When I started in PR, the press release was a big thing.

Early in my career, working for other agencies and companies, I learned a very traditional version of media relations. A client had news, so one of the first things we did was send out a release. It would typically go through a distribution platform and be sent to hundreds of outlets categorized by industry. From there, it was regurgitated and spit out into the mysterious world of press release distribution.

At one company I worked for, pitching wasn’t necessarily much more personal.

We were taught to create several different angles, build targeted media lists and aim to send 3,000 non-personalized emails in one day through a PR database.

Yes. Three thousand.

And yes, journalists sometimes responded exactly as you might expect.

TAKE ME OFF THIS LIST!

There were some good hits that came out of it too. Mass pitching did work, particularly back then. But certainly not at the volume you might expect after emailing 3,000 people.

I found the whole thing frustrating and, frankly, a little invasive. What exactly were we expecting from those 3,000 contacts?

From conversations I had with people at other agencies, I knew volume was very much part of the PR culture at the time, although 3,000 was certainly at the extreme end.

Clients asked about volume too.

How many pitches will you send every month?

And, of course:

How many placements can I expect?

Needless to say, I eventually moved on from that company. The approach felt spammy and non-strategic to me.

And today? I think it would be an even worse idea.

Spray and pray had its moment

Even five or six years ago, mass emailing was still very much a thing. It even has a name: spray and pray.

To me, that isn’t really PR.

The media landscape has become far more fragmented. There are still many staff journalists, but there are also freelancers. Publications have closed or consolidated. Smaller local media have disappeared. Audiences themselves are spread across more places.

At the same time, PR databases have made it incredibly easy to get journalists’ email addresses.

That’s both good and bad.

It’s good for people like me because I can find the right person.

It’s bad because so can thousands of other people.

Journalists can receive more than 100 pitches a day. So if you’re sending the same generic email to hundreds or thousands of them, how exactly are you going to stand out?

You’re probably not.

Mass mailing is not the way to stand out and get known.

Today, I believe much more strongly in carefully curated outreach, relationship building and pitches created for the journalist, their beat and their audience.

It takes more time.

The list is smaller.

And in my experience, the results are much stronger.

Please don’t tell a journalist how wonderful you are

This is probably one of my biggest pitching bugaboos.

The self-promotional pitch.

PR is earned media. You’re trying to offer something valuable, educational, useful, interesting or genuinely newsworthy enough that it earns its way into the media.

That means your pitch shouldn’t essentially say:

I’m wonderful. I’ve done this and this and this. I’ve made a million dollars. I’m very successful. I’m sure you’d love to interview me.

Why?

Why would the journalist’s audience care?

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pitch a product for review. Of course you should, if there’s a legitimate reason for that publication to review it. You have a product you believe matters or solves a problem for their readers. The journalist decides whether it’s worth covering.

That’s earned media.

But the pitch has to provide value to the publication and its audience, not just value to you because you want publicity.

There’s a big difference.

And perhaps don’t pitch dog food to the weatherman

Research matters.

I’ve seen pitches sent to people who have absolutely nothing to do with the subject.

If you’re pitching a story about the best dog food, why are you sending it to the Weather Channel or the local weatherman?

You’ve got to know who you’re pitching.

Does this journalist actually cover the beat?

Have they covered this type of story?

Does this particular angle make sense for them?

This doesn’t mean spending six hours researching every journalist before sending one email. But it does mean taking enough care to know that you’re pitching the right person.

And while we’re here, nothing says I’ve carefully selected you for this story quite like:

Hi First Name.

It happens.

Someone sets up a mail merge, doesn’t have the contact’s name or doesn’t check the system properly, and off it goes.

Hi First Name.

Not ideal.

A pitch doesn’t have to be three sentences long

I don’t subscribe to the idea that every media pitch must be incredibly short.

Sometimes you need enough information to explain the story properly.

But there’s a difference between enough information and crazily long.

Journalists are busy. They’re getting a lot of pitches. They shouldn’t have to work their way through your life story before figuring out why you’ve contacted them.

I feel similarly about subject lines.

I’m not against something corny. I like a good play on words or a pun when it fits. Around the holidays or for the right story, why not?

But clever shouldn’t come at the expense of clarity.

A journalist should be able to look at the subject line and have a pretty good idea whether the email is relevant to them — and whether it’s a story rather than a sales pitch.

And I don’t send attachments.

Ever.

I provide a link to supporting information, images or other materials. I don’t want a large attachment contributing to the email ending up in spam or giving someone another reason not to open it.

