Table of Contents
I’ve been looking to speak with more in-house brands who have had success with digital PR.
I looked to Chris Lewis, the Associate Digital PR at Launch Potato because he works on several brands under the Launch Potato umbrella.
They launched a campaign that you may have seen about fast food price vs inflation.
Through a lot of hard work and strategic pitching, the post really took off. It currently sits at 987 LRD and has links from CNN, LATimes, USAToday, and the list goes on. It prompted thousands of social media posts, news discussions, a press release from McDonalds, and a new $5 value meal.
This, to me, is the definition of viral.
So, in this conversation, Chris outlined the step-by-step process for getting this data-driven digital PR content to go viral.
I highly recommend giving this a watch or listen!
Links Mentioned in the Podcast
Here are some of the links that Chris mentioned in the podcast chat.
Is Fast Food Affordable Anymore? Here’s How Menu Prices Have Changed Over the Years [2024]
Statement from FinanceBuzz on Fast Food Inflation Study
Fast Food Wars 2024: Which Value Meals Offer the Most Bang for Your Buck?
Actionable Takeaways
Based on our chat, I’ve come up with some actionable takeaways for digital PRs.
1. Always be on the lookout for ideas
Anchor your campaigns with topics dominating current conversations. The best ideas often stem from everyday experiences that evoke strong emotions or discussions, like family conversations about fast food prices.
2. Find unique data
Journalists crave fresh angles. Chris’s team used manual data collection (e.g., Wayback Machine, receipts) to uncover insights not easily accessible elsewhere.
3. Adapt your pitch based on how the news is covering you
Start with a strong hook but be ready to pivot. The FinanceBuzz team adjusted their outreach to emphasize McDonald’s after noticing journalists and social media audiences gravitating toward that angle.
4. Involve your outreach team early and often
Bring media relations teams into the ideation and data phases. If they understand the campaign deeply, they’ll pitch it more effectively (and tell you what to include to make it more effective.)
5. Personalization is strategic
Not every email needs deep personalization. Chris talked about personalized pitches on high-value targets (VIPs). He said, “I use like a “would you be upset if they didn’t cover this” kind of a test, and those people get flagged for personalized pitches.”
6. Try to extend the lifecycle
Repurpose successful campaigns into follow-up studies. For instance, Chris’s team compared newly launched value meals after their fast food inflation study went viral.
7. Don’t fear failure
Not every campaign will hit. In our chat, Chris emphasized learning from failures and staying resilient, especially during dry spells in outreach success.
8. Celebrate the Grind
Small wins matter. Even campaigns with modest link-building results contribute to long-term brand and help you become a better, stronger PR.
Transcript
Here is a slightly edited transcript of my discussion with Chris.
Can you explain what Launch Potato is?
Chris Lewis: Sure. So Launch Potato is a company that really just connects advertisers to people.
We do that in a bunch of different ways through a bunch of different domains.
So I like to think of it as kind of a holding property, something like that, where we have, we control a bunch of domains and a bunch of properties online in each of them.
We’re just trying to connect advertisers to customers, however we can.
So some of the ways we do that, you know, FinanceBuzz is probably our biggest?
FinanceBuzz. com is a site just helps people with their money.
It connects people to budgeting apps, whether it’s a credit card product, different financial products, different kinds of financial needs, or whatever finance is.
It is a place where we try to do that for people.
Vince: Yeah, it kind of sounds like sure people have seen these types of sites out there than the Nerdwallets and Bankrate.
So what was interesting to me, though, is it kind of sounds like, you know, you’re using agency tactics are kind of like agency mindset for these sites, but they’re kind of owned and operated by you guys.
Is that kind of the right way to look at it?
Do you view it as an agency?
Chris Lewis: Exactly. So, you know, we have a couple of properties that we do digital PR for a larger SEO initiatives for these sites.
So you know, on digital security site that we do a bunch of work, on finance buzz and a couple others. But, you know, you, you hit the nail on the head, you know, kind of bringing that agency model in house, you know, with a smaller team but working across a couple of select sites rather than a huge book.
Vince: Yeah. So we got to talking a little bit and I came across this amazing post that you guys did that, that was super successful, built something like 2000 links at referring domains to a single campaign. So, that’s what I really want to talk to you about. This is the Fast Food Prices vs Inflation. That’s the post.
I’ll be sure to link to it in the show notes. So let’s get into it. Can you explain the post a little bit?
Can you explain your Fast Food Prices vs Inflation post?
