Cracking the Code to Low Journalist Response Rates

Doug Downs (00:04):

It is always been a challenge getting the attention of journalists and editors. They tend to get locked onto particular ideas and stories, and it's hard to get them to pay attention to your pitch. Case in point, Jay, Jonah Jameson at the Daily Bugle.

J Jonah Jameson (00:18):

Who is Spider-Man? He's a criminal. That's who he is. Vigilante a public menace. What's he doing on my front page,

Daily Bugle employee (00:26):

Mr. Jameson. There is a page six problem

J Jonah Jameson (00:27):

We have a page one problem. Shut up.

Daily Bugle employee (00:29):

They're really important clients, they can't wait

J Jonah Jameson (00:31):

They're about to.

Daily Bugle employee (00:32):

Mr Jameson, it's like this. We doubled booked Page six. See? So both Macy's and Conways both have three quarters of page six

Robbie Robertson (00:38):

We sold out four printings,

J Jonah Jameson (00:40):

Sold out? Tomorrow morning Spider-Man, page one with a decent picture this time. Move Conway to page seven. No make it page eight and give 'em 10% off. No make it 5%.

(00:50):

That can't be done.

(00:50):

Get out of here.

Doug Downs (00:51):

Small business owners and big companies alike crave the coverage, but they can't ever seem to get journalists to look their way. What percentage of the pitches they received do journalists actually respond to? It's now down to less than 3%.

Robbie Robertson (01:05):

Problem is we don't have a decent picture. Eddie's been on it for weeks. We can barely get a glimpse of him.

J Jonah Jameson (01:11):

What is he shy? If can get a picture of Julia Robertson a thong we can certainly get a picture of this weirdo. Put an ad on the front page. Cash money for a picture is Spider-Man. He doesn't want to be famous then I'll make him infamous

Doug Downs (01:24):

Today on Stories and Strategies. What's happening with journalist response rates? What pitches are actually getting their attention, and what alternative strategies can we use so our efforts aren't...

J Jonah Jameson (01:34):

Crap? Crap, crap. Mega crap.

Doug Downs (01:51):

My name is Doug Downs with Music Off the top, the theme for the movie Spider-Man, composed by Denny Elfman. Just before we start this episode, I want to thank Priscy Creates in Nigeria, who recently left a review of this podcast on Apple. Priscy writes "This podcast is just what I need at this stage of my career. Thank you so much for doing this Excellently." Priscy Thank you. And Priscy, I'm guessing that might be short for Priscilla. That's just a guess. Thank you for this. It means a lot personally. It means a lot to the little team that we have here at Stories and Strategies, and it means a lot to encourage other listeners in Nigeria to check out Stories and Strategies. Thumbs up. My guest this week is Zach Cutler joining today from Tel Aviv. Shalom, Zach.

Zach Cutler (02:39):

Shalom, Doug, how you doing?

Doug Downs (02:41):

I'm good. How are things in Tel Aviv?

Zach Cutler (02:43):

Oh, it's crazy over here. It's very hot. We have a lot of political stuff going on this week, so lot of action, but things are great.

Doug Downs (02:55):

And you were saying you're right in the city. You're not in a suburb of Tel Aviv, you're right there.

Zach Cutler (03:01):

I am in the Times Square of Tel Aviv and yeah, I walk out of my building and there's tons of bars, restaurants, and Main City Square. Yeah, it's a happening area. I always love living in the heart of cities and been here about six years, so good stuff.

Doug Downs (03:21):

Awesome. Zach, you're the co-founder and CEO of Propel, which strives to be a leader in public relations management or P R M Technology and is to create of artificial media intelligence, which you dub AMI. Your customers include Microsoft, N P R, Real Chemistry, the Department of Homeland Security and the US Air Force. You have offices in New York, London, Miami headquarters in Tel Aviv, which is where we've reached you. So Zach, this quantitative study on journalist response rates, which isn't how fast do they respond this is, do they even look at our stuff and do we get responses from them? What is the Propel Media Barometer? How do you measure the response results and what did you find this time?

Zach Cutler (04:08):

Yeah, so we've been doing the Propel Media Barometer for about two and a half, three years now. And essentially every quarter we analyze the journalist engagement with pitches coming from PR professionals. So we understand different trends going on. What makes a successful pitch, what are the open rates looking like? What are the response rates looking like? And essentially how can PR professionals and comms professionals craft their pitch in a way where they'll be most successful with the pitch. So we have some interesting numbers, which I'd love to jump into. In Q2 we saw the response rate was 2.99% on average. This was from analyzing about half a million real pitches that were sent via the Propel Outlook or Gmail plugins. And this is the third quarter in a row that we've seen the response rate under 3%, which is definitely concerning in a way.

