How to make nerve-racking media interviews effective and stress-free

I'd like to talk about the press interview. The interview on radio is a key part of the content, a key part of the objective of any PR campaign. I've been fortunate enough to be myself on television, radio, in print, in English language and Chinese language publications, so I have some experience, but I've also prepared executives for public relations interviews, again on print, radio, and TV across the world. Over 25 years, I've worked with big companies and small. There are some common themes and some common practices that everybody should be aware of and can use. I was reminded of this today because we are arranging an interview for the Vice Chancellor of one of our clients’ universities, and the interview is with CCTV, the main Chinese television channel. Of course, there's a certain degree of excitement about being on TV, but there's also a certain amount of anxiety. Are we going to get caught out? Are we going to say the wrong things? Are we somehow going to compromise the organization? 

We always find that clients are ambivalent about interviews, and then what they like to do is to do them but with a massive amount of control. I'm here to share with you that control is important, but preparation is even more important. The golden rule with presentations and with interviews is to be prepared. I just had a conversation with a young journalist from CCTV and ABC, and she's based in Beijing and now in the UK, and she's covering stories, and she wants to cover a story about how Chinese students will feel confident and safe about coming back to the UK to study. Now, our client is a university, so they've been selected as one or two to take part in this. We like to prepare our client, but also to prepare the media. So in anticipation of any interview, the client will have what we call a briefing book, and in that will have questions from the journalists and the client, but also the agency will prepare answers. We’ll also then include in that briefing book the biography of the journalist and links to other stories that that journalist has either written, produced, or broadcast. When you're working with mainstream media like CNBC or the BBC, obviously, most people know who they are. But in this case, if you're dealing with a Chinese media and a UK-based client, they're not sure, so there's a degree of uncertainty there, and the agency's role is to create a briefing book to get the spokesperson in alignment with the journalist’s background. 

What we also then do is to prepare a message home, and I've talked about this before in the SPEAK|pr Methodology. What's really important in any interview is to keep the message simple. Often the people that are going to speak in an interview assume that the journalist is going to be, if you like, the audience. But they're not. The journalist is actually the conduit or the filter for the story that they're going to share with their readers or their viewers or their listeners. So what's really important in the message home, which is available on our website at eastwestpr.com/speakpr, is that we have one central message and then we have three supporting messages, and in those supporting message pillars, we include proof points. Now, remember that the journalist is only there to ask questions that are on behalf of their audience. They're not asking on behalf of themselves. They are looking for a good story, of course, and they have to compete to get their stories placed with other journalists.

Sometimes we find clients or companies are reticent to give out information to the journalist, because they're afraid that the journalist is trying to catch them out. Now, the problem with that is if you don't give the journalist any information, they can't write a story, or the audience for the radio or for the TV will be disappointed. And the journalist is trying to do their best, because they're worried about ratings, or advertising numbers, and subscriptions. So we have to remember that the journalist is just doing their job.

What we do on the other half of the equation where I say we prepare the media briefing book for the client is that we then also prepare the journalist. I've just been on a phone call with the journalist Xie to discuss what we can and cannot say in advance of the interview, and this is why interviews really should never happen spontaneously. They should always be prepared, so we create some ground rules for what can be said and what can't be said. And in this particular case, we don't want to talk about politics, because that's really not germane to the interview. We want to talk about education and about the wellbeing of students. It's important to lay the framework for the conversation and also then to give to the journalists, for example, the biography of the spokesperson and some facts and figures that helps them to fill out their story.

I previously mentioned how over 50% of all coverage that you read in the newspaper or see on TV or listen to on the radio is provided by a PR agency somewhere. So all of that information that we gather from the client or from the internet as research is presented to the media in order for them to then make their story and to make it more quickly, because as we've reported, Cision has said there is so much content out there that the big issue, really, for all the media now is how to process all those stories. So part of what we're trying to do is to get alignment between the client and the media on what the subject matter is, what we can and cannot talk about, and to create some context, so that when they arrive, everybody is fully briefed. 

