The Pay-For-Placement PR Campaign

The Fine Print & FAQ’s

1. How is this different than your Pay-Per-Hour package? For this Pay-For-Placement package, we’ll spend between 5 to 10 hours preparing the PR pitch and distributing it to journalists. We’ve gotten many of our clients into the news this way. But sometimes it takes us longer to prepare and distribute a compelling PR pitch - especially for clients with complex businesses and backstories. That’s why we offer a Pay-Per-Hour package, which you can learn about here. We can tell you more about both packages on a free consultation call.

2. Interview Coordination: Our PR campaigns do not include interview coordination. In other words, if a journalist responds to our pitch, the response will be auto-forwarded to your email address and you will be responsible for answering the journalist directly and setting up an interview (i.e. giving the journalist your phone number, getting their phone number, or scheduling a zoom, etc.) If you would like us to coordinate interviews, there is a $500 surcharge.

3. How long does it take you to contact the 1,000+ journalists?: After you’ve signed up for a PR campaign, it may take as long as 2 weeks for us to prepare the PR pitch for distribution.We need this time to interview you/your team, write the PR pitch, build the media list, and load the pitch and media list into our email service platform. We then gradually distribute the email pitch to journalists for between 5 to 10 weeks; thus, the total length of a PR engagement runs between 7 weeks to 12 weeks.

   That said, once we begin distributing pitches, journalists may respond at any point during the distribution period. If they decide to report about you/your business, they often require additional time - sometimes a few days, sometimes a few weeks, sometimes a few months - to interview you, conduct research, and write an article or broadcast an on-air segment. On average, articles and broadcast segments about our clients are published and/or aired 3 weeks to 3 months after a client signs-up with us.

   To speed up your pitch distribution timeline by 1 week, there is a $50 surcharge (2 weeks = $100, etc.) Additionally, we can distribute your PR pitches close to 2x as fast if you are comfortable with us emailing journalists on Fridays and weekends.

4. Bonus fee expiration: A bonus fee will be due for any placements that are published/broadcast about your company by a journalist we contact within 6 months of the start of your PR campaign - capped at $2,500. Any placements that are published/broadcast after 6 months from the start of your PR campaign, you are not required to pay for.

5. Are you spamming journalists? According to a 2024 Muck Rack survey, 70% of journalists “acknowledge PR professionals as at least moderately important to their success.” But in that same survey, half of journalists said they “seldom or never” respond to PR pitch emails, usually because the pitches are "not relevant.”. We do our best to only email journalists who have at least some interest in our clients’ business. Unfortunately, we simply do not have the time or resources to guarantee that every journalist we contact actually covers the topic we are contacting them about. Put another way, sometimes we pitch meterologists stories that have absolutely nothing to do with the weather. Fortunately, no journalist has ever written an article or broadcast a story about how we pitched them an irrelevant story (though on some rare occasions they have tweeted about it.)

6. Can I edit the pitch before you send it out? Yes you can. After we write the first draft of the pitch, we’ll send it to you for edits and approval. You are allowed 1 round of edits. But please remember these are private emails we are sending to journalists. It’s critical to keep the pitch short and to the point. If and when a journalist schedules an interview, you can go into more detail about your business, backstory, etc. If you’d like to learn more about how we write our pitch emails, check out this blog post.

7. Refund Policy: We will keep pitching you until we get at least one high-value media placement. But if, after we’ve distributed your pitch to every journalist on our initial list, you are unsatisfied with our work, we can provide a full or partial refund - even of your $500 upfront fee. You can request a refund on the “catch-up call” that will take place at the end of the campaign. You can also always contact us at mike@themediawhisperer.com or 201-572-1030.