PR emails are a given in the publicity business, but do they really work?
PR emails are a given in the publicity business, but do they really work?
Like many journalists, Slate writer Dan Kois receives a lot of emails every day from publicists looking to promote a person or thing. “Over 100 just sort of roll in,” Kois said. “At 9 o’clock, a whole wave of them comes in. And then at 10 o’clock, another wave rolls in.”
And while some of the pitches made sense to Kois based on his writing, others felt pretty random. “Lawyers who want to talk to me about divorce procedures, or for random products and fields that I have zero interest in,” he said, in an interview with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal. “I didn’t know why someone had thought they needed to hire a publicist to do this and what they thought they were going to get out of that transaction.”
So, for one day, Kois decided to give the PR machine a chance. “I replied ‘yes’ to every single email where a publicist said, ‘My client wants to talk to you about X.'” He ended up taking 17 interviews, ranging from a woman trying to sell handbags to the writer behind a play called “The Lipstick Monologues.”
And what he found was that the PR email strategy wasn’t that effective. “One of the people I interviewed [said] they were paying their publicist $2,000 a month,” Kois said. “And what they’re getting for that is the ‘spray and pray’ — sending an email to every media person whose email address you can purchase, and hoping to god that someone writes you back.”
For Kois, who has a publicist promoting his own upcoming novel, “Vintage Contemporaries,” the reporting on the PR machine felt personal.
“My hope is that my book publicist has just a couple of people on her list that she knows might really love my novel.” Then he added, “she can spam everyone else, too. That’s fine.”
To listen to Kois’ interview with “Marketplace,” use the media player above.
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