PR & Earned Media
Press, Podcasts, Underground & Guerrilla Media
- Create something genuinely worth covering first, then amplify. Agencies on retainer never worked for us.
- Optimise for baseline evergreen coverage over spikes: one Wirecutter piece drove traffic for years.
- Product seeding to 20-30 niche reviewers beats pitching press for most DTC brands, and reviews compound.
- Judge PR by branded search and direct traffic trends over 6-12 months, not article counts.
On this page
- What Makes a Story (The Angle Framework)
- How to Pitch
- Podcast Strategy
- Underground & Guerrilla Media
- Baseline vs Spikes: What to Optimise For
- Crisis Communications
- Measuring PR
- PR for SEO and AI Search Authority
- Product Seeding & Review Strategy
- Media Mapping
- Amplifying Earned Assets Across Owned & Paid
- The PR Operating System
You can't buy credibility. You earn it by building something worth talking about, then making it easy for people to talk about it. The best PR we ever got at Quad Lock came from people who used the product, loved it, and told their audience without being asked. Charley Boorman was using Quad Lock on his adventures before we had any relationship with him. No retainer fee, no press release, no agency. Just a great product and a story people wanted to share. That's always the starting point.
Why PR Is Different From Everything Else in This Playbook
Earned media means someone else decided your brand was worth covering. That third-party endorsement carries weight no ad dollar can replicate.
A single New York Times feature does something a Meta ad can't: it validates. It moves a brand from "I've seen their ads" to "I've heard of them." That's a fundamentally different relationship with a prospective customer.
PR compounds. Media coverage gets shared, referenced, indexed. It drives branded search and gets screenshotted and posted for years. Ad spend stops the second you stop paying.
Do you need a PR agency? In the early days, probably not - though it depends on your business and your go-to-market. Speaking from our experience: what we needed early wasn't an agency, it was pouring our own time and energy into manufacturing the outcomes.
We tried all sorts of PR over the years, including an agency on retainer more than once. It never really worked for us. The setups that did work were direct relationships with freelancers, engaged project by project rather than on an ongoing retainer. And what worked best of all was being directly involved ourselves: coming up with ideas, pouring energy into them, making things happen. Creating something of real merit, an exclusive event, an ambassador activation, and then leveraging it through PR beats paying someone to send press releases on your behalf. Every business and go-to-market is different, so treat this as our experience rather than a rule. But create something worth covering first. Then amplify.
What Makes a Story (The Angle Framework)
Most brands get ignored because they pitch "we launched a product." Journalists need a story.
| Angle Type | What It Is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Founder Story | The "why we started this" with genuine stakes. Specific details, genuine emotion, a clear before/after. Most reusable PR asset. Have it ready in three versions: origin (startup media), growth (business media), and industry (sector press). | Quad Lock's origin story ran through half a dozen media cycles over a decade, each with a new angle. |
| Data Story | Unique, proprietary data that tells a broader story. Journalists love exclusive numbers. | "We surveyed 2,000 Australian cyclists and found 67% have damaged a phone while riding." |
| Mission or Values Story | Authentic stance on something timely. Journalists sniff out greenwashing immediately. | Brand takes a public position on sustainability with verifiable commitments, not vague pledges. |
| Trend Story | Position yourself as the most credible spokesperson for a trend the journalist is already covering. | Founder quoted as the expert voice in a piece on the outdoor fitness boom. |
| Achievement Story | Genuinely remarkable milestones that make a journalist stop scrolling. | First Australian brand to sell 1M units direct. Hit $10M without raising a dollar. |
| Controversy or Contrarian Take | Challenges conventional wisdom. Risky but high-reward. Works best once you have brand equity. | Founder publicly argues against the industry's accepted best practice with data to back it up. |
Before Quad Lock even existed, between the Opena and Quad Lock, we created a product called The Holda and launched it as an April Fools' joke pitched to tech media. Gizmodo picked it up (we gave them the "exclusive" video), then TechCrunch, The Verge, and a heap of other tech sites ran with it. It drove a massive amount of traffic to a landing page where we collected emails.
