PR and Press: Why Does Your Pitch Suck?

If you, like me, ever had the chance to work on both sides of the PR, representing companies and representing the press, you both know that both parties usually strive to achieve the same thing. PR reps want to share their story with the widest possible number of publications and achieve the largest coverage. Press wants to secure the most interesting story, that will secure the greatest number of views and attract the most readership. 

Both sides are looking to achieve the same thing, and yet, often they don’t succeed. I would say that more often than not, PR and press partnerships don’t actually work out. In the majority of cases, the reason is kind of obvious: “Nobody cares”. Nobody cares about your product. Nobody cares about your technology. Nobody cares about your game. Attention is hard to get.

The battle for attention (you can call it engagement) is tough. You’ve got some of the most powerful and rich companies in the world fighting for it. From Nike and Coca-Cola, to Google and Facebook, to Sirius FM and New York Times, from Fortnite to Diablo IV everyone is up to grab those last milliseconds of the user's attention. This battle has been going up for ages, but it really blew up with the popularization of push notifications on mobile devices. Now you can literally physically touch the user to drive him to take a look. How is this still legal escapes with me, but bear with me. With so much competition from every angle, it’s challenging for a company to actually put their product out there. It’s costly, it requires time, and most importantly companies don’t know how to do it. That’s when they hire PR agents, that go out there and try to pitch their stories to journalists.

The stories crafted are formed by the companies, and rarely do they connect with the audience. There are definitely exceptions, but out of thousands of emails our team gets every day, we hardly find really good ones, and out of those good ones even less stories actually end up going viral.

In the video game industry, there are a lot of examples of good and bad PR, but I would like to end this article with an example of some of the most excellent examples of ‘every company is a media company’ concept. This is the blog of a game development studio Embark Studios, and it is by far one of the most interesting blogs to read about game technology curated by game developers themselves. The stories are in-depth, they touch on very hard science topics and try to explain them in easy-to-grasp ways, they are nicely illustrated and they support the brand and product. They also help to gather great people around the studio, and build a community. No wonder Embark has some of the best talent in the industry.

If I could give one piece of advice to a company that tries to launch a media element in their PR strategy, it would be to pose a question: “Why would a user care?” This is the ultimate question, that is relevant not only for the success of your communication strategy but also for the success of your product.

At the end of the day, your media pitch is only as engaging as your product, so if PR guys are having trouble landing stories it mostly boils down to two things: your story is weak, or your product is weak. The former is easier to fix than the latter.

#press #PR #mediastrategy #communication #commstrategy