TODAY hit last week – 4th time’s a charm

This segment aired on TODAY last Friday, and I’m going to give you the backstory.

But this post is about something much more valuable than pitching national morning shows. See if you can discern the deeper meaning.

Ashlyn Hewitt was stumped. She had a great story to pitch the TODAY show, but she was staring down that grand obstacle that every intrepid pitching pro faces when approaching a national morning show:

Without prior relationships, how do you know who produces which segments?

Ashlyn, who works at PR firm Method Communications, has access to a powerful media database that can give her names and titles and phone numbers. But that wasn’t good enough. She’s way beyond sending the same email to a bunch of addresses she pulls out of a database.

Ashlyn knew she needed to really customize this story to the RIGHT people at the program. So she opened up LinkedIn and got down to work. She reviewed the bios of every Today producer she could find, and noted some distinctions in their titles that weren’t captured in her media database.

Then she chose those she thought she’d have the best chance of success with and prioritized them to start pitching one at a time. How many would you pick?

Ashlyn chose TWELVE. Then she pulled their contact info out of her database.

She emailed the first one. No response.

She reframed the pitch for the second one. Same story.

Struck out on the third, but didn’t give up.

The fourth one on her list was interesting. Because this producer has a special role at the show that makes most people afraid to pitch her. But by now you can tell that fear is not a problem for Ashlyn. She understood some particular nuances of this story and this particular producer’s PAST assignments (gleaned from LinkedIn) that gave her the confidence to click “send.”

And then that magic moment came when she checked her email and saw this simple reply: “Copying [other producer] for consideration.”

(I’ve been doing this a long time and I still get goose bumps at moments like this – PR nerd to the max here.)

You know the result from there. Congratulations to Ashlyn! Not coincidentally, last week her firm, Method, was also named the Tech Agency of the Year by the Holmes Report only six years after its founding.

What’s the real takeaway here?

Proper technique is crucial. But your MINDSET is what drives your technique.

Ashlyn wrote a great pitch. But it never would have gotten to the right people if she wasn’t absolutely clear on the value she had to offer them. That’s what drove her to such thorough research and dogged persistence.

You can develop this mindset, too. I talk more about this in Pillar 1 of 4 Pillars of a Media Relations Master.