(05:11):

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, which I'll get into in a few minutes. A couple of the other findings that we saw were that pitches with six to nine word subject line got a 3% response rate, whereas pitches with a one to five word subject line actually got over a 4% response rate, and that was the highest response rate of any subject line length. As the subject line gets longer, the response rate actually goes down. So common sense there want to keep your subject lines short. Also, we know that the best lead length or length of the first paragraph is between 51 to 80 words and pitches with the lead length between 51 to 81 words got a 3.46% response rate, which is interesting as well in terms of body length, a hundred to, excuse me, 50 to 150 words got the highest response rate at 6.5%. And I think all of this just goes back to the central theme of keep it nice and short. Journalists are really busy. They've got a lot going on, a lot of deadlines, oftentimes hundreds and hundreds of pitches coming their way in a single day, and nobody's got time to read an essay. So the shorter the pitch, the sort, the shorter the subject, the better the engagement.

Doug Downs (06:51):

Perfect. And you still found the journalists are opening nearly half the pitches They receive, just under 50%, which I take as impressive actually, when you consider that journalists are working with fewer and fewer resources these days. They open the most pitches on a Tuesday, which I found fascinating, and yet it fits perfectly into everything. I know Tuesdays are a big podcast listening day. Wednesdays are slightly higher, Thursdays are kind of equal to Tuesday, and then the others are shoulder days. That's just podcasting. So this isn't a case of lazy reporters. They're working hard, they're doing what they can. They're rowing the societal boat in terms of their role in society here.

Zach Cutler (07:38):

Yeah, so it is interesting about the Tuesday versus the other days in terms of response rate. Interestingly, what we also have seen is that Tuesday has the most pitches sent. So actually yes, it's not a surprise that it gets the most responses. We also analyze that most responses come in the same day, so as the day that the pitch was sent. So actually it's been really interesting over the last couple years because seen sometimes the days that you don't expect to be a successful day are actually the most successful day. We've actually seen in our Propel Media barometer analysis over the last couple years that Friday, which was always considered the worst state of pitch.

Doug Downs (08:28):

It's a dead day. That's right.

Zach Cutler (08:29):

Yeah, actually relatively had the highest response rate.

Doug Downs (08:34):

Oh, interesting.

Zach Cutler (08:35):

Yeah, so some of this is counterintuitive. If you have an underrepresentation of pitches on a Friday, then what we've seen is you have an overrepresentation of response rate, whereas on other days, if you have really a lot of pitches going out on a Tuesday, the response rate's not going to be higher than the amount of pitches that went out. And so a lot of this just depends on when are the pitches going out. And that really does determine in large part when the responses are coming back in

Doug Downs (09:09):

And a 2.99% response rate, as you indicated, it's it's been in decline at least quantitatively the last couple of quarters, using your tool. Overall, I would suspect that line graph is in a steady decline response rates getting lower and lower. The overall message here is a repeat message in our proactive efforts for coverage to whatever it is we're trying to pitch or draw attention to. We can't just focus on macro media anymore. Absolutely. Make it part of the efforts, but we need micro media, whatever that looks like for the target audiences that you're going for.

Zach Cutler (09:49):

Yeah, I couldn't agree more that that is exactly right. And I just want to say that these low response rates should not dissuade PR and comms pros because if we think about the PR landscape, it's changing. It's beginning to include more forms of new media, of micro media, things like podcasts. And we've been looking actually in the Propel Media Barometer at podcast pitch volume podcast response rates, and we actually find that podcasts are getting responded to 16 and a half percent of the time. Oh, interesting. Which is remarkably higher. Yeah, it's over five times higher than the overall response rate, which is very encouraging because we all know that there are layoffs in major media, staff rooms, newsrooms and traditional staff writers are being let go, and there are more limited resources in those more traditional media, which might be contributing to the additional challenge of getting responses. However, at the same time, you have all these new media outlets popping up and there are great opportunities there, and we're seeing a lot of engagement there. And those kinds of outlets want to receive pitches, they're responding to the pitches, and they're a great place to pitch.

Doug Downs (11:22):

Yeah. And then the next challenge, of course, is how do I find these Micro media? But that's exactly where a tool like Propel comes in. Part of what you do is help organizations find and track micro media sources that fit the target audience and the psychographics that they're going for. Kind of like a C R M tool, a customer relationship management tool for Micro Media.

Zach Cutler (11:44):

Yes, exactly. And this was really born out of the need at my PR agency. So I worked in PR my whole career. I started a PR agency in 2009 in New York, and once we grew to about 15 people, we were frustrated. I personally was frustrated there wasn't better software to manage all of our campaigns, all of our relationships, to really understand in a data-driven way, how is one campaign performing versus another? How is one account performing versus another? How are the team members performing? How are the different teams across the company performing and really understanding the productivity, the performance, and also the R O I of all of our efforts, there was nothing on the market that did this. So started to become a dream of mine to create the first C R M for pr. And so I sold my agency about five years ago when full-time into Propel.

