Every morning, hundreds of tech journalists open up their email inboxes to a horror show. Among the unread messages, they find countless pitch emails that read more like spam than genuine attempts at outreach. All have the same robotic quality, all are fundamentally pointless. Welcome to the age of PR spam.
This new world is being driven by AI-powered PR tools that allow publicists and agencies to quickly gather contact information for a reporter who has written on a topic vaguely related to theirs. With that information, they send out hundreds of ‘hyper-personalised’ pitches about their client’s project with just the click of a button. And while the number of emails sent and response rates might make it look like these tools are winning, the truth is they are failing. They are making media relations far worse than it already is.
PR is most certainly a numbers game. The more people you pitch, the more chance you have of getting them to write about your client or company. Even with AI that can get past spam filters, however, there is a point where enough is enough. There is a point where reporters become so overwhelmed by the firehose of terrible pitches sent through these tools that, instead of responding, they respond with closed DMs. And so when the robot can’t build a relationship like a human does with the person behind the news desk, it feels less like a pitch and more like something they should ignore.
When it comes to the really big stories, a robot can’t give the inside scoop on what the reporter likes to talk about beyond their general interests, just as a robot isn’t able to tell if it’s actually a good time to reach out to a journalist.
A robot can’t have actual rapport with a reporter, knowing just when to send a quick text message to catch their attention or whether an email for a massive weekend feature is going to get drowned out among small product updates. While a robot can reach five hundred people at once, human publicists can seize the initiative and reclaim media relations with a small, tight team that might choose to eschew blasting those hundreds of five-hundred robotically-customised emails and replace them with five very targeted, very researched notes sent to five specific human beings. For a Tech PR Agency Bristol, visit https://headonpr.co.uk/tech-pr-agency-near-me/bristol
In a climate where spray and pray has become the name of the game, human-to-human pitching stands out, not as shallow noise in a crowded marketplace but as real value. Who wouldn’t want a pitch that is carefully thought through and shows understanding? And, in a world saturated with automated noise, human sincerity is fast becoming one of publicists’ biggest competitive advantages.
