The Pay-Per-Hour PR Campaign

The Fine Print & FAQ’s

1. Cost Breakdown: It typically takes us 7.5 to 10 hours of labor to execute a PR campaign (but if you cap our engagement at 7.5 hours, we will execute a campaign in 7.5 hours). Therefore you can expect to pay between $750 to $1,000 for your campaign. BUT every campaign is different. Before we start work on your campaign, we will give you an estimate of how much time we think we will need to properly pitch you to the press. If you’d like to pay less up front - but are willing to pay more if we land you a placement - check out our Pay-For-Placement package.

2. 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 usually 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.

3. Interview Coordination: You are responsible for replying to - and arranging interviews with - journalists who request more information. We’ve found that this is a win-win-win situation. You win because you don’t have to pay us $100/hour to handle the mindless busy work of sending out zoom links and google calendar invites; we win because we don’t have to spend hours on the mindless busy work of sending out zoom links and google calendar invites; and the journalists win because they don’t have to deal with a middle-man when they request an interview. If you’d prefer to have us handle interview and information requests, we are happy to do that too - but naturally it will take us more time, and thus cost your more money.

4. When You Pay: There is no up-front payment. But payment for our pre-launch labor (the time we spend interviewing you, writing the pitch, and building the media list) is due before we begin distributing pitches to journalists. If you do not pay, we do not pitch.

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. 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. 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.