Poll: PR People Say Exclusives More Popular Than Embargoes

In a recent PRNewser poll, we asked, “Which Tactic Did You Employ the Last Time You Released Big News?” The results: “Posted on a wire and pitched the release,” and “Exclusive with one publication” both came in dead even at 32% each.

21% said “News embargo” and 15% said “Posted on company blog/website and pitched the link.” Judging from these results, we have to ask: Are embargoes on the decline?

Just last week agency Waggener Edstrom assembled a panel to discuss the topic of emgargoes, and reporters in attendance were split down the middle between those who defended them and those who hate them. The panel came on the heals of another declaration that embargoes are dead, this time from TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who has been publicly battling with PR for quite some time.

Skip forward to this week. Waggener Edstrom, the aforementioned agency who set up last week’s panel on embargoes had an embargo broken in regards to one of their clients: Microsoft’s MSN.com re-design. This led to another uproar and Arrington said he “banned” Waggener from communicating with TechCrunch. What did the agency learn from the experience? “Will we abandon embargos all together: nope. Will we have an even higher bar for use of the tool: you bet,” said Jen Houston, global lead of Wag Ed’s digital division, Studio D, in a blog post today.

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