(12:47):

And since then we've been building public relations management software. And essentially it does exactly what you said. It allows you to manage all of those journalist relationships in a really data-driven way, understand not only if you have a historical relationship, but who on your team also has the best historical relationship with every journalist. Also understand things like what day and time and topics are journalists or each individual journalist actually engaging with the most. And this is based on the real millions of aggregated, anonymized pitches that are being sent through Propel that we're able to analyze and then extract. Okay. John Smith at Forbes best to pitch him on a Tuesday morning, Sarah Jones at Fortune Best to pitch her on a Wednesday afternoon. And so yeah, we've been building this technology for the last few years, and this year, including the end of last year, we've been working really hard on a m I and building the most advanced artificial intelligence for PR and comms. And we've launched some really exciting features, our pitch writer, our press release writer, our media list builder, and a lot of other stuff as well. And we're just really passionate about improving the industry and bringing innovation and helping PR pros to save a lot of time and just improve their work.

Doug Downs (14:21):

Let me circle back to that media list builder, because when you're dealing with Micro media sometimes it's like dealing with the number of ants that exist in the world. You can't count them, you can't keep track of all of them. How does your tool go about finding those microm media sources? And I got it that then you help manage it right down to John or Jane prefers a pitch about peanut butter on a Wednesday.

Zach Cutler (14:47):

Yeah, it's a great question. So we track track basically millions and millions and millions of media sources and outlets and all of the articles and interviews and things being published by them. And we understand who are the relevant people to pitch based on what have they been publishing in the past, what are they writing about, what are they posting about? And what our AI media list builder does is essentially you will just put in a pitch or a press release or even just keywords, and we will then build you a list of the 50 most relevant people out of over a million using advanced AI to do that matching. So we've heard so far from customers, it's saving them 75, 80% of their time in building a media list. Obviously, it's not going to take you a hundred percent of the way there, nor do we even want it to, to be a base where you can then go take that, add some of your own people, maybe you'll want to take out some people, make it your own human creation.

(16:02):

Same idea with the pitch writer. The press release writer shouldn't take you a hundred percent of the way there, but it gets you about 75, 80% of the way there. And then you take that AI base and make it your own human creation. And I think, Doug, the thing that we're hearing that people are just really excited about is that it just gives them so much time back in their day to do the parts of PR and comms that they love to really think of that next creative angle to really build that next relationship or find that new client or the more human creative parts of the field that we all love.

Doug Downs (16:44):

This is 2023, we're going to let the machines do the tactical and hopefully we can focus on the strategy. So know, bang on. So last question, and I love the quantitative aspects to the tool that you've built. I hear it loud and clear, but this question is more along the lines of qualitative. To what extent does it appear that relationships matter when it comes to having journalists just respond to you or having them decide to do a story on the thing that you're pitching? A lot of PR pros and I, I'm not one of them anymore who pitches stories to media, but I was for the lion's share of my career, and really the selling point was, and I think still is for a lot, I have the relationships with the producers, the editors, the key journalists who I know have that interest. Oh, I was just having coffee with such and such a reporter. We just had a Zoom call together. To what extent do those relationships appear to matter, which is, it's hard to measure, but what do you see?

Zach Cutler (17:46):

I love this question very much because to me, the relationship part of PR is everything. And as a PR technology entrepreneur, all the technology does is it helps facilitate all of the busy work, all of the admin, all of the grunt work of PR specifically to free up the time so that the PR professional can then go and build that relationship stronger, go and create new relationships they didn't have before, because that is always going to be at the heart of PR and comms. It's that human relationship. It's irreplaceable. And I think what's really exciting about the advancement in technology in our industry is not that it replaces the need for those human relationships, but actually the opposite. It frees up so much time from the admin and the grunt work that it actually gives so many hours back each week to the each PR professional to go and cultivate stronger relationships, better relationships, more relationships. That's the heart of PR.

Doug Downs (19:01):

That's perfect. Really appreciate this. Thank you, Zach. Toda, toda, Zach,

Zach Cutler (19:09):

You've got to come to Israel, Doug and learn some more Hebrew. I mean, I'm impressed with the couple of words, but we got to increase that vocabulary.

Doug Downs (19:17):

That's as far as Wikipedia would take me for my attention span. No, I really thank you, Zach. I appreciate it.

Zach Cutler (19:23):

Thank you, Doug. This was great.

Doug Downs (19:26):

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Zach Cutler, best way to do that is either through the website or propels social media channels. We have those links in the show notes. Stories and Strategies is a co-production of J G R Communications and Stories and Strategies podcasts. We would love it if you could leave a rating and a review for this podcast if you enjoyed this episode helps tell others. This is a podcast worth checking out. Thanks for listening.