Competing for Attention on the Week of an Apple Launch — Conventional wisdom: don’t even bother.

We’ve gone through this process before. Apple carefully stages the expectations for a media event, seeding the market with fact and fiction about a new product that’s poised to disrupt the market. In the days leading up to the event, dozens of companies are reengineering their PR strategies to draft from the announcement, or at least position themselves in a way that will make them look good, or at least prescrient, when the announcement is made. I noticed at least two companies doing this last week. First, the New York Times announced it would begin recharging its Web users for “frequent use,” a odd-but-clever reversal in the days before Apple is likely to unveil some new ideas for rescuing the media industry. Then we heard from Amazon, which announced its intention to develop an ecosystem for developers building on the Kindle, the one device most obviously threatened by the Apple tablet. Brace yourself, because this is just the tip of the iceberg. You can expect many other companies to position, reposition, and even contort themselves to fit into this week’s news-cycle.

Why do we do this? Well, it’s not as though marketers don’t have a reason. Just as Apple has learned to expand its footprint in the tech world by creating ecosystems for developers, its command of the news-cycle creates and ecosystem of news stories each time it makes a new product announcement. Marketers no doubt are also fearful that making an announcement that doesn’t fit into the Apple storyline — either on the side of the protagonist (a pro-Apple story), or the side of the antagonist (an anti-Apple story) is too risky because it will get lost in the news-cycle. This comports well with the notion that the average human being (starting with the average journalist, blogger or other news scribe) can only think of one thing at a time. It’s the ADD theory of PR, and it mostly works (to keep marketing people in their jobs), so it’s no surprise that practically everyone subscribes to it.

If you have a story to tell this week, and it doesn’t quite fit into the Steve Jobs briefing book, I’d caution against the mostly rational impulse to hold your story until next week (or the following week). Before you pull the plug, ask yourself if you believe that people have the desire to hear another kind of story this week. Better yet, ask yourself if all you want to do is talk about Apple this week. As much as I like Apple — pretty sure that I will be buying the tablet — I know I’ll have at least a few other thoughts on my mind. Bet you your customers will, too. And they might be pleased to hear from you during a week when none of your competitors have the cojones to say something.