Who killed the story?

National television asked for a CEO live at five in the morning. His assistant replied that he was unavailable, because the calendar said so and protecting the calendar was the job. The CEO said yes himself two days later, which was two days after the segment aired.

Nobody lied. Nobody was lazy. Everyone did the job in front of them. The story still died.

About six weeks after a launch, somebody in a review meeting says PR did not work. It is a tidy sentence. It moves the failure onto one supplier and lets everyone else keep their quarter. It is also usually wrong, in a way that is worth being precise about, because the same failure will happen again next quarter with a different agency.

Between having something worth saying and seeing it published there are dozens of small handoffs. Each has an owner, a calendar, and a perfectly good reason to deal with it tomorrow. Campaigns die in the handoffs, quietly, without anyone noticing they were the one holding it.

So this is a pre-mortem. Read it while the plan is still a document, not after the report is due. Every quote below is real. Under each one is the planning decision that would have made it impossible.

Before there is any news

“We’ll do PR when we have something to announce.”

the founder

Announcements happen maybe four times a year. Coverage is a weekly market. If you only appear when you want something, you arrive as a stranger every time, and strangers get answered last.

Plan for it: fund a commentary bank alongside the campaign. Three positions your spokesperson can defend under pressure, refreshed monthly, plus the two or three data points that only your company can see.

“Can you get us in Forbes Under 30? I’m 29 turning 30 this year.”

the CMO

Lists, awards and profile pieces run on years of accumulated record. Personal brand and product track record are slow assets. They cannot be bought in the quarter you remember you need them.

Plan for it: at planning, sort every target into what takes weeks and what takes 12 months. Name the slow ones out loud, start them now, and stop pricing them as campaign deliverables.

Before the pitch goes out

“We can’t share numbers.”

the CFO

A reporter needs one fact they can check. Without a number, a named customer or an exclusive, you are asking a newsroom to print your adjectives, and newsrooms are full of adjectives already.

Plan for it: agree the disclosure envelope with finance and legal before anyone writes a pitch. What can be said, in what form, by whom, and what the fallback is when the answer is no.

“No, I didn’t pitch fintech or martech.”

the PR lead

A contact list is a convenience. Left unexamined it becomes the audience definition, and the campaign quietly shrinks to whoever the PR person had lunch with last year.

Plan for it: write the list of industries with a legitimate reason to care before anyone opens a media database. Then mark honestly which of those you have no relationships in, and decide whether to buy, borrow or build them.

“But we have monthly feature KPIs.”

the agency

Volume targets buy safe placements. Six guaranteed trade posts close the month. One serious attempt at a national desk might return nothing at all, which is a personal risk for whoever has to present on Friday. The incentive quietly decides the media list.

Plan for it: split the target in two. Volume on one line, and a short list of named outlets on another with a full quarter to land them and no monthly penalty.

While the window is open

“Legal came back on Friday.”

the comms manager

News has a half-life measured in hours. An approval chain designed for annual reports will eat every one of them, and nobody in the chain will feel they did anything wrong.

Plan for it: set the approval clock before the news exists. Named approvers, a deadline in hours, a pre-cleared boilerplate and a bank of quotes already signed off for the obvious scenarios.

“No, I didn’t follow up.”

the PR exec

Sent once, to everyone, on the day the newsroom had three bigger things happening. Day three is where most coverage is actually won, and it is the day everyone has moved to the next campaign.

Plan for it: put follow-up in the calendar as work with a name against it. Two rounds, dated, owned.

“He’s unavailable.”

the assistant

The gatekeeper did exactly what they were hired to do. Nobody ever told them that a press request is a different category of thing from a vendor call, so they applied the calendar rule and the opportunity closed itself.

Plan for it: give every assistant, receptionist and chief of staff one standing instruction. Press requests bypass the calendar and reach a named human within two hours, at any hour. This is the cheapest fix on this list and almost nobody does it.

When the door finally opens

“Can we move it to next month?”

the founder

The journalist filed in two hours. A spokesperson who is only available in three weeks is not available.

Plan for it: block two standing interview windows a week during the campaign and protect them like board time. Agree in advance who can approve a same-day yes without the founder in the room.

“We had a nice chat.”

the journalist

Forty minutes of pleasant conversation and not one printable line. The founder answered a direct question about margins with a sentence from the website, twice, and the piece quietly became about somebody else.

Plan for it: two hours of media training before the first interview, with the three questions nobody wants to answer written down and rehearsed. It costs less than the interview you waste.

Around the whole thing

“The partner agency is handling it.”

the marketing lead

They were not. In every campaign with more than one supplier there is a relationship nobody owns, usually the most valuable one, and it is discovered in the post-mortem.

Plan for it: one named owner per relationship, written into the plan. Not a company, a person, with a phone number.

“We don’t pay for placements.”

the head of comms

There was budget for the launch video and nothing to put it anywhere, so every result in the plan depended on somebody else agreeing to publish for free. Earned coverage and paid distribution answer different questions, and a plan that refuses one of them on principle is making a taste decision and calling it a standard.

Plan for it: decide at planning stage which parts of the story need to be earned and which need to be placed, and put a number against the second one.

The sentence to watch

Now look again at what happens in the review meeting six weeks later.

“PR didn’t work” is itself a piece of PR. It is a framing that protects the CFO who withheld the numbers, the founder who moved the interview twice, the assistant who followed instructions correctly, the agency that hit its volume target, and the marketing lead who assumed somebody else owned the relationship. The one party without a seat at that meeting absorbs the whole story.

This newsletter exists because that move is everywhere, and once you can see it you cannot stop. Read any post-mortem sentence for what it protects rather than what it claims, and the real failure is usually sitting two rooms away, being reasonable.

The short version of this is on LinkedIn as twelve suspects. If you have a thirteenth, or you think I have blamed the wrong person on any of these, reply to this email. Part two is being written out of the replies.

Want first access to Placed, the brand visibility marketplace this catalogue came out of? It is at placed.network.

Everything is PR by Alisa Zhur. Forward it to the person who moved the interview.