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Press Room and Press Kit Comments

Boating Week 2000

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Press Room

The Press Room contained press packets from many exhibitors. It was great to find several with CDs full of images and printed information. Volvo Penta even went a step further and posted their press kit on line. Back in Stillwater I checked out the site. They have excellent model photos in three resolutions!! Thanks for not choking us web publishing types with 15 to 30 meg tifs or eps images when we only need light weight jpgs.

The Suzuki press kit says they have also established an on-line press room to aid boating and outdoor writers. I called Bear Adventures, their advertising firm, and was quickly and cordially given my access codes. The site is very nice!

We expect others to follow Volvo and Suzuki's efforts in this area soon.

The room also contained a bulletin board providing details of on-site press conference times and locations, plus some phone lines for laptop computers. Best of all, it had free bottled water!

Mercury won the prize for the "most wanted" press kit. They provided a nice black zippered case containing their information to those who attended their press conference.

Wellcraft wins the prize for the best looking and easiest to use press kit CD ROM. The CD was in a jewel case with a nice 4 color cover insert including small color previews of the images on the CD. The insert also explained the various formats provided on the CD for PCs and Macs (portions of the cover insert are show below). The images were also provided in jpg format for web posting. Great Job!!.

We do have one suggestion for Wellcraft next year, print "Wellcraft" on the face of the CD. Several press kit CDs were screen printed with company names, logos, etc. When you get them all scattered out on a table (outside their cases) Wellcraft's is hard to "pick out". It is printed "IMATION" (probably the name of the CD manufacturer). A scan of Wellcraft's and Yamaha's CDs is shown below.

Please note near the bottom of the disc, Yamaha even denoted theirs is for the Model Year 2001 Outboards (another good idea).

A few CDs bore "stick on" mail labels. They work fine for identification, but look a little unprofessional or "rushed" compared to the screen printed discs.

RBBI Comments: Most manufacturers are doing a great job with their press kits. We just tried to provide a little comparison and contrast to provide some ideas to kick around next year.

Its great to see some theatrics back in the press kits (Yamaha's Guinness Book of World Records entry and Logic's aerial drop). Events and activities like this bring back the Kiekhaefer day's of yesteryear. Its fun to see manufacturers pushing their products pushed to the max and beyond. We encourage others to do the same.

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