We're celebrating! It was ten years ago this August that PTA launched an innovative, new media service, the Morning Drive Radio Tour® (MDRT).
In August 1990, PTA booked its first MDRT for Jackie Collins and her book, Lucky (Simon & Schuster). In a fitting bit of irony, PTA just completed our fifth MDRT for Jackie Collins - ten years later - for her newest title, Lethal Seduction.
Consisting of 18-20 back-to-back interviews, all conducted in one morning (from 7:30 - 11:30 a.m. eastern), the MDRT allows a spokesperson to reach an audience of approximately five to six million people, and sometimes as high as ten million. As a comparison, The Today Show reaches six million people daily.
In 1994, PTA further refined the MDRT by partnering with Conference America - a leading teleconferencing service - which enables authors and spokespeople to be interviewed from anywhere in the world; and they have! MDRTs have been conducted from London, Paris, and Sydney, as well as from trains and automobiles. At present none have been done from a plane (though it has been explored).
During the last ten years MDRTs have been conducted for a tremendous variety of best-selling authors, entertainers and public figures including John Grisham, Tom Clancy, P.J. O'Rourke, Former President Jimmy Carter, James B. Stewart, Michael Lewis, Bobbi Brown, Richard Carlson, Michael Eisner, Richard Branson, John Cleese, Dennis Miller, Whoopi Goldberg, Maya Angelou, Harvey Mackay, Bill Parcells, Tony Robbins and Stephen Covey, among many others.
PTA books roughly 300 MDRTs annually.
MDRT FUN FACT: The bestselling author of The Hot Zone, Richard Preston, holds the record for doing eleven MDRTs in a five month period to help push his book up The New York Times best-seller list and keep it there.
