The junior PR staffer who made ESPN pay for the story

One of my favorite Fourth of July traditions is – don’t freak out – watching the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on ESPN.

Believe it or not, this stomach-turning spectacle of gluttony hides a powerful PR lesson.

I’m not into the actual hot dog eating – that’s gross and boring.

Instead, I’m hooked by the epic contestant intros, written and delivered with flair by 30-year emcee George Shea.

The rock on which he stands is not a rock! IT IS COURAGE! … Ladies and gentlemen, the No. 1-ranked eater in the world. The asparagus, and wonton, and corned-beef eating champion of the world. He has God’s username and password, and he does with it what he chooses!

Shea told the New Yorker his secret: ride the line between joking and not joking. Like this:

He will do whatever it takes to win. Three days ago he broke up with his girlfriend and euthanized his dog to leave a void of emptiness inside of him that he can fill today with hot dogs and buns.

TV ratings peak during the intros, and then fall once people start dipping hot dogs in water and basically swallowing them whole.

But my point isn’t what a great orator George Shea is.

My point is that George Shea is all of us. That is, everyone reading this email.

You see, before he ever took the stage to kick off the hot dog eating contest in front of 35,000 screaming spectators and a million people watching from around the world, before he crowned himself the commissioner of Major League Eating, George Shea was a young staffer at a NYC PR agency.

His clients included elected officials, real estate developers . . . and Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs. For that last account, he was the press agent for the contest, tasked with landing media coverage back when it attracted only a few dozen spectators.

Instead of blast-pitching a boring story, he took the initiative to CREATE an angle. No extra budget required. In addition to the intros, he created images for the contestants, borrowing techniques from boxing promoters. The rest is history.

Think about it: Brands shell out millions for TV time. Yet one then-junior PR staffer, using nothing but the English language, turned a faltering account into a nationwide spectacle so compelling ESPN now pays Nathan’s to air it.

You too can wield the power of storytelling to turn today’s yawner into tomorrow’s viral must-cover.

And then maybe someday, I can share your case study in one of these emails:

She stood at the precipice of an empty clip report, staring into the gaping jaws of client dissatisfaction, and scoffed. With a flick of her wrist and dash of speech recognition, she spun a yarn that subtly coiled itself around the minds of journalists and influencers, such that before they broke free of her narrative’s hypnotic rhythm, they’d given her 127 independent stories and 65 high-authority backlinks.

P.S. Here’s a 2018 piece that ranks Shea’s best intros up until this point. Someone needs to update this!