The catch: it wasn't just an April Fools' joke. It was a real product we were going to make. We ended up with a 3,000-deep email list of people who wanted to buy it before the product was even ready. The Opena had needed Kickstarter to validate demand; The Holda got so many sign-ups we didn't need Kickstarter at all. We had customers willing to purchase before we'd built anything, all from one PR play.
That taught us something early: PR isn't just about awareness. It's a demand generation tool. Think about what story your brand can tell that media would want to cover, and what you can capture on the back of it.
How to Pitch
Timing: Tuesday/Wednesday mornings. 6-8 weeks ahead for magazines, 1-2 weeks for online, same day for news. Follow up once, 5-7 days later. No response after that? Move on.
For the full pitch structure, templates, and sample pitches, see The PR Operating System later in this section.
Bad Subject Line- "Introducing [Brand] - The Future of [Category]"
- Product-focused. No story. Reads like a press release.
Good Subject Line- "Australian founders built a $100M+ brand without raising a single dollar"
- Story-driven. Specific. Makes the journalist want to read more.
Podcast Strategy
Podcasts compound. One appearance is a conversation. Ten over five years is an authority position. Treat it like a channel, not a one-off.
Selection: Relevance over reach. A 2,000-listener podcast in your niche outperforms a 100,000-listener general show. Survey customers: "What podcasts do you listen to?"
On the show: Prepare 3-4 memorable takeaways. Stories outperform advice. Mention product naturally. Direct listeners to one URL with a specific offer.
Underground & Guerrilla Media
Community-native media: Subreddits, Facebook groups, Discord servers are media. A genuine, helpful post in r/cycling reaches 50,000 engaged cyclists. Be a real participant first. Don't astroturf.
Niche newsletters: Often 5,000 people who are exactly your customer. Find on Substack, Beehiiv. Approach as a collaborator.
Local media: Easier to get, good for building press track record, often picked up by national wire services.
Speaking: Industry conferences are PR. The bar to speak at AU events is lower than founders expect.
Baseline vs Spikes: What to Optimise For
Most brands chase PR spikes: a big feature, a viral moment, a news cycle mention. Spikes feel great, but like a sugar high, they fade fast. The real value is in baseline coverage that delivers traffic and credibility day after day.
We met the Wirecutter (The New York Times) writers at a US trade show, which led to being featured across multiple rewrites of their article over the years. Unlike most PR that spikes and fades, that single Wirecutter article kept delivering thousands of users, so much that we eventually used it in our advertising. That taught us to focus more on activities that build the daily baseline, not chasing the next hit. One well-placed piece of evergreen coverage is worth more than a dozen news cycle mentions that disappear in a week.
Baseline Coverage- Wirecutter, buying guides, evergreen review articles
- Compounds over time, drives traffic for years
- Worth investing significant effort to land
- Use in your own marketing ("As featured in...")
Spike Coverage- News cycle mentions, launch day press
- High traffic for 48 hours, then gone
- Nice for ego, limited for business
- Don't optimise your PR strategy around these
Crisis Communications
Every brand will face a crisis eventually. A product recall, a viral complaint, a supply chain failure, a social media pile-on. The brands that survive these moments aren't the ones that avoid mistakes, they're the ones that respond well.
The principles: Acknowledge fast, explain later. Be the one to tell your story. Specifics beat generalities ("We recalled lot #2847, issued refunds to 847 customers" vs "We're committed to quality"). Don't delete negative comments. Have a crisis contact list ready (lawyer, PR contact, top stockists).
The First 24 Hours
The Holding Statement Template
"We're aware of [issue]. We're taking it seriously and investigating. We'll share an update by [specific time]. If you're affected, contact [support channel]."