Chris Lewis: So this was a campaign that we were coming up with in Q2 of last year and it was, you know, around where a lot of conversations were happening about inflation. And so we were like, right, we’re a personal finance site.
A lot of our digital PR content has to do with personal finance and money. And it really like spreads the gamut between super, super niche you know, surveys about banking preferences and checking account preferences and that kind of stuff to the really, really tangential. Right? Especially around the holiday season, we start getting into it more.
And so this was an idea about fast food prices that was kind of born from like our everyday experience, right?
Like I think a lot of the conversations around inflation at the time were happening around like gas prices was a huge one for a while. And then it started seeking like grocery prices. And internally we were talking and even like anecdotally, my own like family conversations, you know, my brother was like, have you seen the price lately?
And so it was definitely in the zeitgeist.
When we were coming up with this idea, somebody on my team I’ll give him credit. His name is Josh—he’s incredible—h aas like, we need to figure out how much fast food has gone up because I just went to the drive thru and it’s crazy.
And so like, you know, a lot of, I think probably my favorite digital PR ideas, it’s just kind of born out of our own feelings and experience.
And so we, I kind of trepidatiously was like, yeah, I guess we can explore it.
And the more and more we bought into it, I think the more rich the data was, the more compelling the story was, and it ended up becoming something like so much bigger than just a digital PR campaign for us.
Vince: Yeah, I mean, you touched on a couple of things I wanted to talk about there. Let’s actually get back to them, because I don’t want to lose this thread. So the data gathering, once you come up with the idea, gathering the data, let’s get into how you actually found it, because it sounds like it was part of kind of the evaluation of if this idea would actually take off, right?
Exactly.
Can you talk about how you gathered data?
Chris Lewis: So initially, I think the idea was let’s figure out how much fast food prices generally have gone up, right?
And we started saying, okay, well, how can we figure that out?
We need to find pricing today versus historical.
And if we’re able to do that, we’ll find out whatever that number is, right?
And really, we were thinking about the general fast food market, but we kind of realized, like, the only way to really do it is to go kind of, like, Okay.
Line item by line item on menus and, and, and do it that way, right? There’s not going to be one single source that’s saying, like, you know, in general, fast food prices have gone up X amount.
So, as we started collecting that, we started seeing trends within the market generally, which is kind of what we were after, but also individual retailers, right?
Some are, sorry, chains; I’ll call them fast food chains.
One thing that we found was a lot of these sites are a little bit cagey with their pricing and a lot of it is dynamic.
So a McDonald’s, I live in Miami and McDonald’s in Miami are more expensive than McDonald’s in middle America. Or in New York City, they happen to be the most expensive McDonald’s.
So we realized we couldn’t totally trust the pricing, you know, that was just on our apps or whatever.
So, we started looking for other ways to find the data. Like most of our data collection, like it just starts with a Google.
I really googled: Where can I find fast food menu prices?
And the first thing we found that was interesting was a lot of receipts, a lot of pictures of receipts and the things that we noticed about the pictures of the receipts is that they were data, right?
So you want to see, you know, a receipt with a Big Mac purchase on it from all these dates.
And so we just started writing them down and eventually stumbled across a couple of sites that have. Kind of like current national pricing or at least pricing in some locations.
And so we were thinking, all right, well, from there, how do we get that historically, right?
They’re just posting their current prices.
And we remember the way back machine, the old handy internet archive.
Okay. Well, I wonder how often this was archived and luckily these sites have been operating for long enough that we were able to go back.
What I wanted to do was go back a decade and see what the numbers were.
So we went back exactly 10 years the date and then exactly 5 years of the date and then current date.
And really just manually, you know, from 12 or so fast food chains looked at 10 to 10 to 12 items on each menu. And just gather those three data points for each. So it was super, super manual.
But ultimately, you know, doesn’t, doesn’t really matter.
A hundred isn’t that big of a number when you, when you really get it.
Vince: Yeah, that’s great. I, I felt like a rush of adrenaline when you’re telling me like the Wayback Machine, you know, like I’ve been there where you’re like, I can’t find this data and then you’re like, Oh, you know, I found it.
This is the way we’re going to do it.
And I think one thing that really sticks out to me is like, you know, most of the people I talk to and, you know, I’ve done this myself, it’s the most successful campaigns seem to be the ones that you have to do some of that manual digging, right? It’s not just like, “Hey, here’s a site that has all the stuff.”
