I have had enough of piss poor clippings agencies.  You know who I mean, those ‘organisations’ that pride themselves on providing an easy way to monitor and clip coverage a PR agency has got for its clients.

These companies are supposed to help ensure that we never miss a piece of coverage whilst simultaneously freeing up our time to get even more coverage for our wonderful clients.  Surely this a good investment for any PR agency, right?

Wrong.  I have come to the conclusion that most clippings agencies are an incompetent version of Google Alerts.  So far, according to my clippings agency, and I can assure you it is taking a superhuman amount of strength for me not to publish its name, my client has appeared a great deal of times in the national newspapers, each day for the past week.

But how utterly disappointed I was to realise that in fact I hadn’t achieved PR enlightenment and that my clippings agency has sent me (and is still sending me) totally irrelevant coverage. Not only that, my colleagues and I have to trawl through the nonsense that they send us in order to send it back to them and get a refund.  Oh yes! We pay for this privilege.  Allow me to highlight the irrelevancy.

My client (and I can confidently say this without seeking approval) do not, and I doubt ever will, deploy robotic snipers in the Gaza strip.  They are not at any point in time engaging in any form of hostilities against either Israeli or Palestinian forces.

So why does my clippings agency send me these pieces of coverage?  Well apparently my keywords are at fault.

But surely when we pay for a clippings services we are getting someone with even the slightest hint of common sense to have a quick scan of the coverage their automated system spits out and simply see if it is relevant.  Apparently not.