Last Bank Holiday Monday, I was up at BBC TV Centre with Chris Long, Producer for Click, the BBC’s flagship tech TV programme. We were doing some filming for a piece that will be out this coming weekend. I asked Chris how he fared with PRs these days – I’d imagined they’d be queueing at the door to talk to him.
In fact, the reverse seems to be true.
Or at least, the companies who you think would be constantly vying for attention on the show don’t seem to bother with it – and those that are completely irrelevant to the show seem to take up a lot of the Click team’s time.
Says Chris: "When I was editor of PC User I had millions of new best friends pitching every day – now I work on a show that goes out on BBC1, News 24 and around the world on BBC World and we are ignored – bizarre."
Bizarre indeed. Given that there are few dedicated tech outlets on TV these days, you’d have thought Click would have been right up there – admittedly it is aimed at a consumer audience (so ruling out all the enterprise and B-to-B IT outfits), but there are enough consumer focussed vendors to warrant putting some effort into talking to Chris and the team at Click.
Then again, perhaps it leaves the field open to those PRs who know their broadcast onions to take advantage of the apparent apathy of many consumer tech companies towards a major broadcast outlet.