That's it. Don't over-explain, don't speculate, don't blame. Acknowledge, commit to a timeline, provide a channel.
After the Crisis
- Internal post-mortem within 48 hours while memory is fresh
- Document what happened, what was communicated, and what you'd change
- Update your crisis protocol based on lessons learned
- Follow through on every commitment made during the crisis, this is where trust is rebuilt or permanently lost
Measuring PR
Don't try to directly attribute revenue to PR. Measure it like brand awareness, not like a Meta campaign. The exception: when PR drives to a specific landing page (like the April Fools' play), you can measure it directly.
For everything else, use a tiered hierarchy:
PR Measurement Hierarchy
Tier 1 - Business Impact (review monthly)
| Metric | How to Track |
|---|---|
| Branded search volume trend | Google Search Console. Is search lifting over time? |
| Direct traffic trend | GA4. Does direct/dark traffic correlate with PR activity? |
| Post-purchase survey mentions | "How did you hear about us?" Does press/reviews appear as a source? |
Tier 2 - Leading Indicators (review per campaign/initiative)
| Metric | How to Track |
|---|---|
| Backlinks earned | Ahrefs or similar. Quality backlinks from coverage. |
| Referral traffic from coverage | GA4. Actual clicks from published pieces. |
| Email signups from PR traffic | Landing page conversions from referral sources. |
Tier 3 - Activity Metrics (log for process improvement only)
| Metric | How to Track |
|---|---|
| Pitches sent | Outreach tracker |
| Response rate | Outreach tracker |
| Coverage count | Media monitoring |
| Social shares of earned pieces | Platform analytics |
The only metrics that truly matter long-term are Tier 1. If branded search and direct traffic aren't moving over 6-12 months of consistent PR activity, the strategy needs to change, regardless of how many articles you've landed. Tier 2 are early signals that things are working before Tier 1 moves. Tier 3 keeps your process honest but never confuse activity with impact.
PR for SEO and AI Search Authority
PR used to be siloed off from SEO. That wall is gone. The single biggest off-page driver of where you rank in Google, and increasingly whether an AI search engine cites you at all, is who links to you and who mentions you. That is PR's job. A feature in a credible publication is no longer just a trust signal for humans. It is a domain-authority signal for the algorithm and a citation source for the LLM answering your customer's question.
When a customer asks an LLM "what's the best phone mount for cycling," the model leans on the sources it trusts: the same news sites, review sites and expert pieces that earn dofollow links. You cannot buy your way onto that list with ad spend. You earn it the same way you earn coverage, with a story or a dataset worth citing.
The most reliable way to manufacture earned links at scale is to give journalists something they cannot get anywhere else: proprietary data. This is the Data Story angle from the framework above, pointed deliberately at link-earning.
This stacks on top of the awareness value of PR, it doesn't replace it. Coordinate with whoever owns your SEO so PR targets the publications that actually move your authority, not just the ones with the biggest logos. For the SEO and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) strategy this feeds, see Section 16: Other Marketing Channels.
Product Seeding & Review Strategy
For most DTC brands, product seeding drives more long-term value than traditional PR pitching. A journalist might write one story. A product reviewer creates an asset that ranks in search, gets shared in forums, and influences purchase decisions for years.
The Charley Boorman story from the top of this section is exactly what seeding is designed to create at scale: a great product in the hands of someone whose audience genuinely cares, before any deal exists.
At Quad Lock, product seeding to cycling and tech reviewers was one of the earliest things that built real credibility. We didn't have a PR agency or media contacts. We had a product that was genuinely good, and we sent it to people who would use it and tell others about it. That was the strategy. It compounded.
The Seeding Spectrum
Not all product placement is the same, and the lines matter, both legally and strategically:
- Earned reviews: You send product, no strings attached. The reviewer writes what they think. This is the gold standard.
- Gifted with expectation: You send product with an implied expectation of coverage. This is the grey area most brands live in. Be honest with yourself about what this is.
