It feels like a given that getting your CEO on the couch is a big winner, and it can be. But are there also times when aiming for the stars is the wrong approach?
It seems like a given that if you have a message you want to push to a national audience, getting one of your spokespeople on TV is an obvious way forward. Big PR agencies will give you lots of very impressive stats about the potential reach of a programme like BBC Breakfast. For a campaign that needs to make an impact across an entire country or region, it is harder to imagine a better platform than a TV broadcast. There's a reason why major corporations continue to invest so much in TV advertising on commercial channels after-all.
But there is something of a dirty little secret to the world of broadcast PR that nobody seems to want to talk about - likely because, for those of us who've worked with major names, the implicit promise of 'access' to brands like BBC or CNN is a big selling point. I'm guilty of it myself. The reality, though, is that it's entirely possible to spend a fortune on a highly successful push for earned media coverage or TV advertising and walk away with little to nothing to show for it by way of tangible benefit to your organisation or your cause.
In fact, one of the biggest frustrations of my career has been seeing organisations chase big ticket media coverage that they think will be transformative for their business or charitable mission whilst passing up opportunities that may actually translate into real gains against their business goals, or contorting themselves for the opportunity to get on TV to the point where they end up losing focus on why they wanted broadcast media attention in the first place and effectively waste the opportunity. So what are some of the reasons why you might want to think carefully before making TV the focus of your PR strategy?
This is probably the biggest dark secret of the PR world (and it isn't limited to TV viewing - but that's a conversation for another time). When you work with fancy PR agencies, for broadcast coverage, you'll often get told that a slot you were in could be seen by millions of people. On the surface of things this is a legitimate statistic. BBC Breakfast, for example, often boasts that it has somewhere between 5 and 9 million viewers dependent on the conditions of any particular day (harsh weather tends to lead to more people at home in the morning and so more viewers).
But these are reach figures for the entire programme. The average person sticks around on BBC1 for just 24 minutes (though BBC Breakfast itself is higher than this due to the length of the programme). On BBC News, that plunges to just one minute and 47 seconds (June 2025). If you manage to bag yourself a one-off slot on the news, the number of people around to see your 5 minute segment is going to be significantly smaller than the average viewing figures for the programme as a whole imply. You may be seen by a few hundred thousand people even on a big ticket programme - not the millions a fancy PR agency will claim.
If the goal of your campaign is to genuinely reach a mass market and you're working with limited resources, then the reporting stats from your PR firm may do wonders for your professional ego, but they may not be giving you an accurate impression of how many people actually saw your news story and could give you a sense of false confidence in the potential success of your project.
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One Communications Manager I worked with told me about the enormous effort they put into securing national media coverage. In terms of raising awareness and bragging to the Board, it was a huge success getting onto the couch - but for their actual funding KPIs they were devastated to be told that they'd supposedly reached over 10 million people on one day, only to get fewer than 300 visits to their sign-up page!
Hundreds of thousands of people reached in 5 minutes is, of course, absolutely nothing to scoff at, especially in 2025 with the fragmentation of media markets. But the other unspoken pitfall of putting all your eggs in the TV engagement basket is that you may end up investing a great deal of time in reaching the wrong audience for your purposes. This doesn't matter terribly if your goal is simply brand recognition and strengthening the identity of your organisation. In fact, in those cases, you may not care terribly much at all who you reach on TV if your communications strategy is otherwise rooted in a strong understanding of who your audience is and why.
But if you're planning your PR around a specific objective - for example, mobilising mass engagement with a particular campaign or ask to the public - you may well find that you end up investing a great deal of time or money into trying to get onto that vaunted breakfast sofa only for the programme to generate precious little by way of follow through or awareness from the public. That's because even though broadcasters want (understandably) to imply that they are the voice of the nation, in reality every TV programme - even the most popular - has a demographic skew.
