PXN Interviews Indigo Pearl's very own Luke Bennett!
Luke Bennett is an Account Manager at Indigo Pearl, an award-winning PR Agency specialising in entertainment technology, based in London. We sat down with him to discuss how PXN’s suite of tools and features allows him to do his job in PR more effectively.
How does PXN make your life easier?
I would say it makes my life easier because a lot of the time, especially with bigger campaigns, code mailouts can be some of the most time-consuming parts of my job and it prevents me from doing things which can generate more value.
Say I have 50 codes to send out, and it takes me 2 to 3 minutes per code. I know it's going to take me over an hour or so. If within that hour, instead I could set up a code mailout via PXN within half an hour, then I could use that other 30 minutes to pitch out a specific feature, an interview opp, or something else.
“I'm just essentially making more efficient use of my time and PXN really helps me to do that.”
The asset management system allows me to create links which I can share with journalists easily. I can share them with my clients easily. They can see it and it's not a problem. It just makes my life a lot easier and quicker, which lets me use my time more efficiently.
PXN has an embargo feature so you can embargo assets. This means they are unavailable to most users until after a certain time. How is this useful?
I would say a big problem and worry for our clients is the potential for information to leak. Pre-seeding, where we will sell a story to trusted press ahead of time, is such a valuable thing we can do.
One of the biggest things about the news industry is timeliness. The faster you jump on the story, the faster you get clicks and this means the more likely the story will appear in a google search. Journalists want speed.
What can happen if we don’t use PXN to have those embargoed assets is we’ll have a situation where I can’t share assets with someone, because they might go ahead and upload them ahead of time. I’ve had sometimes where a CMS goes awry and they’ve already preloaded their assets. Then those assets are out in the wild.
PXN’s embargoed assets just really helps to facilitate the pre-seeding process and make sure we’re able to share a link with someone.
It's just more streamlined, it's less clunky. I don’t have to follow up very quickly after the news has gone out with the link. It just helps to streamline the process.
What's the difference to your workload between using PXN for code distribution and doing it yourself?
It is a nightmare. What can happen, especially if the codes are coming in very close to an embargo lifting, is we don't have a lot of time to get them out.
The journalists need to get this code because they need to get started on their reviews. If we're asking them to review this game and the embargo lifts in three days, they need every hour possible to make sure they've got enough time.
So, we need to make sure we know who's going to want these codes. We'll have a huge list of people who are waiting for a code that maybe they've requested, or maybe we've already pitched them in because we know the code is going to be coming up and it's going to be up against the wire.
All of a sudden, as soon as we get those codes, it's not a very quick process because first we go through our list, and we’ll start to send out all those codes individually.
In the UK every journalist kind of knows each other. As soon as one person gets that code, they say to the others, “Oh, guys. I've just got my code in, and I'm playing it right now.” But I haven't sent it to the other 30 journalists, because I'm about to get on to them.
It takes me a few minutes to do each email when I'm doing it manually. I try to create a template, but then I need to manually copy and paste the code in, which will take me time.
Journalists think I've prioritised another outlet over them. By the time I get to code number 40, they think, so I am not as important as these other journalists?
“With PXN, they all get them at the same time. It just goes out to everyone. No one feels like they're less than another journalist.”
No one is sending me anonymous hate and telling me about how I can't believe that you don't want to see my impressions of this game. It's like, no, we do. But I am but one man. And there are a lot of codes.
Why is digital asset management important to you or to your clients?
I think the main thing, and the most important thing, is security. I've seen Google Drives which haven't had permissions properly set up because it's not the most intuitive system. The journalists think maybe I can use that in my article and actually that asset is under embargo. That's coming in our next beat.
It really complicates the whole campaign because it throws out of whack our timeline and realistically that could have been solved by a team that is dedicated to making sure all of the assets are in the right place, they're private, they're stored correctly. They've got the right embargoes.
It alleviates the pressures of, is this WeTransfer link going to work properly? Is this WeTransfer link going to expire by the time the journalist opens it?
If we're doing something with a long lead pre-seed with someone and we send them the story a week in advance, and then they go to post their article and then they realise the asset link has just expired because you didn't set it up properly and now they can't use it.
Now the journalist can't get these assets and won’t be able to post a story because we made a mistake in the setup. Maybe that happens overnight. If you've got an embargo at midnight and the UK team isn't awake at that point, we can't jump to it and make a new link quickly.
'“I think PXN just provides that extra layer of security and it's a service you can trust in, without it being faceless.”
One of PXN’s most crucial features is security. How is this beneficial to your job in PR?
Yeah, I think the big thing is, it just makes it very secure and it's a platform you can put your trust into.
“There's nothing worse than having such vital and crucial information that needs to go out at certain times to certain people and you're like, I really hope this link works.”
You don't really want to mix a confusing platform with the potential for human error. You want to eliminate one of those if you can, and I would like to keep my job. So let's keep human error and have a more secure platform which I can share embargoed assets with instead.
Because yes, I would rather keep my job than have the inevitable AI catastrophe take my job and write all my press releases for me. Thanks, ChatGPT.