I mean, you kind of backed into that a bit, but like, you still have to do the Wayback Machine and, and, you know, do some manual digging.
Cause to me, like that is the stuff that ChatGPT, AI overviews. Like they’re not going to be able to just pull out. Right?
And that’s the stuff that’s interesting to journalists, to readers and, you know, bloggers.
And I think that gets missed a lot with, with campaigns for people.
Chris Lewis: Absolutely. And I think you hit the nail on the head with like, that’s what ends up being most exciting because it’s also the data that hasn’t been mined.
You know, digital PRs that have been in the space have been doing it for long enough that, like, we all know the data sets, we all use the same data sets, you know, the transportation statistics, like, we’ve all done the airplane campaigns, right, and some variations of it.
So, finding unique data sets and really, like, creating your own unique data sets is what builds that kind of uniqueness and also a lot of, like, the emotion that, like, I think the market is asking for.
Vince: Yeah, totally. All right. So let’s keep on the kind of production theme of this. So once you get the data, what does that look like next?
Does it get passed off to writers who are going to analyze and write it? Is that, do you have that in house?
What happens after the data collection phase?
Chris Lewis: So everything we do at FinanceBuzz is done in-house with, you know, some, some like kind of rare, rare exceptions, especially on the creative side.
But our team likes to have the people who are connecting, collecting the data, actually do the analysis and do the writing themselves.
It’s a tricky tightrope to walk because a lot of times, you know, the data people aren’t great writers or, you know, great writers aren’t super into the data.
We definitely hire it with that in mind.
Like, we want people, but we also know that the person who ends up writing about this has to be super connected to the data because they have to understand it.
I have a data science background and like my whole thing is scrutiny and, you know, thinking really, really hard about if I was a journalist and I really didn’t want to cover this, like, you know, if my editor handed this to me on my plate and I wanted to make an excuse for why I didn’t have to cover it, that’s what I want to solve for early, early on in the process so that we don’t run into it later.
So we do it all in-house.
And so for this particular campaign, the same person came up with the idea and was really passionate about the idea.
I said, great, run with it.
And then not only is he collecting the data and understands it all, you know, backward and forward, but he’s going to, that enthusiasm, I
think translates into the writing and translates into the product.
Vince: Yeah, a hundred percent. And that’s how we used to do it.
When I was at Siege Media, I was the person who ideated and wrote it, researched it, and worked with a designer. And then also did the outreach too, the pitching and stuff.
And I do, you know, I think that also helps eliminate, like—I’ve talked to a couple of people on the pod who talked about this idea of like, you know, protecting your idea from the inception, right?
For example, when you go to do data analysis or somebody else’s doing it, data gathering, maybe you don’t find us a specific stat that you need.
So you kind of tweak the story, tweak the idea a little bit.
But having that person championing the concept all the way through, I think, helps keep what made this idea unique from the start, you know, what, what will catch people.
So, you can keep that path all the way through. I think that’s super important.
So, okay, now let’s get into the outreach, right? So talk to me about your team, the outreach team. Is it different than the person that’s doing the research?
How did you handle outreach with this idea?
Chris Lewis: Yeah. So we, we typically will we’ll have somebody else outreach.
But I don’t want it to sound like they’re totally disparate.
I mean, yes, they’re, they’re two separate people.
But our outreach, you know, our media relations team, is very involved in the process. And, in fact, they kind of own it a little bit.
So you know, our data folks are really good at collecting a lot of data.
But our outreach team is really, really critical in saying like, okay, here’s the outline for what you’re actually going to end up writing about, you know, with a lot of conversation.
So they’re at the kickoff meetings when we’re talking about how we’re going to collect stuff.
They’re there when we review the data, right?
There’s always a data review meeting where we go over everything and talk about what’s interesting and what’s not.
And we start to kind of puzzle piece it in a way we’re going to be able to tell a compelling story.
And we need to have those media relations people there from day one, because they’re the ones who have to sell it.
So not only do they need to understand it, you know, front and back, just like our data team does, and just like the writers do.
But if they’re going to sell it, I want them to have the same kind of buy in as everybody else.
So they’re the ones who end up pitching it.
But it’s not like they’re just handed a campaign, right? They’ve been with this for over, over a month at that point.
Vince: So they’re super familiar with it. Yeah. I mean, either way you do it, it’s like having that person that’s going to be pitching it involved at the early stage whether or not it’s the same person or a different team I think that’s probably the key.
