Mathew links to some of the recent posts about embargoes and comes up with the conclusion they suck. He says:
I take that back. It does help someone: it helps the company that is trying to push their new gadget/service, and it helps the firm that is trying to get as much free publicity and marketing juice as possible for their client. If a company has developed a personal relationship with a journalist or blogger, then I could see doing someone a favour by respecting an embargo. But in most cases by agreeing to an embargo, bloggers are just helping to load the tubes with PR bumpf so that the client and the PR firm can get a nice bang for their launch.
A year or so ago I wrote a few times about embargoes. I gave three reasons when they might make sense, while also noting that using fewer embargoes is a good idea:
1. Complicated news. If the news announcement is either super technical or very complicated, embargoes make sense because it allows for more in-depth briefings, q/a, etc. Other option is a press conference, which does not really optimize for good questions.
2. Limited spokesperson availability. It often happens that a company will only have one or two people available for interviews. In this case, it makes sense to do an embargo because it lengthens the amount of time to do briefings and levels the playing field a bit -- you don't always want to just optimize for the wire services, for example.
3. Demos. If you want to actually *show* the product, it sometimes means getting on a plane and visiting people, often on both coasts. In this case, you don't want to leave one city, have a story appear and deal with unhappy reporters in the second city who feel they've been penalized by geographic distance.
So call me embargo neutral -- they represent one way of dealing with a specific set of problems. I'm always amused at some of the histrionics that follow the use of tools (come on, comparing the use of an embargo to underpricing a stock so it can pop during an IPO?)? We must be fully into the silly season.