About those guaranteed placements...

This one gets me.

There are companies that will tell potential clients:

We can get you into Forbes for $1,000.

We can get you into another major publication for $1,500.

And the client gets excited.

Of course they do. Who wouldn’t want to say they’ve appeared in a major publication?

But if you’ve purchased a guaranteed placement, that’s not the same thing as earning editorial coverage.

It is paid placement.

There may be legitimate reasons someone chooses to buy sponsored or paid media. That’s fine. But it should be called what it is.

The problem comes when paid placement is sold or understood as though a journalist or editor independently decided the person or company was worth covering.

Those are two very different things.

AI can make PR stronger — or more mediocre than ever

I love AI.

There. I said it.

I use it as a strategic partner, particularly for research and brainstorming.

What topics are becoming important in a client’s industry? What’s relevant right now? What might the best PR mix be for this particular client? What angles haven’t we considered?

And definitely — definitely — learning more about the journalist.

I have access to tools like Muck Rack, but sometimes AI gives me much greater insight or helps me make connections I might have missed. And it saves an enormous amount of time.

For me, that’s where AI gets really interesting.

It’s like having another partner at the table.

Where I become much less enthusiastic is:

Hey AI, write me five pitches.

Copy.

Paste.

Send them to 500 people.

We’ve basically reinvented spray and pray, only now we can do it faster.

I prefer to write pitches myself or have our team write them. AI can help us research, brainstorm angles, check something, polish it and even think about how an angle could be personalized for a particular contact.

But the thinking and the voice still need to be human.

Otherwise, it’s just laziness at scale.

AI can strengthen PR.

Or it can make mediocre PR more mediocre than ever.

Sometimes the journalist who clicks doesn’t bite

We’ve become very good at watching what happens after a pitch goes out.

Opens. Clicks. Repeat opens.

And I admit it: I still get excited when I see that a journalist has opened a pitch and clicked through to the supporting information.

They clicked!

And then...

Nothing.

Meanwhile, another journalist opens the email once, doesn’t click anything and ends up covering the story.

That still surprises me.

It is also a good reminder that we can read far too much into our own data.

An open is an open. A click is a click.

Neither is a media placement.

Ultimately, journalists respond because they see a story.

Maybe it’s a human-interest story that’s genuinely right for their local beat. Maybe it’s a new technology that could change an industry. Maybe it’s an unusual angle backed by strong data.

A good subject line helps.

Timing helps.

Relationships help.

But there still needs to be something worth covering.

Before you hit Send

If someone new joined Mackasey tomorrow and was about to send their first pitch, I wouldn’t tell them to worry about how many emails they were going to get out that day.

I’d want them to ask three things:

Does this journalist actually cover this beat and this angle?

What value could this story provide to the journalist’s audience?

And is it actually newsworthy?

If you can’t answer those questions, don’t hit Send yet.

Three thousand pitches won’t fix the wrong story.

And AI won’t either.

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I’ve been in PR and communications a pretty long time. Long enough to remember that landing a client in a major publication was a big win that could potentially change everything for the client and the publicist.

Of course this still matters… actually very much so.

But the world of media is in constant flux and over the past few years it has changed dramatically, including the way that people communicate and become known.

Now, there are so many ways to get noticed. You can talk up a storm on ten podcasts, post your best advice, tips and tricks on LinkedIn, be quoted in industry articles and mainstream news, share your voice in an op-ed, create a thought leadership piece and send out a press release announcing your latest news and see your name and company turn up all over Google.

And still you will have a visibility problem.

Because being seen isn’t the same thing as being remembered. And it definitely isn’t the same thing as being known.

The desire to count everything

PR has always been hard to quantify. For years, the industry has tried to prove its value using metrics like impressions, shares, likes and advertising value equivalency. If an article had 10 million monthly visitors, and your client was featured in that publication then that was supposed to mean that 10 million people read that article intently.

Well guess what? They weren’t. Maybe a small percentage were, maybe a significant percentage were but there was no exact science to quantify just how many people read that article.

And now we have even more things to count to prove our successes.

Media mentions, interviews, Podcast appearances. LinkedIn impressions. Substack subscribers. Search rankings. Engagement. Share of voice. Domain authority, and on and on.

And, of course, the latest, everyone wants to know if ChatGPT is aware they exist.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t count

Don’t get me wrong. We need to count. Clients need to see results and know whether things are working. No sound strategy can exist without solid numbers to back it up.