It’s like understanding this is what makes this valuable—this is what the story is going to be and why it’s going to be enticing for journalists.
Like if you have that in mind from the start that seems to be the most important part.
Okay, so once the media relations team picks it up, talk to me about kind of crafting the emails, crafting the angles, the volume that you send that kind of stuff, I think, is interesting for people to hear to understand, you know, you got 2000 links, but did you send out?
5,000 emails or something, you know?
Can you talk about crafting emails and subject lines?
Chris Lewis: Yeah. So that’s a great question. I think this is a good illustration of this kind of iterative experience, right?
So it starts off with kind of one intention, just like the campaign did, frankly, and then kind of morphs into something else.
So for this campaign, right, we get the data back, we come up with our hook, and we start pitching it out.
Subject line-wise, we were going with something like, “fast food’s risen at double the rate of inflation in the last decade.”
And typically we’ll test two or three subject lines at the same time.
We’ll pitch it out to 20 people, say for subject line A, B and C, see what the open rates look like, see what the click rates look like and then kind of make decisions from there.
I remember that all of them were very good, and we actually started seeing coverage pretty quickly.
What was interesting about this outreach was immediately what everybody took to wasn’t necessarily like the overall, you know, fast food markets doing X, Y, and Z. It was McDonald’s.
Vince: Yeah, I love that approach.
So you AB test the first kind outreach. Are you AB testing the new like McDonald’s angle?
How often do you A/B test?
Chris Lewis: So we switched subject lines and the pitch a little bit.
We start AB testing those angles.
And then I think what, one of the British publications, you know, the headline said “McDoubled”.
We saw that. We were like that’s the new subject line. Like we don’t even need to test.
Vince: Tell me about like the timeline of this. Right? So you start sending it out. That sounds like got coverage kind of pretty quickly, right?
But then you pivoted. How, how long are you sending out outreach for this campaign?
What’s the timeline for outreach look like?
Chris Lewis: I’d say the 1st, we probably was about a week until we saw our 1st piece of coverage or maybe, maybe a little bit less.
We started seriously seeing the pickup on the McDonald’s angle probably a week later, and then we continued outreach for probably the next three or four weeks.
Our timelines are pretty long for outreach, which ended up being a huge, huge benefit because as we were producing these articles and seeing them, you know, it was a really solid campaign.
It was getting great results.
But at the same time, there was also a big social media swell not just on, on our articles.
We did see a lot of like Reddit pickups and our inflation and things like that picking up.
But we started seeing a bunch of virality of people’s McDonald’s receipts because of a bunch of outcry over a a $25 Big Mac meal.
So we started seeing this on TikTok and it was getting, you know, millions of views and we were like, okay, well, how can we lean into this more?
And so as things started swishing, with the media landscape, they were talking about this $25 Big Mac meal. Is it a real thing? Where is it a real thing?
We started not only incorporating that into our pitches but continuing to feed that fire however we could.
So we kept outreach for a relatively long time.
And then the other thing that happened was California had a 25 dollar minimum wage increase.
That started to take effect, probably in over a month of us pitching this thing.
And so as that was happening, we were thinking, okay, well, what’s that going to do to fast food prices, right?
Because when you think about minimum wage, it’s the biggest state in our country, right?
You’d start thinking like minimum wage workers, like there is no more typical than a fast food worker.
So we were saying, okay, well, what would that do to prices?
So we had a kind of a total strategy shift, a month in or whatever that was and started.
Rather than just targeting the CNNs, like we made a huge, huge California regional list. And started, you know, anybody who’s covering California, anything or anybody who’s covering this minimum wage hike, which ended up doing this great numbers regionally as well.
Vince: So that kind of angle and new stat that you come up with or new story that you’re leveraging becomes the new intro to the email?
Chris Lewis: So whether it’s $25 Big Mac, like that was definitely in our phase two pitches, and then it was California recently had this 25 minimum wage increase. What’s that going to do to prices?
Well, here’s how bad it is without that.
Our pitches should change really, really drastically within six weeks.
Vince: Yeah. That’s a fascinating microcosm of how I think content strategies and PR strategy should work.
I feel like, though, the tricky part for people working in an agency and maybe where you kind of benefit working in-house is a lot of times with agency, it’s like, “Okay, we’ve gotten this post. We’ve gotten, you know, coverage on this. Now it’s time to jump on to the next thing.”
Right?
