PR Insights, Trends
& Expert Advice

Every agency will tell you about the placement it landed. Almost none will tell you about the one it killed.

There's a moment every leader eventually notices. An analyst describes your category and reaches for a competitor's name to define it. A prospect explains what they're looking for using language your rival coined. A reporter writing the definitive piece on your vertical quotes three companies, and you're not one of them. None of this happened overnight. It built up quietly, one story at a time, while your competitor kept showing up in the conversation and you kept assuming the work would speak for itself.

You are sitting across from your third agency this month. The deck looks great. There is a slide with recognizable client logos, a screenshot of a New York Times headline, and a stat that says "300% increase in coverage." Everyone nods. You feel like you should be impressed.

You have three proposals on your desk. One agency costs half as much as the others. You have a feeling that the cheap one is cheap for a reason, but you can’t quite explain why to the people asking you to justify the spend.

For years, your founder was the story. They were quoted in the trades, booked for speaking opportunities and had their cellphone number saved by reporters. Every profile, trend piece and "where is this industry heading" roundup came back to one person. It worked. Then they resign, retire, get recruited away, or leave under circumstances nobody wants to explain on a press call. And the media presence you spent years building walks out the door with them.

Most consumer brands treat the calendar as background noise. They know the holidays are coming, they line up a promo or two and they move on. Meanwhile, the sharpest brands in your industry are booking press coverage months ahead because they understand something most of their competitors miss. The calendar is the most predictable pitching engine in PR, and hardly anyone plans around all of it.

I recently joined Peter Woolfolk on the Public Relations Review Podcast to talk about Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, and what it means for how brands get found.

I sat down with Todd Perry on the PR360 podcast for a wide-ranging talk about building an agency, where companies go wrong with PR, and how AI is changing the way brands get found.

There is a number almost no PR agency wants you to ask about, and it is the one that tells you the most: how long do your clients actually stay?