- Paid placements: You pay for a review or feature. This is advertising. Treat it that way, disclose it, and measure it like paid media.
The more you can stay in "earned" territory, the more credible the coverage.
Building Your Seeding List
Think beyond mainstream journalists. The people who move the needle for DTC brands are often:
- YouTube reviewers in your category (engagement and comment quality matter more than subscriber count)
- Newsletter writers with niche, engaged audiences
- Podcast hosts who use products in your category
- Niche publication editors (cycling magazines, beauty blogs, parenting sites)
- Reddit and community contributors who are genuinely influential in your space
Start with 20-30 names. Quality over quantity. One genuine review from a trusted voice in your niche is worth more than 50 unboxing posts from generic "lifestyle" accounts.
How to Approach Reviewers
Be genuine, be brief, attach no strings. Send the product with a short, personalised note explaining why you think they'd find it interesting. Don't ask for coverage. Don't follow up three times. Don't send a brief or talking points. If the product is good and relevant to their audience, they'll cover it.
What kills seeding programmes is treating them like influencer campaigns. Reviewers aren't creators for hire. They're building trust with their audience, and anything that compromises that trust gets ignored or declined.
Managing the Pipeline
Track seeding in a simple spreadsheet:
| Reviewer | Platform | Product Sent | Date Sent | Coverage Published | Link | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Name] | YouTube | [Product] | [Date] | Yes/No/Pending | [URL] | [Any context] |
Don't over-engineer this. The goal is knowing who received product, whether they covered it, and what the result was.
Compliance & Disclosure
When a reviewer or creator receives free or paid product, disclosure is required - and it is now actively enforced by the FTC (US), the ACCC (Australia) and their equivalents. That used to be a courtesy note; the rules have hardened. Disclosure has to be clear and in-content (not buried in a caption, a bio, or a platform "paid partnership" tag alone), and there is now a flat ban on fake or AI-generated reviews, review gating, and suppressing honest negatives. Regulators are most active in beauty, skincare, supplements and health. The full legal picture - the penalties, the fake-review rule, and how the obligations differ by jurisdiction - is the job of Section 9: Compliance & Regulatory. What matters here is getting the practical obligation right for your seeding programme.
What triggers a disclosure obligation is broader than paid posts, and that catches a lot of brands out:
| Relationship | Disclosure required? |
|---|---|
| Paid creator / sponsored post | Yes. Clear, in-content ("#ad" or spoken) plus the platform tag. |
| Gifted product, no posting required | Yes, if they post. The material connection exists the moment you sent free product. |
| Earned review (product sent, no strings) | Yes. A simple "[Brand] sent me this to try" covers it. |
| Affiliate / commission link | Yes. The financial relationship must be disclosed. |
| Genuine customer, bought it themselves | No. No material connection, no obligation. |
| Employee / insider review | Yes, and the connection must be obvious. Undisclosed insider reviews are banned. |
| AI or virtual influencer | Yes. The persona being synthetic does not exempt it. |
The fix is contractual and procedural, and it is cheap to get right:
None of this dulls the strategy. Honest disclosure doesn't weaken a genuine review, because the credibility was never in pretending the product appeared by magic. It was in the reviewer telling the truth.
The Compounding Effect
Reviews are evergreen. A YouTube review published today still ranks in search two years from now. A blog review builds backlinks and domain authority. A Reddit thread gets referenced in future discussions. Unlike a PR hit that spikes and fades, reviews compound. Every one you earn makes the next customer's research path shorter and more convincing.
For how earned content feeds your broader creative engine, see Section 17: Content & Creative.
Review Generation & Ratings Infrastructure
Seeding earns you reviews from voices with audiences. The other half of the job is the steady flow of reviews from ordinary customers: the star ratings on your product pages and marketplace listings. That is infrastructure, not outreach, and most brands under-build it.