Whereas when you’re in-house, you can see this and—maybe I know this isn’t every single agency that does this—but I know there’s always that thing where you’ve promised a certain amount of assets to be created so it can sometimes be tricky to do that.
But it sounds like, as in your case, you have that flexibility with in-house.
Still, for people in an agency, it’s maybe just a matter of explaining, you know, that there is more juice to squeeze from this post that you’re working on.
Do you think in-house digital PR gives you more flexibility with changing angles?
Chris Lewis: Yeah, it’s that kind of fluidity, which is a huge advantage of doing things in-house.
I think the great agencies and the ones that have really healthy partnerships can start identifying those maybe as quickly as in-house teams can and saying, “Hey, I know that our contracts are this, and we have to produce X amount of campaigns.
But instead of the next one, like we’re just going to keep going on this, and if it doesn’t pan out, it doesn’t pan out, and we’ll, we’ll figure it out later.”
But I think a lot of good agencies also have that intuition and can do it, but many of them aren’t super incentivized to do so under their contracts or whatever.
So, I would hope that good agencies can see the opportunity and kind of pounce on it, but it’s so much easier to do when it’s in-house.
And, you know, it’s not a challenging conversation with a client and, you know, it’s just kind of like, well, what else are we going to do?
Vince: Why not? Yeah, yeah. 100%. All right.
Before we get too far away from the email thing, one thing I like to talk to people about is kind of the personalization of emails.
There seems to be kind of like a difference in opinion of how personalized you want to take each email, especially to a journalist.
Are you personalizing the subject line, tailoring it to like how they write their headlines?
Do you add that little hook in the beginning where it’s like, “Hey, Chris, I saw you wrote about inflation, really love the article. Here’s another similar piece.”
Are you doing any of that type of personalization? Do you think it’s important?
Can you talk briefly about email personalization?
Chris Lewis: I do think it’s important, and it is something we do, but I wouldn’t say it’s like a one-size-fits-all.
So what we typically do in the list-building process is, as we’re building our list, if the journalists is one we want to target, we’ll start flagging them kind of as VIPs.
So these will typically be people who are higher DR pubs.
People who I can tell, take digital PR pitches from people, people who have covered surveys from other people, (as you can tell the writers that do versus the writers that don’t, right?)
And so, if all of this is a game of batting averages, you know, the ones with which you’re going to have a higher batting average, right?
So we’ll start marking those and saying this is a good time for personalization.
Often based on what they write or if they’ve written about something.
I use like a”would you be upset if they didn’t cover this” kind of a test, and those people get flagged for personalized pitches.
So it ends up being a much smaller subsection of the total people we pitch that will get like very personalized subject lines and really more personalized pitches themselves.
A lot of the templates are still probably in those.
But you know, maybe a personal connection, something like quote offers or additional information if we know that they’re going to like them or with somebody we want to have a relationship with.
And it also kind of depends.
Like for our California regional, that was a numbers game for us.
We’re not going to have the time to personalize to everybody.
But when we’re talking to local radio stations and news outlets in California, I always like to balance it.
Let’s put the effort and energy where we think it will pay off or has a higher likelihood of paying off.
And then others can get, you know, a seemingly personalized email or just a template.
Vince: Yeah. I think there’s definitely stages of personalization or, or, you know, tiers of personalization.
Whether or not you’re just getting their name right I feel like is one.
Offering quotes to more of those like VIPs—, is that something you do universally?
Because I know there’s, again, like, this is a strategy that some people stand by, they put in on every single pitch they do is like, here’s a quote from the CEO of Finance Buzz on why inflation is high.
Just to give the journalists one extra thing that they maybe don’t have to come back to you for before they read their article.
Do you offer quotes in every pitch?
Chris Lewis: We’ve tested it.
Candidly, don’t use it a lot.
The vast majority of the time, I’d say what we’ll do in our template emails is say we’re happy to offer quotes.
We have these experts available.
But if it’s somebody we know will want to quote right away. For example, some journalists that we’ll work with always say like, okay, can I have a consumer-focused quote?
So when it’s one of those it’s going to be a different quote than somebody else.
Vince: Yeah, that, that makes sense. So, I had written down a couple of questions based on some of the early stuff you said.
I feel like we kind of hit this one, you know, from start to finish process, but I want to come back to sort of the early, something you said very early about ideation.
And I think back to some of the most compelling campaigns I was a part of, and most of them started with talking at the dinner table with someone. You’re talking to your relatives, brother, sister, whatever.
And this seed of an idea has some emotional tie, right?
