ShareJoseph Cammarata, author of Face of Courage: Rise from the Rubble
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Client: Joseph Cammarata, Author Solutions author, was a NYC police officer when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. That morning, Joseph watched as the South Tower fell on top of his brother, Michael, a new firefighter for the FDNY; Michael was the youngest responder killed that day. For the next eight years, Joseph was buried under his own emotional rubble.
He wrote Face of Courage: Rise from the Rubble to show others how they, too, can come back from despair, and to honor his brother’s wish to make his spirit live on.
Challenge: Immediately following the death of his brother on 9/11, Joseph was interviewed by many national media outlets, including CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, People and Oprah radio. For his book’s publicity campaign, Joseph’s first goal was to make his brother’s spirit live on by reaching out to the media outlets that had featured him directly after 9/11 and as many new national outlets as possible.
Solution: The timing of Joseph’s campaign would play a major role in its success. Scheduled to last three months in 2010, we purposefully launched it to end one week after Sept. 11. Although Joseph initially focused on media outlets with a national reach, Bohlsen Group did not want to discount the many angles and niche markets we knew we could pursue, including those focused on self-help, trauma counseling, and firefighting and police news.
Current events helped generate coverage, too, such as the federal 9/11 Health & Compensation Bill and debate about a mosque at Ground Zero. We capitalized on these events by notifying media of Joseph’s availability for interviews.
Results: We secured more than 35 broadcast and print interviews across the globe, including Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Fox News & Friends and CBS Radio Network, niche placements such as EMS Responder Magazine and News Blaze talk radio, as well as numerous social media hits not mentioned here.
“The media coverage I received helped sell my book and, more importantly, allowed me to keep the promise I made to my mother before she died: to keep my brother’s spirit alive.”
– Joseph Cammarata