Kasey Keller piped into 20 news stations across the country from Hurley Media Group studios to share his battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Hurley Media Group partnered with Bristol Myers Squibb and Cision to put Keller’s story in front of local newsrooms across the country in a single morning, timed to Blood Cancer Awareness Month. Keller, who retired from a 17-year run as a U.S. National Team and Seattle Sounders goalkeeper, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and treated with Breyanzi, BMS’s CAR T-cell therapy. Our job was to get that story, plus the awareness message behind it, into as many markets as possible on the same day.
The run of show looked like a morning news producer’s fever dream. Twenty bookings between 8 a.m. and noon Eastern, stacked back to back with no gaps. Some hits were live, some pretaped. Some were TV, some were straight radio. A couple were national, syndicated shows rather than single-market stations. But once they were published, they were replicated to national outlets like Yahoo Sports via shared content agreements.
For a sense of scale, the markets booked on this tour cover a combined television universe in the neighborhood of 20 to 25 million households, anchored by top ten markets like Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta, plus the national reach of American Urban Radio Network’s affiliate base. Industry rule of thumb puts earned media value for a single local TV hit on a tour like this somewhere between two thousand and fifteen thousand dollars, more for top ten markets, less for smaller ones, before counting the national syndicated stops. Add it up across twenty placements and this tour likely cleared six figures in earned media value, all without paying for airtime.
Full credit to Bristol Myers Squibb for trusting us, and to Cision for the distribution muscle. Very fun project and a wonderful tool for anyone with a story worth telling.
