CLICKBAIT EDITION: It's Election Day

It's a Good time to think about something else. Like Media Relations.

(Originally published on Dan Nestle's Substack, Communications Trends from Trending Communicators)

Today, all of my American friends and colleagues, and I’m sure many worldwide, are purportedly transfixed by some event that may or may not determine the future of civilization as we know it. I’m told that such a state of affairs causes widespread anxiety (welcome to my world), distractibility (again, my world), and not a small amount of fear (not me). I’ve been advised to hold off on publishing anything important until this event blows over.

To which I say two things: 1) what better time than now for a distraction, and 2) importance is a relative term, and who am I to judge.

Earned Attention by a Landslide

A few weeks ago, I took a swipe at the practice of Media Relations, the over-indexed, underperforming, ineffective, and unaffordable arm of Communications that, for a multitude of reasons, has ensorcelled leaders and organizations. I mean, I get it. A top-tier media hit can deliver a high as potent and addictive as any Schedule 1 narcotic, and once you’ve had it, it’s hard to get the monkey off your back.

Based on the flood of comments and feedback from my comms compadres, I’m cautiously optimistic that the comms profession is ready for rehab. It’s happening already as the Sisyphean reality and questionable ROI of Media Relations work—for most of us, anyway—has led to a sharper focus on audiences and stakeholders and broader perspectives on the meaning of earned media. It’s also led to (or been aided by? Kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario) innovation and rapid advances in CommsTech (communications technology), now supercharged by AI.

It’s fertile ground for a shift to Earned Attention, my take on an approach that includes but de-emphasizes Media Relations. Like so many other concepts and methodologies that have made their way into the Communications profession, Earned Attention comes to us from the marketing sphere. As far as I can tell (and please fact-check me on this), marketer and futurist Greg Verdino was the first to talk about Earned Attention as a marketing goal (albeit in the context of paid vs. earned media) in 2009. 15 years ago. He was on the money then, and he’s on the money now. As he wrote:

Attention is a scarce resource.? Far scarcer these days than media inventory or marketing budgets.? And with scarcity comes value.? Speaking as a consumer (because, of course, we are all consumers before we're marketers): if you want my attention -- even a teeny tiny slice of it, even only for a few moments -- you have got to earn it.? Period. Does the fact that you have enough money to name a stadium or advertise during prime time get my attention?? If I'm Adweek, yes.? If I'm Joe America, probably not.? Does the fact that your PR person worked hard to get some reporter or another to sit through a briefing that resulted in a newspaper puff piece get my attention?? Not a chance.? So much for earned media.? Right?? [Emphasis mine]

-Greg Verdino, “The problem with paid media isn’t the paid,” April 28, 2009, https://gregverdino.typepad.com/greg_verdinos_blog/2009/04/the-problem-with-paid-media.html

We can quibble about Greg’s conflating of the “newspaper puff piece” with earned media writ large, but you get the idea.

Trending Communicators Advocate for Progress

Greg’s not the only one pointing in this direction. The voices from The Trending Communicator podcast have been hammering this point home from different angles.

Ethan McCarty puts some hard truth to this, noting: "We have maybe over rotated on our investment in chasing headlines with traditional public relations or chasing clicks with traditional advertising, and yet we're sitting in relationship with many thousands of people whose connections probably dwarf the reach of any one article or advertising by orders of magnitude." It's a stark reminder that we might be ignoring more valuable earned attention opportunities while chasing that elusive top-tier placement.

Mark Schaefer takes this a step further, arguing that the future belongs to content that's "so distinctive that AI can't duplicate it." He's pushing for a grittier, more authentic approach to earning attention—one that goes beyond the polished press release and cultivated media relationships that have been our industry's bread and butter.

Rafi Mendelsohn points out the shortcomings of traditional media relations in hyper-accelerated crises, as when a brand is facing a "bot attack" on social media. Instead of resorting to the "classic playbook" of apologies, brands can "present the data and say... actually, 30 something percent of all the conversations around us are driven by fake accounts.” An agile crisis response with Earned Attention at its core would be more effective than traditional approaches.

Melanie Samba reminds us that "you cannot manage what you cannot measure," pushing for a more data-driven approach to measuring earned attention – something that goes well beyond traditional media impressions and advertising value equivalents.

These voices aren't just suggesting tweaks to the media relations playbook – they're confirming what we've all started to suspect: the traditional approach of prioritizing top-tier media placements above all else is a relic of a simpler media age. And that's exactly where Earned Attention comes in.

Earned Attention: It’s Up to Us

For a reminder of my perspective on Earned Attention for Communications, feel free to read my last post about it, but if you want the tl;dr version:

• Earned Attention Reflects the Current Landscape: Today's fragmented media environment demands more than traditional press hits. An attention-based approach capitalizes on all earned opportunities – from social conversations to podcasts – meeting audiences where they actually engage.
• Earned Attention is Audience-Centric: While media relations focuses on vanity metrics like potential reach, Earned Attention measures real impact through engagement metrics, content consumption time, and audience behaviors that demonstrate ROI.
• Earned Attention is More Adaptable to Strategy: Traditional media relations often misaligns with business goals. Earned Attention's flexible approach allows quick pivots based on audience response and supports business objectives rather than chasing arbitrary coverage.
• Earned Attention Subsumes Media Relations Anyway: As AI tools automate traditional PR tasks, Earned Attention elevates professionals from pitch writers to strategic advisors focused on audience insights and business alignment.
• The Bottom Line Speaks: Earned Attention replaces outdated metrics like AVE with clear, behavior-based success indicators, giving communications the credible measurements needed for executive buy-in.

In my view, the key to Earned Attention is a change in our perception of what counts as earned media and where the value comes from. The answer to the latter is in audience impact. As for the former, the sooner we see the earned media universe as an ever-growing concatenation of audio, video, social, traditional, and TBD channels, the better our strategies for reaching audiences will be—and media relations (small m, small r) will remain an important part of that. How large a part will depend on your organization’s firmographics, reputation status, public interest relevance, and a variety of other factors.

I think I’ve made the case for Earned Attention, now all we need to do is codify it, create some models (although Gini Dietrich ’s PESO Model incorporates all of this quite nicely), load up some more acronyms, revise every Comms job description in existence… Sounds like something we should be doing as a profession. I’m up for it if you are.

Notes

This post is 80% human-created.

• The “Trending Communicators Advocate for Progress” section is AI-generated, with minor touch-ups: I used Google NotebookLM to extract insights and quotes from my podcasts, and I used Claude to transform those insights into the text you see above
• I used Grammarly as my style and grammar assistant while writing.
• Images were generated using Midjourney.

In future editions, I’ll return to this topic and keep sharing what I hear from Trending Communicators. In the meantime, I’m sure many of you have strong opinions about the future of Media Relations. Tell me what you think. Drop a comment below or send me a direct message. And don't forget to subscribe to The Trending Communicator podcast for more insights on navigating this wild, AI-powered world.