Bad pitching’s good business model

The operator of a PR source connection platform inadvertently encouraged his users to use AI-generated pitches.

The tragic part is he was trying to communicate the exact opposite.

In a Q&A with Aly Walansky, the owner of HARO said his team scored more than a million pitches to see whether they were AI-generated, and then whether they were published. The results?

Roughly 1 in 3 human-written pitches got featured. For AI-written pitches, closer to 1 in 10. That’s a 3x gap. Yes, AI has made it easy to pitch. But if I told you that you’d be 3x more successful doing the opposite, what would you do?

– Brett Farmiloe, HARO

I respect what Brett’s trying to do. The problem is when any numbers-driven marketer reads that math, it means something different to them:

“Wow! AI has a 10 percent hit rate! Let’s lean on that!”

Let’s say it takes an hour to write a solid human pitch that has a 1-in-3 chance of landing. And it takes five minutes to use AI to generate a pitch that has a 1-in-10 chance of landing.

That means it takes 3 hours of human work compared to 50 minutes of AI work to equal one expected placement. Guess which path the ROI-focused growth hackers are going to take every time?

I share your protestations: What about long-term reputation?! What about real relationships?!

The problem for the inboxes of the journalists you and I want to reach is there are more than enough people who don’t share those concerns who think a 10 percent hit rate is heavenly.

Like the British PR agency that sent so many spam pitches that Gmail started blacklisting them. You’d think that would be a signal to stop doing that. But instead, they created a bunch of fake publicist emails (complete with AI-generated photos watermarked with “this-person-does-not-exist.com”) associated with fake agencies so they could get new email addresses that weren’t blacklisted.

Unfortunately, I’m not confident that initiatives like the Claude watermark will fix this. That’s a token effort to comply with a vague EU regulation and seems to be too broad to be impactful. I’m taking a wait-and-see on that.

Big sigh. Why am I ruining your Thursday with all this bad news?

Because in the long run it’s good news.

The more overwhelmingly corrupted pitching gets by AI, the more you’ll stand out for being human.

On your next assignment, spend 80 percent of your time researching and personalizing your outreach to the top 20 percent of your media list. Follow this pattern:

• Be able to honestly complete this sentence: “I’m contacting (name) because (clues) verify this idea or source cleanly fits their work.”
• Write the pitch yourself. Use AI to organize your research beforehand and strengthen your brainstorming and tightening afterward.
• Make every follow-up earn its place by adding a new reason to respond.

You’ll need to be more strategic, creative and empathetic than ever. But if you do all that consistently, journalists will start recognizing your name and remembering that you make their job easier.

Then they’ll give you their unpublished Gmail address, or maybe even their cell phone number!

And you’ll be free from the email-inbox-zombie-apocalypse.