The spine is a post-purchase review request. A review platform (Okendo, Yotpo, Junip, Reviews.io and similar) automates the ask and, critically, syndicates the result. Set the workflow once and it runs on every order.
Amazon Vine is the marketplace-specific lever. A new Amazon listing with zero reviews barely converts. Vine lets you supply units to vetted reviewers to seed early reviews, and since the July 2025 update you can enrol and stockpile up to 30 reviews before the listing goes live (Amazon cites sales lifts of up to 30% from reviews), so the pre-launch window is the play. It's one piece of the wider Amazon playbook in Section 23: Marketplaces & Wholesale.
Vine reviewers rate tougher than organic buyers: expect roughly 4.0 to 4.1 stars from Vine versus 4.3-plus organic. On a strong product that is a fine floor to launch from. On a marginal SKU, or the wrong product at the wrong time, Vine can drag your rating down and cost you more conversions than it earns. Only enrol products you are confident in, and let organic reviews pull the average back up afterwards.
Whatever the channel, the guardrails are non-negotiable: no review gating, no suppressing or deleting negative reviews, every incentivised review disclosed. Those aren't just good manners, they are the law now, covered in the Compliance & Disclosure subsection above.
For how reviews become social proof on your product pages, see Section 11: Website & Conversion.
Media Mapping
Treating "media" as one category is a common mistake. Each type of outlet reaches different audiences, serves different purposes, and requires a different approach.
Product review sites and blogs - Highest-ROI media targets for driving purchases. Reviews rank in search for buying-intent queries, they're evergreen, and they carry credibility that advertising can't match. Approach: send product, no strings, let the review speak for itself.
Business press (Australian Financial Review (AFR), Forbes, Inc., Fast Company) - These tell the founder story, not the product story. Useful for milestone moments, founder credibility, and recruiting. They don't directly drive sales for most DTC brands. Approach: pitch a story angle, not a product.
Trade press (Internet Retailing, Retail Biz, Power Retail) - Industry credibility. Your peers and potential partners read these. Approach: share operational insights, data, or frameworks. Trade press wants substance, not press releases.
Podcasts - Long-form, high-trust, relationship-driven. A 45-minute conversation builds more connection than a 500-word article. Approach: listen to the show first. Pitch a specific topic, not just "I'd love to come on and talk about my brand."
Newsletters - Niche audiences, high open rates, strong trust. A recommendation in a well-curated newsletter with 10,000 engaged subscribers can outperform a feature in a publication with 10 million monthly visitors. Approach: subscribe first, understand the voice, pitch something that genuinely fits.
How to Prioritise
For most DTC brands, start with product reviews and podcasts. Reviews drive purchase-intent traffic. Podcasts build the founder's profile and create content that can be repurposed. Add business press and trade press when you have milestone stories to tell. Add newsletter outreach as you identify niche publications aligned with your audience.
For community-native media (Reddit, forums, Discord), see Underground & Guerrilla Media above. You can't pitch these, you can only earn them by being genuine.
Build relationships with each type differently. The journalist wants a quick, relevant pitch. The podcast host wants to know you'll be an interesting guest. The newsletter writer wants to know you understand their audience. Mass pitching the same email to all of them is the fastest way to get ignored by everyone.
For how IRL brand building creates PR opportunities and content, see Section 19: IRL Brand Building.
Amplifying Earned Assets Across Owned & Paid
The biggest waste in PR is landing the hit and then doing nothing with it. A Wirecutter feature, a great seeded review, a podcast appearance: each one is an asset you paid for in time and effort, and most brands let it sit on the publisher's page and decay. The brands that win treat every earned moment as raw material to recycle across the channels they actually control. We ran our Wirecutter piece in our own advertising for exactly this reason. "As featured in" is not a vanity bar. It is the cheapest credibility you will ever buy, because someone else already paid for it.
