There should also be a basis of experience that warrants credibility with the media for the investor relations practitioner, as well as for the company he represents.