PR Isn't Dead, But You Should Rethink It

Marketers love to proclaim that a channel or tactic is dead. SEO is dead. Cold email is dead. PR is dead. Of course, that’s almost never true. 

That said, there are challenges with PR, which I consider one of the pillars of adtech marketing, that every adtech and martech company should consider. Here are three — and how to rethink PR in light of them.

The press is facing long-term headwinds

I once had a martech company tell me they expected their PR agency to get them 30 hits, or “placements,” per month. 

This is a, shall we say, interesting goal given that, to my knowledge, there are maybe ten legitimate publications covering advertising and marketing. And any one publication will typically only cover a single company — unless it’s a behemoth like Google or The Trade Desk — about once a quarter, if even.

So, what are we doing here? Are we expecting each trade publication to cover the company three times per month? 

No. What actually happens is that, when a PR agency is graded on placements and the bar for placements is set unreasonably high, a couple forms of cheating occur that don’t serve either the agency or the client. First, the client will end up in publications that no one actually reads. Second, the agency will come up with cheap ways to hit the placement quota — ways other than the real goal of earning legitimate mentions in reported stories and columns. 

But it gets worse, actually, for both the PR team and the client. When you set an unreasonable bar for placements, you incentivize the PR agency to spam their entire email list of journalistic contacts with every insignificant announcement by the company. This undermines the credibility of both the agency and the client, whom journalists view as lacking the editorial insight to understand what’s worth reaching out about.

This problem is likely to get worse in the coming years. There are more and more marketers (like me) and fewer and fewer journalists — more people pitching and fewer people covering pitches. And, to my knowledge, the economics of the news business ain’t getting a lot better anytime soon. So, if you’re relying too much on PR or expecting dozens of placements from advertising trade press per month, your expectations are likely to grow even more out of touch with reality, incentivizing even worse behavior and further undermining the reputation of the company and its PR people.

In short, earned media isn’t sustainable as the only or even the primary vehicle to do the work of B2B marketing.

When it comes to PR, the rich tend to get richer

Adtech professionals will sometimes comment that The Trade Desk is really good at PR. Some people hate TTD and claim the opposite. What I think is actually going on is that TTD indeed gets a lot more coverage than most adtech companies — and they exert a lot more influence over the industry discourse — but it’s not because they’re better per se. It’s because, in PR as in marketing in general, advantages compound.

When TTD launches a new platform (eg Kokai), it’s actually news, not because TTD’s team has crafted a brilliant pitch (though they may have) or because Kokai is brilliant but because TTD is the no. 1 independent DSP with a near-unparalleled client and partner list (whom the rollout affects). And a lot of people in the industry, even non-clients and non-customers, care about what the market leader does. So, TTD’s singles turn into home runs from a PR perspective.

Meanwhile, the opposite is true for startups. Unless they have a very well-known founder — a new startup by Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi, or Joe Zawadzki would probably do alright PR-wise — little-known startups are not automatically newsworthy to the rest of the ecosystem or to journalists. Plus, journalists don’t necessarily have the time or skillset to parse the company’s products — which every company will claim are “revolutionary” — to decide whether the startup truly merits coverage. So, even if the startup’s new product is worthy of coverage, it’s likely to go unreported.

In other words, in PR, the rich get richer — and that dynamic only grows stronger with a relatively small trade press and tons of PR people pitching them. The biggest names just keep getting attention and growing their reputation; startups, especially those without well-known talent onboard, struggle. This dynamic should make you question whether there’s another way to build your reputation without depending on gatekeepers who might not notice your merit. Which brings me to the third challenge PR is facing.

Other channels have emerged that give you more control

In the olden days before social media, earned media, or the press, truly was the best and often the only way (besides paid advertising or expensive event activations) to spread the word about an organization. Over the past twenty years, direct communications channels have proliferated that mean startups no longer need Ad Age to amplify their message. They can share it themselves on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Now, of course, earned media has advantages that social media doesn’t. It confers credibility to be covered by the press, especially by prestigious trade outlets or (in very rare cases in adtech) the national business press. You’ll also reach people via trade publications that you won’t necessarily reach on social channels. For example, AdMonsters and Digiday remain great ways to get in front of publishers; Ad Age and AdWeek are great venues to get in front of brands and agencies. These are some of the reasons I am not saying PR is dead (and, on the contrary, believe it’s still a critical part of the modern B2B and adtech marketing mix).

However, only relying on the trade press to boost your reputation and relationships — in an era when you have alternatives such as LinkedIn and Twitter where you can post as much as you want, whenever you want, and whatever you want — is strategic suicide. 

No matter who you are and how well-known your organization is, you should always take control of the conversation by putting out your own announcements and thought leadership on owned and social channels. If you’re a little-known startup or even a mature company that simply doesn’t play in an often-covered market sector, you should expect that the press will rarely cover you and that you need to build an audience through shared and owned channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, a podcast, a newsletter) to distribute your message.

Don’t expect AdWeek to cover your news and thereby render it interesting to your target audience through the halo of their credibility. Regularly engage your audience on owned and social channels with insights that help them better understand the industry — and then you’ll earn their attention and the ability to talk to them on your own terms when you have an announcement to which you’d like them to pay attention.

By the way, these channels feed each other. I recently spoke to a CEO who made a very popular post on LinkedIn. Hundreds of people reacted to it, and several journalists DM’ed him privately to ask him for more information about the situation on which he commented publicly. What do you think is more effective? Luring the bees with honey or spamming their inboxes via a PR representative?

PR isn’t dead. We just need to expand our conception of it

Let me repeat: PR isn’t dead. Earned media still has a tremendous amount of value as a channel to build awareness and credibility while also helping you get in front of people, especially non-adtech people, whom you may not be able to reach anywhere else.

That said, we need to rethink PR, specifically by expanding our conception of what public relations means at a time when the channels we can use to reach the public are so much broader than the traditional media. 

Personally, I think of PR and content marketing as overlapping, which is why I tell people that Sharp Pen does marketing strategy, content, and PR for adtech and martech companies. The point of both PR and content marketing is to boost a company’s reputation and relationships, mostly to drive sales. Part of that is still liaising with the press and writing thoughtful, newsworthy pitches. An increasingly large part of it entails taking advantage of alternative channels to distribute messages that once might’ve been confined to trade press columns (in the case of thought leadership) or reported stories (in the case of product announcements, mergers and acquisitions, hires, and other news). 

The job of a PR agency isn’t to get ‘placements,’ which have never been a good marketing metric and are far less so nowadays. The job of a PR agency or professional is to build the company’s reputation and relationships through every available channel where long-form storytelling and insight sharing takes place. 

It’s part of the strategic work of marketing to figure out which channels are best and what to say on each of them. But it’s probably not just earned media.