The practical map is to ask of every earned asset: where else can this live, and what does each channel need from it?
| Earned asset | Owned reuse | Paid reuse |
|---|---|---|
| Press feature | "As featured in" on PDPs, email, newsletter | Logo bar in ad creative, retargeting social proof |
| Seeded creator post | Repost (with permission) to brand social, embed on site | Whitelist via Partnership / Spark Ads (rights permitting) |
| Customer / star reviews | Star ratings and quotes on PDPs and landing pages | Review-quote and rating ad creative |
| Podcast appearance | Clip for social, embed on About page, link in email | Audiograms and clips as paid social creative |
| Data study | Pillar page, newsletter, repeated annually | Stat-led ad hooks, lead-gen landing pages |
This is the flywheel: earned media creates assets, owned channels distribute them for free, and paid amplifies the proven winners. For the mechanics of running creator content as paid and whitelisting, see Section 17: Content & Creative.
The PR Operating System
PR without a system is just occasional hustle. A repeatable operating rhythm turns PR from sporadic to compounding.
Monthly PR Cadence
The Story Inventory
Maintain a running list of 5-10 angles you can pitch at any time:
- Founder story - Origin, pivots, lessons. Every founder has one; not every publication has heard yours.
- Data story - "We analysed X and found Y." Journalists love data they can cite.
- Milestone - Revenue, customers, market entry, partnerships. Only pitch when the number is genuinely impressive for your stage.
- Trend take - Your perspective on an industry trend. Contrarian is better than consensus.
- Customer story - How someone uses your product in an unexpected or compelling way.
- Behind the scenes - Supply chain, product development, how something is made. Works well for trade press and podcasts.
The Pitch Structure
Keep pitches to five lines. Journalists receive hundreds of emails.
- Why this matters to their audience - not why it matters to you
- The angle in one sentence - what's the story?
- One proof point - a number, a fact, a data point that makes it credible
- What you can provide - interview, data, images, product sample
- One clear ask - "Would this work for [publication]?" or "Happy to jump on a quick call if it's relevant."
No attachments. No PDFs. No media kits on first contact. If they're interested, they'll ask.
Sample Pitches
Founder Story Pitch- Subject: [Your Brand] founder story - bootstrapped to $10M in [your category]
- Hi [Name],
- I noticed your recent piece on [topic] and thought this might fit. [Your name] built [Your Brand] from [specific origin story] to $10M without outside funding, using [one genuinely interesting approach].
- The story covers [2-3 specific insights their readers would find valuable].
- Happy to jump on a 15-minute call if it fits. [Founder] is available for interview this month.
- [Your name]
The Pitch That Gets Deleted- Subject: Exciting new brand disrupting the [category] space!!!
- Hi there,
- I'm reaching out because [Brand] is an innovative, award-winning DTC brand that's disrupting the [category] space. We've been featured in [list of logos]. Our founder would love to share their inspiring journey with your audience.
- Please find attached our 12-page media kit and press release.
- Looking forward to hearing from you!
The good version is short, specific, and makes it easy to say yes. The bad version is generic, self-serving, and signals that you don't understand how editorial works.
Spokesperson Prep
Before any interview or podcast, have these ready:
- Three key messages - The things you want the audience to remember. Every answer should route back to one of these.
- Three proof points - Numbers, examples, or stories that back up your messages.
- The 60-second founder story - Practised, not scripted. If you ramble for five minutes, you'll lose the interviewer and the audience.
Handling Inbound
When press comes to you, respond fast. Even if the answer is "I can't comment on that right now." Journalists work on deadlines. Being responsive builds a relationship for next time. Being slow means they find someone else and stop calling.
Outreach Tracker
A spreadsheet with: outlet name, journalist/host name, email, angle pitched, date sent, follow-up date, status (pitched/responded/published/declined), and a link to any published coverage. Review monthly. Delete contacts who've bounced. Add new ones from research.
PR by Stage
Section 20 Checklist
Go from reading to doing.
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