Like there’s a discussion around it.
So I guess the question is — Is your digital PR mind always going?
Are you able to extract these that, you know, like if you were to process size this, you know, put a process to ideation and find those ideas that work outside of just, you know, your, your job, right?
Like, where do you do it? Where do you find these ideas?
Where do you find your digital PR ideas?
Chris Lewis: It’s funny.
You mentioned that in your every day; you happen to come across them.
The answer to that is yes.
And I think that’s the case for a lot of digital PR; you’ll stumble upon an idea while doing something in your life.
We do formal ideation sessions with our team, kind of the smaller digital PR team, but we also do ideation sessions quarterly with a larger team, right?
We also realize that our experience isn’t everybody’s experience.
And so we deal with our larger SEO team and editorial team, and it’s interesting because they will bring in ideas that we would have never thought of based on what they’re working on.
For instance, at FinanceBuzz, we do a lot of syndicated content.
A lot of these are “Costco tricks”, “Trader Joe’s items that you should buy this quarter,” and things like that.
These go to syndication partners that wouldn’t be great candidates for traditional digital PR content.
But they have this insight that’s valuable to us—which is—some of that data like “when we talk about these brands, it tends to do really well.”
So then we ask, what can we do about brands?
So, we loop in kind of everybody with who is varying degrees of understanding of digital PR and what we do.
I always say that the best digital PR idea, like kind of mixes methodology and is methodologically sound.
Something concrete and then some part of your personal life, right?
With finance and personal finance, I think it happens to be pretty easy or much easier than some other verticals, right?
Because money touches us in all these different ways, right?
It’s from your job and employment, like that’s a huge sector to your everyday consumer spending to whatever trend.
So it ends up being somewhat easy to come up with ideas that relate to our personal lives, but that’s the way I always like to start them.
Vince: So once you come up with those ideas— you talked through this a bit, but I want to dig in a little bit more— tell me about the validation process you had said earlier, there’s a lot of digging into the data and that seems like that’s a big piece of it, but I remember the kind of sometimes you struggle with people’s ideas that don’t necessarily, like you said, have the digital PR background, right?
Like they, they might throw out something that’s interesting, but you’re like I don’t know if that’s going to work, but you still want to check into it. Right?
Like, so, so what is, what does that process look like to evaluate these ideas?
How do you validate and evaluate PR ideas?
Chris Lewis: So typically, when we get a good idea, one thing that the team is really good about is we always say like, “I want your idea in the form of a headline.”
And so rather than just a list of ideas, right, I’m getting a list of headlines that were evaluated and then I can kind of go, yeah, that would work or that could be a journalist headline.
And that I think is a lot easier to do.
It’s a little bit more palatable and I think a little bit easier to decipher what could be successful.
But figuring it out is the challenging part.
Yes, you kind of make a snap judgment. Yeah, I think it could be successful.
And then you have to do the due diligence of digging into the ideas.
And that process can kind of take a long time.
One thing that I do think is a big advantage of in-house work is that we have no problem killing ideas after we’ve started.
So, you know, in an agency setting, you might have to think of a bunch of ideas, validate them, and vet them before you pitch them to a client because you don’t want to be in a scenario where you pitch an idea, you’ve agreed to go forward with it, and then you have to kill it two weeks later because you can’t find the data or for whatever reason.
And I think the great agencies are really transparent about that being part of the process.
But in house, we’ll kill a lot of ideas very quickly and have no problem with it because we have that ability to.
There’s no tough conversation. There’s no struggling with it.
There’s no, “Oh, we’ve promised something” to anybody, which that kind of fluidity is really helpful.
Vince: Yeah. I’m definitely thinking about this from the agency side of things.
Like you come up with this idea.
I want to make sure that it’s got legs before I pitch it to the client.
So, I love that process of like thinking from the pitch side of things. Asking how would I pitch this?
Then the validation process is, “okay, I’m going to find other people that have talked about this.”
I know you mentioned this kind of three checks, right?
Like does it have a concreteness?
There was an emotional check.
What does that look like from, you know, audience standpoint? Are you looking at media your media database and seeing like are there enough people in this this audience?
Do you do any audience check when validating ideas?
Chris Lewis: So the first thing that we do is we’ll Google the idea and look for surveys or for other data studies that are on either the same idea or tangentially similar.
That’s definitely part of our kickoff process.
It ends up reading a lot of, you know, good ideas for us in what to either lean into or stay away from.
