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Fast to slow media strategy
Fast to slow media strategy

A media strategy for architects and the online world

Nic Granleese avatar
Written by Nic Granleese
Updated over a week ago

The Fast to Slow Media Strategy is simple and effective. It aims to maximise the number of publications that cover a project, and orders publications based on how quickly they can publish. This order also corresponds to the length and quality of the content being published. 

Fast to slow media

  • Social media (under 1 week)

  • Websites (1-2 weeks)

  • Newspapers (1-4 weeks)

  • Magazines (4-8 months)

  • Books (1-2 years)

  • TV shows (1-2 years)

A hypothetical example

Let's say you're working on a new, amazing project called the Blue House. You've been sharing the build process on Instagram for months. That's when the world first finds out about this new thing you've created. 

Once the project is completed, you get it professionally photographed and create a BowerKit on BowerBird. This allows you to compile all the information about the project that journalists will need to publish a story, and it makes it easy to approach out to a wide range of publications. 

The first type of publication you submit to is large Instagram accounts. They can publish with a single photo and a description about your project. An example would be Australian Architecture which has more than 200k followers.

After this, you contact several online publications like Archdaily, Contemporist, Design Boom, Design Milk and several others. Over the next several weeks your project gets published online and over the next few months secondary online media cover your story. Your project is now online and has a life of its own. Websites from Portland to Poland are sharing your project in a similar way to how people share posts on Facebook.

You now submit to your local Newspaper who features a house each Saturday. They can't publish this week, but have a slot available in 3 weeks. They use the content in your BowerKit to write a story that goes out to their 300,000 person audience.   

Next on the submission list is magazines. Grand Designs Australia Magazine gets back to you and say they would like to publish in their next edition. This is several months away because it takes time to layout the magazine, get it published and distribute it. You now have a physical record of your project getting published that sits nicely on your office coffee table waiting for new clients to visit.    

Twelve months later a book publisher makes contact and says they're working on a book about blue houses. They want to feature your project and tell you they found it online. They go back and forth for months and eventually a hard copy arrives in your mail box. 

Finally a TV researcher get's in contact and says they are looking for projects in your area for a new show. They want to include the Blue House in their shortlist. The producer comes back to you and approves the project which will need a camera crew on site for two days. The host of the show interviews you and the clients of the project and 6 months later you see your project on TV. 

All of this activity is triggered when you first submit your project. You contacted 10-20 different publications on your first sweep and triggered a media process that may run for months, or years. If it slows down, you have the choice of submitting to more publications that you find on BowerBird, or you decide the project has run it's course and it's time to focus on a different project. 

Overall, our hypothetical project, the Blue House got published 26 times in a range of different formats. The total audience that saw the project was not due to any one publication having a disproportionately large audience. Instead the project had a form of virality and the total audience was an accumulation of many different sources. 

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