The Six Mistakes of Media Pitches
Dear publisher/digital service/network,
I apologize if I have taken a while to respond to your message. My voicemail and email are inundated with digital publishers, networks and services that are essential to my client’s continued success. At least that‘s what dozens of messages everyday tell me. With 150,000 new sites being created daily and every publisher and network looking for some of the Internet money I’ve had to develop a system to screen suppliers.
Did you send me an email from a home or webmail (gmail/hotmail/etc) ?
I most likely moved your email straight to my spam filter. If you can’t invest the $10 a month for your company’s own domain and email then I’m not going to invest thousands of media dollars into your site. It’s like you have written your proposal on a fast food wrapper – it’s greasy and disposable.
Did you fail to do research?
If you got the company name wrong, the clients wrong and don’t even know what a media agency does, its highly unlikely we’ll be investing media dollars with your company.
Did you not define your service or property?
I mean really explain what you do in plain simple language, without the adjectives and claims of “first of”. Something like “full suite of digital marketing services” means jack-squat. Do you do SEM/SEO? Do you sell display media space? Is it dynamic ad generation? Or are you a social media API reseller? If I don’t know what you do I’ll define you as “filling my email trash folder.”
Did you buy “exclusive” rights to rep an online directory?
There’s a sucker born every minute but you won’t find that sucker at Media Experts - check the mirror.
Did you use the term “hits” ?
Unless you are on the set of some Sopranos spin-off or batting for the Blue Jays you shouldn’t be using the term “hits”. It signals you either don’t understand the lingua-franca of digital media or you have somehow perfected time travel and you are pitching me today from the past circa 1999 (psst - buy some Apple stock for me).
Do you rely on your hit-counter for traffic data?
The first thing I’m going to do is check your comscore numbers so don’t over-hype the facts. Let me be specific, for most of my clients I’ll be looking at your Canadian comScore data – not your global data, or your South American data. Being measured by third-party services such as comScore are the price of entry to the media playground.
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then odds are your correspondence is at the bottom of my to do list. If you answered all these questions in the negative then you only have one barrier remaining - What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?