And the other thing it does is like kind of immediately give us like competitor content to, to work through.
And we can look up their Ahrefs report and see like, where was it? Was it successful? How successful was it?
So we have some kind of like proxy metrics.
I’d say we also have kind of our whole team reviewing ideation.
So our data guy’s on it, right?
And he’s saying, “no way. Can we get this data?”
Who will know the best?
Our promo team is on and it’s like, “I am not going to be able to pitch that.”
So we get a bunch of voices in the room and, like, get a lot of consensus on these ideas before we really lean into them.
Vince: It sounds like you do need something more outside of those proxies, right? Like you do have to have some intuition and maybe some experience that can say, “I can actually pitch this.”
What if you don’t?
Like, what would you go to if you have new people on your team?
Your outreach team, you know that they’re fresh out of college or something and haven’t done this.
What does that look like for them?
How do you approach an idea that isn’t good?
Chris Lewis: They’re definitely funny conversations to have because sometimes it’s hard to have the conversation sometimes with people that things just aren’t interesting.
It’s like, here are the most interesting things I found, and you’re like, I don’t think any of that’s interesting.
It’s hard.
It’s a hard conversation because it’s hard to have constructive.
It’s like having a conversation like, it’s just bad writing, you know, there’s not a lot you can do with that.
Or it might just be like, “Oh, well, that’s your opinion.”
And candidly, like my opinion is wrong a lot.
This fast food campaign that we’re talking about, like I kind of initially was like, eh, meh.
Right.
And then, and then kind of let my team run with it.
And they ended up doing an awesome job and being very happy to be wrong about it.
I think ,to your point, anybody can make the case, and I think we want to give people that opportunity to be right and to be wrong.
One huge advantage of being in-house is that we can miss a lot.
And it’s not really a huge sweat for us.
So good ideas, bad ideas, a lot of them can get produced or initially pitched or whatever, and have people who fight for them, who believe in them and then learn from them.
So for junior members of the team, just ask questions like, “Why do you think it’ll be successful?”
“Can you find other articles that might make you believe that?”
And a lot of times they’re able to back it up, or they just don’t have the institutional knowledge or whatever, but you’re able to educate them in a way.
So actually, that ideation and vetting processes is a huge training part for us.
You know, just look at these old campaigns. What makes them successful? What do you think makes them successful?
It ends up being a really good tool for us, especially for the more junior people.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. I love that.
And I can definitely see, I mean, I’ve been the same spot with a lot of those.
The ideation process is I think where you probably learn the most. And maybe have the hardest time sometimes when you’re first starting.
It can be the most frustrating, because you think these ideas are great and you might have a gut reaction to it and you’re trying to push it through.
I think that was probably the biggest learning for me.
It was like, don’t get too attached to any ideas.
And because you know, there there’s always other stuff you can pivot to.
Chris Lewis: Right. There’s always other stuff out there.And especially for the team. I think. They’ll finally come up with a great idea and then you, you Google it and it’s just been done well in the last three months.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Last thing I want to talk about is repurposing this content.
So you had your campaign did really well throughout the life cycle. You kind of pivoted into different news items that were happening and were able to change the angle a bit.
Eventually though, you decided to stop, right? Like, let’s talk about that. What made you, okay, now it’s time to move on to the next campaign.
What made you finally decide to stop and move on from the campaign?
Chris Lewis: So there were a couple of impetuses.
First, you start seeing link volume.
With a campaign like this, you’ll start seeing national clicks come in.
You know, in this, in this case, it was a much, much larger conversation that was happening.
What happened specifically here was McDonald’s CEO put out a press release that was basically about our campaign and it was, you know, this kind of waxy piece about, I first entered my McDonald’s when I’m young, it’s such a piece of my fabric, but I want everybody to, you know, I’ve been hearing all this stuff in the, in, in, on social media, but I also want to be realistic about, you know, McDonald’s pricing and why we’re committed to providing valuable meals for, for families and things like that.
And it excited our data.
And this is what, like, you know, really hockey sticked the results up because now all of a sudden it was like in this kind of corporate business, the shareholder you know, really it was a letter to shareholders, right?
And so when journalists were covering this, they were looking for data and ours was the one out there.
It was also the one that was cited.
So at this point, we leaned into this for about a week, right?
We ended up writing a press release kind of in response to it saying, “Hey, here’s why we stand behind our data,” and things like that, which was a fun experience.
But after that, you know, McDonald’s started responding in different ways.
