In ARmadgeddon: AR 101: Analysts and press quotes
we explained that analysts don't charge for quotes. However, itis worth adding a postscript: one reader has pointed out that there's one case where vendors do pay for a press release. This is what she writes:
"I just wanted make a comment say that you have to be either green or naive to take this idea of paying for quotes seriously, or even think if could happen here in the States but not in Europe. However, a comment about Frost is on the money: they told us that we had won an award, so we said 'great'. They replied, if you want to tell people who have won, then you need to pay us for the package -- which included a trophy, a photo opp and a press release. We said, no keep the trophy: we'll just spread the news about the award ourselves. They told us that they would only anounce the award if we paid for it."
We'd love to hear about other experiences like this.
Saturday 18 February 2006
Frost demands cash for press release
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6 comments:
Vinnie is right - the impact is small - and the impact on buyers by analyst in general is much smaller than the likes of Gartner would like to admit.
But that is not what they or their rivals tell vendors.......
Anyone who has been in this business more than 10 mins know that anything endorsed by F&S, Butler, Aberdeen or Hurwitz probably sucks. But vendors for whatever reason, still cling to the illusion that an 'analyst' quote - even a pseudo 'analyst' will have an impact.
There seem to be a confusion between using a quote and leveraging an award (commercial product), or a magic quadrant (intellectual property -although one may ask whether this is an oxymoron in this case).
Again, we'll re-state that quotes are free.
This is not to say that Frost & Sullivan behaves ethically by selling its awards, but then back to Vinnie's point, if consumers may be fooled by the "best European car of the year" (attributed by rotation from a self-selecting sample), we hope to believe that enterprises are smarter when it comes to endorsement.
Wrong - F&S used to charge for quotes. Each analyst would have a list of current vendors who had contracted for this service.
When the press called you - you would look at the list and try and ensure those vendors were mentioned.
If they were an invoice was sent. This was pretty common and popular. Don't know if they do it now, but they definately did a few years ago.
Amazing. But apparently this did not them too much good as they don't seem to be either on many vendor's radar screens nor in many PR ratings....
F&S carries a lot of weight in the Telco sector - though not IT.
But question I am left with is why the Infoweek article didn't enearth any of these going's on?
Books could be written about the practices of Butler, Aberdeen - some of their excesses have gone down in analyst lore - but Infoweek found nothing...etc
Alan,
IW's article was very shallow, did not unearth anything -see our post on the subject.
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