What happens then when people get there, now the air has obviously changed. It used to be that you would have an interview, and you'd go to the studio, and I did one with Bloomberg in Beijing, and you have to get up at seven in the morning and get to the studio so that it could be broadcast and ready, or if you're doing live, you'd have to wait and get to the studio just in time, no matter what time of day or night. But now, as Xie is preparing the Zoom video, the time schedules are now much more flexible. It does mean though that we still need to be prepared. We still need to make sure that we're dressed properly, and that if you're going to do Zoom, that you've had a shave, for example, if you're a man. If you're a woman, that you've groomed, that what you're wearing is important. We've talked before about lighting if you're going to be on a Zoom call, and also the quality of microphones that you're going to be talking into, because all these things impact the overall quality, and what happens is if they're not very good, then they'll be left out of the show. We'll just give you an idea of something that Rob Young and I discussed all the way back in 2017 about British brands:

Rob: In a golden era of relations between China and the UK trade, between us and the world's second biggest economy was worth ￡55,000,000,000 in 2015. We buy considerably more from China than we sell there, but the growing ranks of China's middle class seem to have a growing fondness for brand Britain. When I was there recently, there were a lot of young people with the union flag emblazoned on their t-shirts and sweaters. Jim James is the managing director of Morgan Cars in China. He also worked as a kind of brand ambassador, helping other UK companies sell their products there. As we sat on his red, white, and blue sofa in Beijing, he told me why UK products seem to be doing increasingly well.

Jim: I think British brands for the Chinese represent a number of things, one of which is our heritage, and that we have this respect for individuals and innovation and creativity, and yet we also have this amazing heritage. If you look at events and programs like Downton Abbey, for example, or even the affection for the monarchy in China, there is a real sense that our culture is a very established and very civilized culture, and the Chinese really enjoy and want to embrace that.

Rob: France, Spain, Italy also have long-standing proud cultures. Why are they more keen on the British culture than the French or Italian or whatever?

Jim: They often think of English as gentlemen, and I’m amazed at the number of meetings I go to and they say, “You’re such an English gentleman,” and there’s a sense that we have a particular stereotype. I don't hear that when they talk about European, French, or German. They might call it the French charm or the Italian food or the German efficiency, but those are not really warm, resonant qualities that they want to associate with. And I think the other thing is our sense of humor. I think there is a sense that the British, no matter what happens, will always have a bit of a giggle and laugh and make some humor out of it.

Rob: What types of British brands sell well in China?

Jim: Jaguar Land Rover certainly leads the way in terms of both percentage of our exports, but also in terms of awareness. It’s doing fantastically well here. Also, brands like Burberry are doing well, and brands like our universities and secondary schools and boarding schools are doing very well in UK property, so it's not just the exports into China are some of the things we've got at home in the UK that are very appealing to Chinese.

Rob: So we're talking here, then, largely about the well heeled in China, not necessarily people who are what you might regard as middle class or working class more ordinary Chinese people?

Jim: I think that the brand UK is appealing to people regardless of where they are on the social strata, really. We're seeing people riding scooters and wearing backpacks with union jacks on them, and we're seeing well heeled people driving Jaguars and Land Rovers, so I think brand UK is appealing to people across the social spectrum.

Rob: When somebody buys a British product in China, what is it that they hope the brand will bestow upon them?

Jim: I think we've got a couple of elements. We look at a product like Morgan Cars, for example. The belief is that it comes from the UK, it'll have been well-made, and that's not just the hand-making element of it, but the raw materials, the supply chain will be good, and also the after-sales care, the insurance, and all the soft elements of a product will be good as well. So I think one of the key elements is the quality throughout the British product.

Rob: The value of the pound’s fallen quite a bit in recent months. Does that make British goods more competitive? Does it give them even more of an edge in China?

