Every so often, a prospective client asks:
“Can we structure this around performance?”
Short answer?
No.
Long answer?
Let’s break it down.
Some clients are doing something genuinely compelling. They’re building in a category that matters. Their POV is sharp. Their timing is perfect. Reporters are already hungry for the story—we just connect the dots.
We get them placed everywhere. Early. Often.
Sometimes it’s five hits in the first two weeks.
It looks effortless.
Then there are the others.
Companies in crowded markets.
Weak positioning. No urgency.
No story that resonates outside the building.
These are often the clients who ask about pay-for-performance up front.
And ironically, they’re the ones who require the most of us.
More meetings.
More drafts.
More pivoting.
More heavy lifting to make a story that doesn’t feel urgent still land with someone who doesn’t owe you coverage.
It’s not glamorous. It’s just the work.
And in those cases?
If we billed by effort, not outcome, we’d be sending them the biggest invoices.
(If inverse performance fees were a thing, they’d owe us hazard pay. Kidding. Sort of.)
Media doesn’t work like paid performance marketing.
You don’t drop $1 into the slot and pull out $3 in press.
This game is different.
It’s shaped by:
We can’t control the news cycle.
We can’t force a journalist to care.
We can’t fix a client’s positioning overnight.
But we can do the real work:
That’s what earns you momentum. Not a quota.
One well-placed story in the right outlet can change everything.
A client once landed a story in The Information—a piece we helped make happen.
From that single article, they secured a $30+ million investment from a single VC.
Not a campaign.
Not a multi-channel blitz.
One story.
We could have “failed” all year to land a single other piece, and that one hit would’ve paid for everything—ten times over.
That’s what we’re optimizing for: impact, not volume.
You don’t need 20 hits.
You need the right story, at the right moment, in front of the right eyes.
That’s not performance. That’s leverage.
Look—if you want guaranteed coverage in exchange for a dollar amount, there’s a word for that: advertising.
And to be clear:
We do that. We’ve built a whole division that handles paid content, partnerships, influencer campaigns, and sponsored media. It’s a valuable tool in the stack—and when used well, it can absolutely move the needle.
But when you come to us for earned media, it’s a different brief.
We’re not here to pay for attention.
We’re here to earn belief.
To manufacture perception.
To create pressure and positioning that actually changes the way the market sees you.
That takes strategy, timing, instinct, and reps.
And that’s not something you bill by the hit.
So no, we don’t do pay-for-performance PR.
Because real performance in this world?
It’s not transactional.
It’s not guaranteed.
And it’s definitely not cheap.
It’s earned.
Or it’s nothing.
