March Madness
Okay, it’s not about basketball.
February and March are the busiest months of the year for me as the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day, the ideal time to promote Irish butter and cheeses for my client, the Irish Dairy Board.
It’s hard to get the food media to mention brand names without a good reason. St. Patrick’s Day provides that reason. If you want to make a genuine Irish feast, you need genuine Irish dairy products. And how do you know which ones are Irish unless you know which brands to buy? While the promotional effort is timed to use St. Patrick’s Day as the news “hook,” truth is, once consumers aquire a taste for Kerrygold butter and cheeses, there’s no reason to wait until another St. Patrick’s Day to buy them again.
What’s not to like about Kerrygold? The dairy products are made with milk from grass-fed cows that feed on Ireland’s rich green pastureland. The cows are not given growth hormones and the diary products are made without additives or preservatives — just pure, unadulterated, delicious dairy.
This year, for newspaper food editors, we produced an electronic press kit with recipes and photos that featured both traditional and innovative ways to use Kerrygold products. The press kit included interviews with two high-profile Irish chefs who use Kerrygold butter in their restaurants. As a former newspaper food editor, I try to anticipate media needs and provide everything I think a food editor could want to put together a St. Patrick’s Day feature.
For magazine food editors, we held a St. Patrick’s Day luncheon last week, flying in a talented chef from Ireland, Paul Flynn of the Tannery restaurant in Dungarvan, County Waterford, to cook a contemporary Irish meal at Geoffrey Zakarian’s chic Country restaurant in New York. Paul made a fabulous lunch, which started with “Baby Guinness” — shot glasses of the richest lamb stock, looking every bit like stout, with a “head” of mashed potato foam and Ivernia cheese.
There were Kerrygold cheeses to sample, including the new Ivernia, a hard-grating Italian-style cheese with an intriguing Celtic design; the iconic Dubliner, a Cheddar-like cheese with a hint of sweetness and Parmesan bite; and Blarney Castle, reminiscent of a young Gouda. And every table included Kerrygold butter — salted and unsalted — with remarkably creamy flavor and characteristic natural golden color, to enjoy with chef Paul’s Dubliner bread.
These public relations efforts are intense — my clients and I researched restaurants, looking for a high-caliber venue that would welcome a guest chef. There were conference calls linking Ireland, New York, Wilmette (the Chicago suburb where the Irish Dairy Board is based) and San Francisco. We worked on the logistics, sourcing the florist, a winery partner, musicians, and organizing cheese shipments for the event. We wrote press kits, designed menus, developed a guest list, created invitations and made dozens of follow-up calls to secure media attendance.
Magazine food editors work six months in advance, so we were not looking to be featured in St. Patrick’s Day stories this year. Our goal was to introduce editors to the sophistication and quality of new Irish cuisine and with it, the genuine Irish products that are integral.
After the hugely successful luncheon, I spent the next day with my son Calvin in New York, going to the farmers’ market — fun, but not as extensive as San Francisco’s remarkable Ferry Building farmers’ market — and having lunch at Momofuku Noodle Bar, whose chef David Chang was just nominated as a James Beard 2007 Rising Star Chef of the Year. The noodles and condiments were beautifully prepared, but the broth was too salty to slurp.
I took a train to Boston to see my older son David, who is an MBA candidate at Babson’s F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business. I was invited by the Babson Culinary Society, of which he is a member, to give a talk about public relations. Since Babson is ranked #1 in the country as the school with the best program for entrepreneurship, David thought that this group would benefit by understanding how the more cost-effective discipline of PR can be used to promote products or services, since start-ups tend to have marketing budgets that would find advertising prohibitive.
I used case studies from the Irish Dairy Board, Ghirardelli, Glad Press ‘n Seal wrap and Frito-Lay to illustrate how PR tactics can be used to communicate the benefits of various products. And, since we were talking about food, I stopped at the supermarket to buy the products to pass around for tasting.
Now that I’m back in the office, it’s not only time to get back to work for my clients and Ketchum, it’s also time to hold a board meeting for Les Dames d’Escoffier, prepare a media training session for the Asian Chefs’ Association, gather auction items for the Hawai’i Chamber of Commerce of Northern California’s 5-Star Aloha event — a PR practioner’s work is never done.
INSIGHT: PR is a completely absorbing job that takes a great deal of effort to do well. But there’s more. It’s about tracking the trends for your “beat” even when you’re taking a day off, and staying involved and connected to the network of people who influence your business, all while you do your day’s billable work. And I wouldn’t trade this career for anything!