But I think we can get so busy counting that we lose sight of the true goal: to have our clients stand out, to have their brands make an impact, in other words, to make sure that they aren’t just seen but known.

Multiple media mentions are wonderful. So is being a guest on ten podcasts, having a large social media following, a bylined article in a major publication and ranking high on Google.

But even with all this, what happens when someone sees your name pop up again and again? Do they know what you do? Do they know what you think? Do they trust you? Do they even remember you?

To me, that is where getting known begins.

We can get so busy counting how many media hits we’ve secured that we forget to ask the much more important question: What are people actually starting to know you for?

That’s where things start to get interesting.

You can be everywhere and still be known for nothing.

I see this more often than you might think.

A company wants publicity, so they start conducting PR. The founder talks about leadership on one podcast. Innovation on another. AI in a contributed article. Work/life balance on LinkedIn. Sustainability in a media interview. Maybe there’s a press release about a new product thrown in for good measure.

Technically, they’re doing everything right. They’re visible.

But six months later, ask someone outside the company what that Founder is known for and the answer may still be: Who’s that?

That’s not necessarily a PR failure. It’s often a strategic positioning failure.

The problem isn’t that nobody saw the content. It’s that nothing stuck.

Good PR is repetitive

This is one of the less exciting truths about becoming known. You must repeat yourself.

Not word for word. Please don’t do that!

But the main ideas and themes need to show up over and over.

If you want to become known as the person who understands why small businesses struggle with client retention, you can’t just weigh in on the topic once and treat it as the be-all, end-all. That discussion is happening in multiple different outlets across a variety of media formats all the time, and your name should be popping up wherever that topic is being talked about.

You don’t need to suddenly weigh in on workplace culture because somebody advised you that personal branding requires content diversification. You’re allowed to have a lane.

In fact, lanes are quite powerful.

The people we think of as highly visible usually aren’t known for 57 different things. They’re associated with a handful of ideas, and sometimes only one.

That isn’t limiting. That’s effective positioning.

The media still matters

Every once in a while, someone announces that traditional media is dead.

The media climate has been incredibly energetic for something that’s supposed to have been dead for about 20 years!

A credible media placement still does something that a self-published post can’t quite do: it’s earned media. A third party is validating you. You are not self-promoting. This itself creates credibility and trust.

But I don’t think media relations works very well anymore when it’s treated as the sole solution.

A strong interview can result in a podcast invite.

Which can lead people to your website.

Your website can lead them to a recent article you’ve written.

That article can lead them to subscribe to your Substack.

Months later, they may see you quoted somewhere else.

Now something very cool starts happening.

They recognize your name. They know what you’re about. That’s different. That matters. That gets you known.

And now we have AI to think about

As if we didn’t have enough acronyms to keep track of!

We’re now talking about AEO, GEO and whether brands are appearing in AI-generated answers.

This matters. I think it will continue to matter a great deal.

But the basic principle hasn’t changed nearly as much as some of us believe.

If you want search engines, journalists, AI systems, and actual real-life humans to understand who you are and what you are about, there needs to be a reasonable amount of credible, consistent information out there about you.

What do you know? What do you talk about? Where have you been quoted? What have you written? Who else considers you credible?

Reputation is becoming more easily searchable, and I don’t mean just reviews.

Getting known is cumulative

This is the part I think companies underestimate.

There usually isn’t one magical piece of coverage that changes everything. (Though sometimes there is. Enjoy it when it happens!!)

Most of the time, reputation builds much more gradually. It tends to snowball.

One article.

Then another.

A podcast.

A journalist who remembers you from the last time.

An informative LinkedIn post.

An introduction.

A speaking opportunity.

Someone searches your name and finds enough credible material to think, Okay, this person knows what they’re talking about.

Eventually, you’re no longer introducing yourself from scratch every single time. That’s when visibility starts turning into reputation.

And reputation is the part worth building.

So, what are you trying to be known for?

Before worrying about how many podcast pitches went out this month or whether your latest LinkedIn post got 847 impressions, I’d ask this question.

Not simply:

Where do we want to appear?

But:

What do we want people to think of when our name appears?

Once you know that, the rest of the communications strategy gets easier. Media coverage matters. Podcasts matter. Thought leadership matters. LinkedIn matters. Your own content matters.

But none of those things, by themselves, make someone known.

They are the pieces. Together they build the reputation. If the pieces are all solid, then that reputation will be truly built to last.