One way was they created these value menu, value meals, like a $5 meal.
And a bunch of the other fast food chains sort of doing the same thing.
So the conversation was kind of shifting away from fast food prices are high to, “Hey, look at these value meals,” which I think really smart tactic on their part too.
And that started kind of becoming the end of this.
As we were pitching this, one thing that was happening was the snowball was definitely rolling.
And we realized that the equity we would put into pitching probably wasn’t going to yield.
It was high risk, just the natural pickups we were going to get.
So we were kind of like, let’s let it do its thing, and we can move on to the next thing and sort of reallocate our resources.
Vince: Yeah. And eventually you did kind of, I don’t want to call it repurposing because that’s not necessarily what you did, but you kind of have a followup piece that you did to this, right?
What was your follow-up piece to this?
Chris Lewis: So after after all the fast food companies started making their value meals, we said, “okay, why don’t we just compare all of these compared with their actual pricing?”
You know, this is the best value meal.
This is the one that actually doesn’t save you that all that much money to begin with.
So we’re able to take that idea and put it in a new piece of content and then pitch it as a fresh piece of content.
It’s great because not only is it continuing to send signals that we’re experts in this area, but it’s also just part of this larger inflation narrative.
And we already kind of have our name in it.
So we’re able to reference the previous beats in our pitches and things like that. Right.
Vince: In 10 years from now, you can do a value meal inflation study!
Chris Lewis: Totally. It actually has— to your point about repurposing— it’s not just that idea, right, that got repurposed. But we’re also able in-house to take an idea like that and start repurposing it in some of our other channels.
So I mentioned we do syndication content, right?
This is great fodder for syndication partners.
So, what if they just, you know, wrote an article on McDonald’s, and then one on Taco Bell, and then one on KFC?
All of a sudden, that’s blended into ten different ideas.
What if we just looked at chicken sandwiches?
These are the fast food chains that have risen their chicken sandwich prices the most.
So we’re able to spin it off and go, you know, 20 or 30 more ideas just based on this one dataset.
We’re not going to pitch them, but they might do well in syndication or in other channels, which is really cool.
Vince: Well, Chris, I feel like that’s a good stopping point. I want to leave with like one last thing is just like with all the success of this one campaign, right?
It’s easy to think about like okay if I get into this, this is something easy to replicate.
But realistically, not every piece you’re going to do is going to get 2000 links.
So leave us a little imparting message to people about how it’s okay to fail.
I mean, you’ve mentioned this a lot, and that’s kind of a bit of note I wrote here, it’s like, you do have the advantage of being in-house, but like, that is how we learn, right?
Like, you learn from your successes like this, but you also learn from your failures.
So I’d love to just kind of hear your take on that.
Can you talk about learning from campaigns that fail?
Chris Lewis: Yeah. So realistically, I fail at something every single day, and it is the impetus of growth, whether it’s personal or professional.
And I think that a lot of people in FinanceBuzz were like, we have that mindset of like, let’s just fail, fail, fail as much as we can and learn, learn, learn as much as we can.
Digital PR is especially cruel.
When we’re hiring, like the thing I’m most worried about is, is, you know, somebody on the media relations team going to be able to take weeks or months drought of pitches being successful.
Like it just happened.
And the reality of all of this is like, it’s a numbers game.
You have your batting average, you know, I always think about it as a baseball analogy, the best baseball players, best, maybe you’re successful three and 10 times, you know, digital PR is very similar.
Like 80 percent of our campaigns don’t pan out that well, and that’s fine.
We just understand with some certainty that the more and more tries we get at it, the more it will succeed in the long term.
I think from an in-house perspective, having leadership from the CEO on down who understands and embraces that is crucial to be able to tolerate any of this.
Because like it can be super brutal when things aren’t going well, like you start getting worried and things get scary.
And I think applying this to the agency side or best agency-client partnerships, understand that to a client will understand this will not go super smooth.
They’re up 10 campaigns, two of them might do super well, two of them might do kind of well and still successful engagement.
I wouldn’t gauge, quite frankly, like I gauge campaigns like this a little more fluky.
We know some flukes will happen sometimes and they’re great when they do, but like the successes that I really get excited about are like grinding out 15 links for a campaign that I didn’t think would do well.
That to me is really exciting.
And that’s where I think a lot of the growth happens.
Yes, fail often and fail spectacularly and fall on your face and learn and make sure that you just have a supportive environment, especially if you’re building teams to build a supportive environment where you do that.
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