Media and Narrative
Lesson 10: Media and Narrative
You cannot outspend anyone.
That is the starting condition for most brands that will ever read this course. A startup does not have the advertising budget to buy attention at the scale a category leader can. A scale-up has budget but not enough to move the whole category. Even a well-funded brand, if it is honest with itself, has less paid firepower than the market noise it is trying to break through. Paid media is a lever, but it is not the only one, and for most of us it is not the main one.
Earned media is. Press. Radio. Television. Podcasts. The interviews you give and the stories written about you by people who are not on your payroll. This is what fills the gap between what your brand deserves in the market and what your budget can buy for it.
It is also, in most companies I have seen, badly done. Delegated to a junior comms person. Outsourced to an agency that pushes generic press releases into inboxes nobody reads. Treated as a tactical function rather than a strategic one. This is a mistake. Press is the CMO's job — not entirely, but the shape of it, the story that runs through it, the decision about which stories to tell and which journalists to build relationships with. Press is where the brand's narrative meets the outside world, and the CMO is the person accountable for the narrative.
This lesson is about how to do that well.
Why Press Is a CMO Skill, Not a Press Officer's Skill
The Head of Marketing typically thinks of press as a channel among many. A press officer or PR agency runs it. Press releases go out. Coverage comes in. It is measured in clippings, sometimes in reach numbers. It sits in the mix.
The CMO has to think about it differently. Press is not a channel. It is a way of building mental availability at a cost per impression that no paid medium can match. When a national newspaper writes about your brand, or when you appear on a prime-time TV programme talking about your category, you have just done something the paid budget cannot do: you have reached hundreds of thousands or millions of people with an implicit endorsement from a source they already trust. That endorsement is worth more than the paid impression, because it carries editorial credibility.
But that credibility is a bank account you have to fund. Journalists write about you because you are useful to them. You become useful to them by being available, credible, prepared, and having something to say that their readers will care about. That work is relationship work, story work, and preparation work. It cannot be outsourced without the outsourcing becoming visible.
The CMO who understands this treats press with the same seriousness they treat brand strategy. They know the journalists who cover their category. They have a view on what stories are worth telling and which ones are not. They have a framework for how to talk about the brand that survives the compression of an interview. And they know how to insert the brand into the news cycle when the moment presents itself.
That is the topic of this lesson.
Working with Journalists — Before You Ever Need Them
The single biggest mistake I see startups make with press is that they only think about it when they have something to announce. Product launch. Funding round. Rebrand. That is the moment they pick up the phone, call an agency, and hope for coverage.
This almost never works well. Journalists have relationships with the people they cover. They pick up calls from names they recognise. They open emails from addresses they have seen before. If you are calling for the first time on the day you need coverage, you are cold — and cold is where the low hit rate lives.
The work starts long before you need anything.
Research the outlets first. Which newspapers and magazines cover your category? Which TV shows do stories in your area? Which radio programmes book guests? Which podcasts have your kind of listener? This is not a fifteen-minute exercise. It is a map. For each outlet, understand what they cover, how often, and what angle they take. A business paper writes about your industry differently from a consumer lifestyle magazine. Both may be useful. But the story you pitch to each has to fit their frame.
Then identify the journalists. For each outlet, one or two names. The person who writes about your category. The person who covers your kind of story. Read their recent work. Understand what they respond to, what they mock, what they take seriously. You are looking for the specific human being on the other end of the pitch, not the outlet name on the masthead.
Build the relationship before the pitch. If they are on LinkedIn, follow them. Comment thoughtfully on their posts. Not "great post" — a real engagement with what they wrote, the kind of comment they would remember. If they are on Twitter, do the same. Over a few weeks, they will start to see your name. When the day comes that you email or call, you are no longer a stranger. You are the person who commented on their piece about supply chain issues in the plant-based sector. That is a warm start, not a cold one.
Make yourself easy to check. Your LinkedIn profile is credible. Your title is clear. Your background is discoverable. When a journalist looks you up — and they will — they should see a person worth ten minutes of their time.
