In PR, Be Al Roker
Success is sometimes harder to predict than a winter storm
The blizzard hit Sunday into Monday. My son had just finished an entire week off for winter break, and then, because the universe has jokes, Monday became a bonus snow day.
He was thrilled. I was not.
While he was fully committed to the very serious business of being a kid in the snow, I was trying to convince myself and my clients that it was just a regular Monday. Any parent who parented during remote learning and Covid lockdowns remembers this struggle. We had gotten back into a rhythm after a week off, and here we were again. I was fielding his requests for sledding, hot chocolate, and screen time in between emails, and at some point, he asked me why I was still working if there was no school. I didn’t really have a good answer for that one.
But somewhere between my third cup of coffee and watching the news cycle turn over every twenty minutes, I got fixated on the weather forecasters. They’d been at it all week, adjusting the models, making predictions, changing those predictions, and then showing up the next morning completely unfazed with a new map and a new outlook. And it hit me that these people have genuinely figured something out that most of us in client services spend years getting wrong.
Let’s talk about what’s actually happening in the media right now.
Trust is down, according to Gallup’s October poll. Content is overwhelming, coming at us faster than we can digest it. The line between credible and slop has never been harder to locate, and it moves every single day. For anyone in PR, this isn’t background context, it’s the whole job getting harder in real time. And clients are watching the same news we are. They’re confused, they’re anxious, and they want to know what it means for them.
The most important conversation I’m having with clients right now isn’t about a specific pitch or a placement. It’s about expectations. What we can count on, what we can’t, and how we operate when the ground keeps shifting.
Which brings me back to Al Roker.
Nobody gets mad at the Al Roker when it snows two inches instead of six. You know why? Because he called for eight.
That’s not a mistake. That’s the whole strategy.
Weather forecasters have figured out that giving people the worst-case scenario is actually a gift. If they’re wrong and it’s less bad than expected, if they’re right, everyone was prepared. If you stayed home, you were safe, the roads were fine, the storm fizzled. Nobody is upset about that. Relief is a perfectly good outcome.
In PR, that math runs in the opposite direction entirely. Overpromise and underdeliver here, and you don’t get relief; you get a client who feels misled and a relationship that’s very hard to recover. So we flip it. Underpromise. Overdeliver. Same psychology, opposite execution.
I think about this all the time, and especially right now when the media environment is about as predictable as a February nor’easter.
The Bill of Goods
Here’s the thing about client expectations that nobody really warns you about early in your career: by the time a contract is signed, your client has already built out a whole version of how this is going to go.
How fast does the coverage come?
How big it looks.
How much involvement will they need?
And honestly, you can’t fully blame them; you sold it to them. But none of those assumptions are in the SOW, and if you don’t surface them early, they don’t just disappear. They sit there quietly building until they come out sideways during a check-in call three months later.
I’ve learned to name it before it gets to that point.
PR is Not a Vending Machine
The thing I come back to with every client, early in the relationship, is this: PR is not a vending machine. You don’t put money in and get coverage out on a schedule. It compounds, and like most things that compound, it looks like nothing is happening right up until everything is.
As Charlie Munger once said “ The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.”
Relationships take time. Visibility builds on itself. When 10 placements land in month six, that's not luck, that's the five months of groundwork finally breaking the through. Being straight about that doesn't make clients trust you less. It does the opposite, because you're not selling them something that was never real.
The Weatherman Move
Don’t promise six inches and deliver two. Call for eight, deliver six, and let everyone feel great about it.
The forecasters who’ve been doing recaps on the news all week weren’t out there apologizing. They were contextualizing what happened, here’s what we knew, here’s what changed, here’s what’s coming. That’s exactly what good client communication looks like, and it matters even more right now when the media landscape is shifting faster than any model can track.
What Does Success Look Like to You?
The first question I ask in every discovery meeting is: What does success look like to you? (I wrote about that here and here.) If I’m measuring press volume and a client is measuring conversions, someone ends up disappointed, no matter how strong the work is.
And Much Like the Weather, We are Not in Control
The control piece, is a hard one for a lot of us because we want to be. But here’s the part where I give you a bit of grace and explain that you can execute perfectly and still not get the outcome you wanted because editors pass, timing shifts, a news cycle swallows your story whole. It’s the conversation clients don’t always love, but it’s the one that matters most. Even the best meteorologist can’t stop a storm from changing course.
Set those expectations clearly at the start, and you spend a lot less time explaining yourself later. When priorities shift, and they will, updating the forecast isn’t a red flag. That’s just the job.
The Fine Print
The media landscape is unsettled right now in ways that feel different from the usual churn. Trust is down, content is abundant, and the rules keep changing. Your clients are watching the same news you are and are wondering how it affects them. They have questions, and managing their expectations through honest conversations is how you get ahead of it. And not with false confidence, but with honest context. You don’t have to have all the answers. You just have to show up with a new map every morning. The forecast changes, the job doesn't.
That’s what Al Roker does. That’s what we do too.
Here’s what on my mind this week
My friend Noah launched The Honey Dept., and you should all check it out
NYC Folks, my friend Kristin- Marie Pernicano is partnering with MM La Fleur for a workshop and shopping event March 5th. Details and sign up here (and it’s free)
My friend Denika (the most amazing makeup artist) was in town recently and gave me a few tips (maybe I’ll share them in a later newsletter) including this powder being a great cover for a full night’s sleep and I’ve used it ever since
Thank you all for your feedback on the magazine collection, they are going to the office, come visit them and us
I just finished this book and I have enjoyed everything I’ve read by Lucy Foley
Im re-reading this because its a great foundation for life
You can find some of the things I talk about in my ShopMy page. If you buy something, I might get a commission but the good news is you don’t pay it, check it out, it means a lot that you trust my recommendations
As I always say, THANK YOU for being here. It’s free until it’s not so what do you have to lose by subscribing.
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