In 2021 I put up more than 250 billboards across the United States for National Arab American Heritage Month. It ended up recognized by the White House and the State Department, and it generated more press than any paid campaign I have ever run.
The thing I want to be honest about: the coverage was not earned by the pitch. It was earned by the design of the campaign, months before anyone wrote an email. The pitch was almost an afterthought.
That inversion is the entire lesson. Most digital PR fails because someone builds an asset and then asks how to promote it. Coverage has to be a design constraint from the first sketch.
The five tests an idea has to pass before you build it
I run every campaign concept against these. If it fails two, I kill it, no matter how much the client likes it.
Is there a reason it is happening now? Journalists need a reason to publish today rather than whenever. A date, a policy change, a season, an anniversary, a new data release. The heritage month campaign had a fixed month attached to it, which is why it had a news hook built in rather than bolted on.
Can it be photographed? Coverage is enormously biased toward stories with images. A physical manifestation of an idea beats a report about the idea nearly every time. Billboards are photographable. A whitepaper is not.
Does it contain a number or a fact a reporter can lead with? "250 billboards in 20 states" is a lead. "A campaign celebrating heritage" is not. Give them the sentence.
Is there a real human at the center? Not a spokesperson delivering a quote. Someone with an actual stake, whose story explains why this exists. Editors are looking for a person to build the piece around.
Would it exist if no journalist ever covered it? This is the honesty test. If the answer is no, it is a stunt, and stunts get one cycle and leave nothing. The heritage campaign would have been worth doing for the community even with zero press, which is exactly why the press was good.
Where the ideas come from
Three sources, in order of reliability.
Something you already have that nobody has counted. Every operating business sits on proprietary observation. Support tickets, transaction patterns, application data, the reason customers churn. Count something, report it honestly with the sample size stated, and you own a fact.
I am deliberate about this: report what you actually measured and its limits. Inventing a study is the fastest way to a permanent credibility problem, and enough people are doing it now that reporters are checking.
A gap in public conversation you are positioned to fill. The heritage campaign existed because there was almost no mainstream visual representation of Arab Americans outside of conflict framing. That absence was the story. I wrote about the personal side of it in the Arab American Heritage Month story, and the strategic side is that a real absence is more coverable than a manufactured claim.
A physical intervention in a public space. Expensive, high risk, high reward. Only works when the physical thing is a legible metaphor for the message.
Building the target list before building the asset
This is the step everyone skips and it is the one that determines outcome.
Before production starts, I build a list of 40 to 60 specific writers, by name, who have covered something adjacent in the last twelve months. Not publications. Writers. For each one I note the exact piece, what angle they take, and what my thing gives them that their last piece did not.
If I cannot find 40 people who plausibly cover this, the idea is wrong and I would rather learn that before spending the budget.
Then I design the asset to fit what those specific 40 people publish. If most of them write list driven pieces, the asset needs to be listable. If they write personal narrative, there needs to be a person to interview. This sounds cynical and it is actually just editing for your audience, which is what we do everywhere else.
The pitch, which matters less than you think
Short. Subject line that states the fact, not the campaign name. First sentence is the news. Second sentence is why it is for them specifically, referencing their actual work honestly. Third is what you can provide: images, data, an interview, an embargo.
No attachments. Link to a page with everything on it.
I test subject lines the same way I test email campaigns, with an email subject line tester, because a pitch is an email and the same open rate mechanics apply. The framing principles in the framing effect in messaging apply directly.
One follow up, six to eight days later, with something new in it. Not "just circling back." A new number, a new image, a development. Then stop.
What I stopped doing
I stopped pitching a hundred people at once. A tight list of 40 researched targets outperforms 400 sprayed contacts by a wide margin, and it does not burn relationships you will need next year.
I stopped chasing tier one only. A well placed trade publication piece is often worth more commercially than a general interest mention, because the readers are buyers. And trade coverage frequently gets picked up upward.
I stopped measuring in links alone. Links are one output. Brand searches, direct traffic, inbound inquiries, and being mentioned in threads and AI answers afterward are the rest of it. The distinction between this and paid placement is something I argued in digital PR versus link buying, and it holds up: bought links produce a number, real coverage produces a narrative.
The part that compounds
A campaign that earns real coverage does something no ad buy does. It creates independent third party documentation of who you are and what you stand for, permanently, in places you do not control.
Three years later, when someone researches you, that coverage is what they find. When a retrieval system tries to establish whether you are a real entity, that coverage is the corroboration. It becomes the substrate for the thought leadership you build afterward, and it is why one well designed campaign outperforms four years of press releases.
Design for the second story
Here is the specific takeaway I would give someone planning their first real campaign: do not design for the announcement. Design for the second story.
The announcement gets covered once, by whoever you pitched, in a week. The second story is the one a journalist writes six months later without you asking, because your campaign created a fact they now need to reference. That only happens if you built something real, counted something honestly, and put a name on it.
For the billboard campaign, the second story arrived when institutions started referencing the effort in contexts I had nothing to do with. That was worth more than the launch coverage, and it was possible only because the thing was real enough to still exist after the news cycle ended. Build for that, and the launch coverage takes care of itself.