This is the pre-work. It is not glamorous. It is not fast. But it is what makes the difference between a pitch that gets opened and one that gets ignored.
Getting Through — The Mechanics of the Cold Call
There is a version of press outreach where you send a press release into a shared inbox and hope someone reads it. It is a rounding error against zero. If you want coverage, you have to get to the person.
At larger newspapers and TV stations, that means the phone. Emails alone do not work at scale. Journalists get hundreds a day. Yours is not special. But a call, done well, breaks through.
Here is how the mechanics actually work. You call the main switchboard. You know the name of the journalist you want to reach. You know, or you have researched, that they are actually in the building — because in larger organisations the person covering your beat may work from a different city, and the switchboard cannot connect you if the physical presence is elsewhere.
You ask to be put through. Usually the receptionist will try. Sometimes they will say, "Send an email." When they do, you say: "Yes, I understand. Can you tell me the correct email address so I can be sure I have it right?" They will often give it to you or confirm the one you have. Now you have a direct email.
You send the email. Short. Personal. Specific to the journalist. Then you call back the next day or the day after and say: "I sent an email yesterday about X. Just following up. Can you put me through?" The follow-up call is what makes the email work. It signals seriousness. Sometimes they will pass you through. Sometimes they will say the journalist is not available. Sometimes you will be routed to the editorial floor — the newsroom staff who can pass a message along, but who are not the journalist themselves.
Persistence is the game. Not aggression — persistence. You call again a day later. You leave a message. You try a different time. Early mornings, before the editorial meeting where they decide the day's stories, are the best window. That is when the journalist is at their desk, not yet locked into the day's assignments, and open to what could become a new angle.
When you get through, you have seconds. Have your pitch ready — who you are, what the story is, why their readers will care. Fifteen seconds, maximum. Have your call sheet in front of you: the objections you expect, the answers you have prepared. If they say "we already covered this" — you have an angle they missed. If they say "not for us" — you have another outlet in mind and you thank them and move on. If they say "send me more" — you have a media brief ready to send within the hour.
None of this is comfortable. It is the least glamorous part of the CMO job. But it is what earned coverage actually looks like from the inside. The founder-CMO doing it themselves in the first phase of the brand will build relationships that pay compounding returns for years. The Head of Marketing who thinks this is a job for the intern will find, in the second year of the CMO role, that they have no journalist relationships and no story momentum.
Do the work.
The Story — What Journalists Actually Buy
Here is the mistake to avoid: pitching your story as if the journalist is the audience.
The journalist is not the audience. Their readers, viewers, or listeners are the audience. The journalist is the gatekeeper. And the gatekeeper's job — the only job — is to serve their audience. If your story is interesting to you, fascinating to your team, and important to your investors, but does not clearly connect to the life of the person reading the newspaper on the train or watching the news over breakfast, it will not get picked up. Not because the journalist is closed-minded. Because the journalist knows their readers, and their readers will not read it.
So the story you pitch has to pass a specific test: would a grandmother listening to the radio in the kitchen find something in this? Would a family rushing to get the kids ready in the morning, with the TV on in the background, hear something that makes them look up? The test is not "is this important to my sector?" The test is "does this connect to a life?"
This is not a small shift. Most brands pitch product news. New launch. New feature. New certification. To the reader, this is noise. To the journalist looking at it through the reader's eyes, this is a press release to delete.
What connects to a life is a story. A person. A change. A tension. A choice. A stake.
We do not read as much of the news as we think we do. Even social media — the medium named after our attention to it — we forget most of what we scrolled past within an hour. This is not a criticism of the reader. It is a reality. Six and a half hours of daily media consumption does not translate to six and a half hours of retention. It translates to a small handful of impressions that actually stuck.
Your story has to be one of those. That is a high bar. And it clears the bar by connecting to a feeling, not by delivering a fact.