In many cases, the people watching TV are doing so in a low engagement environment and mindset. They have the news on whilst they're doing something else; they're watching Breakfast during the school run; they're flicking through channels at the end of a long work day. If your goal is to drive conversions - petition signatures, campaign sign-ups, visits to your website, downloads of your info pack - then TV may not be the best place (yes, even in the age of doomscrolling) for you to connect with your target audience.
One Communications Manager I've worked with told me about the enormous effort they put into securing national media coverage. In terms of raising awareness and bragging to the Board, it was a huge success getting onto the couch - but for their actual funding KPIs they were devastated to be told that they'd supposedly reached over 10 million people on one day, only to get fewer than 300 visits to their sign-up page! Most likely, a Google Ad campaign and some well coordinated sector press PR and organisational partnership work would have given them much better results.
Unfortunately, TV broadcasting is fickle business even by the standards of press and media work. More times than I'd care to count, I've seen organisations struggling with limited resources put their all behind a media moment that was never actually promised to them only to be met with disappointment at the final hurdle, sometimes ending up out of pocket and always left feeling frustrated. This is unfortunately the nature of broadcast media. It's a high pressure, ever changing working environment. Journalists and producers don't want to let anybody down, but the intense pressure on them means it's an inevitable part of the job.
For smaller and ambitious charities or businesses especially, investing your all in earned broadcast media could leave your communications strategy with a giant gaping black hole at the centre of it, not to mention your budget if you decide to spend big bucks on trying to pull something off. Even more so than print media, you should never assume that a broadcast moment is a guarantee or pin your entire PR campaign on the possibility of getting on TV unless you have the money, resource and crucially the patience to make several attempts to pull it off.
This is doubly true if you're a business hoping for a big PR moment. Broadcasters are even more weary of corporate PR, for all kinds of legal and ethical reasons (especially the BBC), than print journalists are. I've built media moments with big corporate partners that have made it into national newspapers successfully but saw the corporate sponsor cut out of news broadcast footage. If you're a business with much more limited resource, you should be grounded in your expectation of what is and isn't possible when it comes to TV.
Despite everything I've said in this blog, the truth is that the answer is still always "whenever the opportunity presents itself" - just with the caveat that you should always be honest with yourself and your key stakeholders about what you want to get out of doing broadcast media, and don't let yourself get carried away by the mystique of being on television.
You can build a campaign that allegedly reaches millions, spend tens of thousands on a top PR company to get there, and still end up with 100 sign-ups to your mailing list because your media moment to drive youth engagement actually reached 150,000 people predominantly aged 50+ during a time of the time when they're mostly watching idly. But might be that a spot on a breakfast programme is fantastic for legitimising your organisation in the eyes of larger funders, putting your name in front of policy-makers, or bolstering your reach KPIs as a marketing team as one part of a bigger conversion strategy.
This is why it's vital any push for broadcast coverage is part of an informed, considered communications strategy that carefully considers your organisation's objectives, target audiences and the best way of connecting with those audiences. There's nothing wrong with pursuing a TV opportunity for the sake of showing off to your funders or elevating your brand's presence but it shouldn't come at the expense of opportunities to generate real conversions or tangible engagement with your work if your resources are limited.
If you're going to work with a PR agency or strategic communications expert to pursue your goals, be weary of anyone who hypes up potential viewing figures or appears more interested in telling you where they can get you and less interested in interrogating why you want to be there. I have, over the years, learned that it's better to respectfully challenge a client and push them in the direction of a more cohesive and considered strategy than to let them spend all their energy focused on an ideal goal that may not actual be the right priority for the goals they're trying to achieve.
Like with all things PR and media the crucial thing is to know why you're doing what you're doing. When you pursue coverage for coverage's sake, unless your interest is purely in having impressive reach statistics to show off to prospective partners, you dramatically increase the risk of putting in a lot of effort without much by way of real-world outcomes to show for it.
I work closely with my clients to understand their vision and practical goals, develop a bespoke PR strategy suited to the realisation of both, and then help them execute that strategy with my expert help. I provide grounded advice and considered support based on my experience working with hundreds of organisations around the world on their communications. My primary interest is always in helping you find the best way forward for your needs.