Jim: The depreciation of the pound against the RMB is fantastic news for exporters. One or two exporters have increased their prices into China, which I think is a real mistake because all they've tried to do is to shore themselves up instead of getting the volume up lift. But a weakened pound is super news for all of us in China that are trying to build the brand, because we can take the extra margin and use it for marketing and greater distribution. 

Rob: As someone who is trying to persuade Chinese people to buy more British products, have you had to change anything after the Brexit referendum?

Jim: It was interesting, the response in China. People said, “We still love the UK. It’s still the same place.” With Wake Drinks, which is a new energy drink from the UK that we've just started to import, we changed the labelling from “Wake Original” to “Proudly British,” so I think that there's a sense that the UK is standing up for itself, that Brexit means that there's a group of people who are saying, “We want a voice,” and that's something to be proud of.

Rob: There has been some commentary in Chinese state media that relations between China and the UK are not as warm as they were. Does that talk have an impact on the perception of British brands among ordinary Chinese?

Jim: I think that the ordinary Chinese, by and large, are worried about economic and social development, not about political discourse, and so they see the Chinese government is taking on a certain mantle, but their association with British brands are not affected. They still have the same warmth and empathy about British brands that they've always had.

So you'll have heard that as I was speaking about British brands in China, that I get to come back to some core messages about the value of British brands to the Chinese in terms of the sense of credibility and respect and craftsmanship. This is an interview that I've given, and I gave the same interviews in China on television and also in print, and one of the things that Rob Young and I were looking for was a common “feel good” story. Now, it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes, the media are looking for a story that is chasing down something that you're not excited about or that you don't want to talk about. So this is where I come back to my client earlier on. There are some things they don't want to talk about, so how do we manage that? 

Well, one of the tools that we use in media training is that of bridging. Bridging technique is to take a question, show it the respect that it's due because someone's thought to ask that question, but also then to take it back to your key message. An example would be if someone says that they want to talk about the value of the UK in China and the journalist asks about worsening trade tensions and how some Chinese students have been ill treated in the UK. Our response, because we're not responsible for that and we've got our own agenda, is to say that we would like to respect all people no matter where they are. We may not even know the circumstances of that, but what we're committed to is furthering the better interests of dialogue between these two countries. And then ultimately, as I said in my interview with Rob Young and as I've done on Chinese media, was that the Morgan company was interested in bringing the Morgan brand and the Morgan lifestyle experience to Chinese consumers, and that was not a political issue. That was a cultural and lifestyle and personal issue, and that's how we bridge back, so bridging is all necessary in many interviews, but it's especially important during times of crisis where the journalists are fielding and digging for where people may have something to hide or maybe haven't been fully compliant with the truth.

In media relations, we are never advocating that clients lie, or that they somehow avoid the issues, but it is possible to try and control the narrative with bridging techniques. And the other big one is the use of “No comment.” Sometimes people say, “Oh, no comment.” What should we say in the event of “No comment”? My answer to that is, if you ask your child something and they said, “No comment,” A) you’d think they were rude, or B) you'd assume they were guilty, so “No comment” doesn't really work. What we have to do is to come back to the bridging technique, where we're saying, “I understand the question,” but I'd like to rephrase it by saying, “That's an interesting way of looking at that. Our perspective is this…” So as we would in a social situation or a domestic situation, we would never say to somebody, “No comment.” We don't do that at home, and therefore, why would you do that in a relationship with the media and their audience? So interviews make a lot of people nervous, but there's no need to because actually, it's just the journalist doing their job. And if you're a spokesperson for the company, the CEO or founder, part of your job is to articulate the vision for the company to the outside world, and media interviews are a great way of doing that. 

The secret to a successful and stress-free media interview is preparation. Know about the journalist and the publication. Let the publication and the journalist know about what you're willing to talk about, and they have your facts and your figures written down but in a message home, not too many to be overwhelming, but just one or two central key points from one or two central key messages with their proof points, so that the journalist takes away a good story, so that you get covered, but that your company's goals and objectives are also covered. 

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

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