Ethos, Logos, Pathos — The Frame That Makes a Story Land
There is a rhetorical structure that has worked for two and a half thousand years. Aristotle named the three modes of persuasion. Ethos — the ethical foundation. Logos — the logical argument. Pathos — the emotional connection. A story that has all three lands. A story that has one is thin.
Use it as your frame. Here is what it looks like in practice, for a food and sustainability brand.
Ethos comes first. This is the values statement. The why. The reason your brand exists in a form that anyone can nod at, whether they agree with your product choices or not. Something like: "We believe eight billion people on this planet need to be fed — fairly, affordably, and without destroying the ecological base that food production itself depends on." That is an ethical position. Almost nobody argues with it. It creates the space for the rest of the argument.
Logos comes second. This is the reason the ethical position translates into an urgent, specific claim. It is the evidence. "A significant share of global anthropogenic emissions comes from the food system. Everyone eats three times a day. That means every day, everyone makes a choice that affects the climate. Small shifts in that choice, scaled across a population, produce measurable outcomes." The logic connects the ethics to reality. It is where the specific data point does its work — one number, well chosen, is enough. Do not over-cite. One anchor is more persuasive than five.
Pathos comes third. This is the emotional turn, and it should carry a concrete invitation. "Buy a bag of sunflower seeds this week. Eat a handful a day. They are cheap, tasty, high in protein. This is a change anyone can make on Tuesday afternoon." Now the reader has something they can do. The abstract has become physical. The ethics have become an action.
Then close by returning to the ethos. The story circles back to the values statement. "We are more people on this planet, and we will be more still. The space for food production is not growing at the same rate. We want to help solve that — and everyone eating a handful of sunflower seeds is one small step. The brand exists to make those steps easier."
That is a complete story. It has an ethical anchor, a logical argument, an emotional invitation, and a return to values. It is a shape a journalist can write around because it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It gives the reader something to feel and something to do.
Every angle you pitch should be built this way. Not because ancient rhetoric is a magic trick, but because it maps onto how humans process information. Value first. Reason second. Feeling third. Return to value.
The Interview — The ABC That Keeps You in Frame
When the story lands and the invitation to interview comes, a different skill activates. You are no longer pitching. You are being questioned, often live, sometimes by an interviewer who is trying to sharpen the story by challenging you.
Most people, in this moment, react. They answer the question directly, sometimes defensively, sometimes going where the interviewer is leading them. The result is a fragmented interview where the story you wanted to tell got lost inside the story the interviewer wanted to tell.
There is a technique that solves this. I call it ABC.
A — acknowledge. Thank the interviewer by name. "Thank you for that question, Anna." This does two things. It signals that you heard the question, so the interviewer does not need to repeat it or press you on it. And it buys you two seconds to think about how to answer.
B — bridge. Move the answer to the wider context before you deal with the specifics. "Let me put this in the wider context first." Then set your ethical frame — the ethos. Now the specific answer is being delivered inside your frame, not inside the interviewer's cornering question. You have moved the interview onto your ground.
C — close. Come back to the concrete. Deliver the answer to the question, but on your terms — with an invitation, an action, or a value statement that ties the whole answer together.
This is not evasion. You still answer the question. But you answer it inside your own frame, which means the emotional weight and the takeaway of the answer belongs to you, not to the interviewer's setup.
A few rules that go with the technique.
Do not oppose the presenter. You do not have to please them, but you should not fight them either. A combative guest is a guest who does not get invited back. Be friendly. Be calm. Assume the presenter is doing their job in good faith.
Remember who you are actually talking to. The presenter is not the audience. The audience is the person at home, half-watching, half-doing something else. You are speaking to that person. Warmth toward the presenter is a courtesy. Substance is for the viewer.
Feel your expertise. In your field, you are the expert. The presenter is a generalist. If you speak from confidence and clarity, the interview lands. If you hedge and qualify, it does not. This is not arrogance — it is service to the viewer, who is trying to learn something from someone who knows.
News-Jacking — The Second Lane
There is a second way into media that most brands never systematically use. It is what I call news-checking, or what the industry sometimes calls news-jacking. It is the practice of monitoring the news for stories where your brand could add credible commentary — and being ready to move fast when the moment comes.
The mechanics are simple. You watch the news for stories in your category or adjacent to it. You have a view on the ones that matter. When one of those stories breaks, you reach out to journalists covering it and offer commentary from your brand's perspective. If your view is fresh, well-framed, and delivered fast, they will use it.
The catch is speed. News-jacking is a same-day sport. The window is hours, sometimes minutes. If you cannot move that fast, the moment passes.
At Veganz we did this deliberately. When the movement to pause Facebook advertising over its handling of harmful content built momentum in the US, most European brands watched from the sidelines. We were the first plant-based brand in Germany to publicly join. We coordinated with others in the space. We put out a statement, we backed it with action — we actually paused our Facebook spend — and we made ourselves available to journalists covering the story.
Within a day, we were on one of the most-watched primetime programmes in Germany, giving a statement on why we had joined. The reach we got from that one appearance was significantly larger than what our paid budget for that quarter could have bought. And the halo effect was larger still. The programme was seen by people who were not the plant-based-food buyer and would not have been reached by any of our targeted campaigns. Some of them became curious about the brand. Some of them associated us — for the first time — with the position of the value brand willing to take a stand.
That was not a paid moment. It cost nothing beyond the preparation of the statement and the availability of a spokesperson on the day. But it did work that six-figure media buys cannot do. It attached the brand to a category entry point — the moment of asking "is this brand one I can trust?" — through an editorial context that carried credibility we could not have manufactured on our own.
News-jacking is not for every story. If the story does not sit naturally in your category, forcing your way in looks opportunistic. But when the story is in your space, and you have a view worth hearing, and you can move fast — this is the highest-leverage press play there is.
Build the muscle before you need it. Have a shared document of positions your brand is prepared to take on the topics that could break into the news. Assign one person to monitor. Have your spokesperson available on short notice. When the moment comes, you will not have time to build the machinery — only to run it.
Press Releases — The Craft
Most of what has been written about press releases is thin, so I will keep this to what actually matters.
The opening has to answer five questions in the first two sentences. Who, what, when, why, where. If the journalist reads the first paragraph and does not know the answer to all five, they will not read the second paragraph. This is not writing. It is signalling: here is what this is, in enough clarity that you can decide in three seconds whether to keep reading.
The headline is a decision-maker. Short. Specific. Not clever. A journalist will scan hundreds of headlines a day. Yours has to earn the click by being immediately understandable. Not "a new frontier in plant-based nutrition" — "Veganz launches €4 protein bar with 20g plant protein for €4."
Keep it to one page. If you cannot say it in a page, the story is not clear enough yet. Attach a media brief with background — company history, founder bios, market context, the research paper if there is one. Journalists writing longer pieces will use the brief. Journalists writing short pieces will use only the release.
Have visuals ready. Photographs. Video snippets. B-roll for TV. A press release without visuals is a release that does not get picked up by TV or magazines. High-resolution product photos, portrait photos of the spokespeople, ambient shots that could sit alongside a text article — these are not extras. They are the difference between coverage and no coverage.
Write in the present or the future. News is about now or what is next. If your release describes something that happened last week, it is already old. Frame it forward: what happens from today. What is now available. What will change. What the audience should watch for.
Time it against the release date. If a product launches in six weeks, the outreach begins now, not the day of. Journalists need lead time. Magazines need months — their publishing cycles are quarterly or bi-monthly, not weekly. TV features involve production companies that shape the story with you before the show is filmed. If you want to be in a TV feature, you are working three to six months in advance, with the production team, before a single camera runs.
Target ten outlets and expect to land two. This is a normal hit rate for a well-prepared campaign with an experienced pitcher. It is a great result. Two well-placed pieces of coverage — one in a business paper, one in a consumer magazine, or one on TV and one in a leading podcast — outperform ten weak placements by an order of magnitude. Aim for placement quality, not release volume.
Working the Angles — The Compound Effect
The mistake with press is treating each pitch as a single event. You send a release, you get a placement or you do not, you move on to the next release.
The compounding play is different. You have three, five, seven angles on the brand — different aspects of the story, each with an ethos-logos-pathos frame, each mapped to the outlets and journalists most likely to pick it up. Over months and quarters, you cycle through them. Different journalists cover different angles. Some pick up the sustainability angle. Some pick up the founder story. Some pick up the pricing challenge to incumbents. Some pick up the retail distribution story.
Each placement, on its own, is a small moment. The compound effect is what matters. Over eighteen months, a brand that has consistently placed stories across a coherent narrative starts to appear in the mental landscape of readers who were not paying explicit attention. They begin to recognise the name. They begin to associate the name with the position — "the value plant-based brand," "the direct-to-consumer challenger," "the founder who talks about supply chain." That association is exactly what Byron Sharp calls mental availability. It is the memory structure that makes the brand more likely to be considered in the buying moment.
The paid budget is doing the same work, at a much higher cost per impression. Press does it earned. Both build mental availability. The CMO's job is to use them together, deliberately, over a horizon of years.
Repeat the frames. Do not vary the story every time a journalist asks about the brand — vary the angle, but repeat the underlying frame. Over time, the audience learns what the brand stands for by hearing the same values statement from different angles, in different outlets, from different voices inside the company. This is penetration by earned media. It is one of the cheapest and most durable brand-building mechanisms available.
What Changes When You Become CMO
The Head of Marketing usually delegates press. There is a press officer or an agency, they run the outreach, they book the interviews, they manage the coverage. The Head of Marketing signs off on the messaging and reviews the coverage report at the end of the quarter.
The CMO cannot delegate the shape of the narrative. That is theirs. What the brand says about itself in the world — the values statement, the frame that runs through every interview, the angle that connects the individual placements into a coherent story — this is a CMO decision. The press officer or agency executes it. The CMO owns it.
There is a second thing that changes. The CMO becomes a face of the brand externally, whether they wanted to or not. In many companies, the CEO and the CMO are the two people journalists ask for on any story. If the CMO is not comfortable in an interview, is not prepared with the frame, is not able to hold the story under pressure, the coverage suffers. Sometimes the story does not run at all.
This is a skill that is built, not born. Some CMOs are naturals. Most are not. The good news is that it is trainable — through preparation, through repetition, through the discipline of the ABC frame. The CMO who invests in this skill has a competitive advantage that most peers do not build. And they have career capital that is portable — journalist relationships travel with you when you change companies. Paid media relationships do not.
The founder-CMO has less choice about this. They are the brand's face by default, whether they want the exposure or not. If they cannot show up in the media well, the brand carries the weight of that gap. Better to build the skill early — before the moment when it matters most.
The Bigger Point
The commercial logic of press is not complicated. Paid media buys attention at a known cost. Earned media wins attention at a much lower cost, with a credibility premium the paid channel cannot manufacture. In every phase of a brand's growth, from Start-Up to Maturity, earned media is a compounding asset — but only for brands that build the muscle to do it well.
The muscle is: research the outlets, know the journalists, build the relationships before you need them, have the frame ready, work the angles, move fast on the news, and repeat the story consistently across years. That is not glamorous work. It is discipline. But the CMOs who do it — and who understand that this is a CMO skill, not something to be outsourced entirely — build brands that punch above their paid weight for the duration of their tenure.
The audience for your brand does not live inside your paid media plan. Most of them are somewhere else — reading the news, watching TV, listening to a podcast, scrolling past a headline that mentions your category. Meeting them there is what press does. That is the work.
We tell stories. Then we tell them again, from a different angle, to a different audience, until enough people have heard enough of them that the brand becomes part of the mental landscape of a category. That is how mental availability is built in the world, not in the media plan. And that is the CMO's job.