👋 What’s growing: How do you go from an obscure app for gamers to the digital platform of choice for brands like Midjourney, Starbucks, and FC Barcelona? Ask Discord.

They might say something like:

You put a middle finger up to algorithms and let users chat authentically about subjects they care about. 

Bravo, Discord. The platform hit a market value of $15 billion as of February last year and saw a juicy 87% user growth from June 2020 to January 2023 according to Analyzify.

Find the 4 sets of 4 connected words!

PR

You Don’t “Get” PR - You Manufacture It

Two requirements: engineering and tact.

Imagine what landing on Forbes or the Financial Times front page could do for your business.

The best hack? Engineer a news-worthy moment.

Yes, most businesses are boring - but an artful stunt can put you in the spotlight.

Sometimes, you get lucky: Simulate, who makes yummy veggie nuggets, announced they were out of stock on social media. When supermodel Bella Hadid commented to share her disappointment, they immediately replied that they were sending her the “last box” and created a huge buzz.

Sometimes, you have to do it all yourself. We’ll get into how.

The next best hack is knowing how to woo journalists. There is a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

Both hacks, right here 👇️ 

1. Engineering Newsworthiness First

Don’t bother pitching things like:

• Some obscure award you earned

• Slight improvements to your product

• A new C-suite hire who nobody knows

• Your 5th anniversary (no one cares unless you’re already famous)

A. Tap into cultural relevance

• In a time of digital addiction and loneliness, Boardwalk announced they were “quitting social media”

• REI, an outdoor brand, closed its stores on Black Friday to encourage people to go outside.

💡 Think of cultural movements, then put some thought into how your brand can react to it.

B. Publish original insights

Are there valuable or engaging insights for your industry at large in your data? Make a report out of it. Examples:

• Linkedin pulls from their data to publish about the state of the workforce 

• Dove actually commissioned a study to understand women’s perception of their own beauty (only 2% find themselves beautiful)

You don’t even need to do the research yourself.

C. Go with standard things that work

• Unexpected partnerships that make people go - wait, what?

• Expert commentary and hot takes on big topics in your field.

• Major milestones (going public)

2. Handle Journalists Better

Once you’ve engineered a newsworthy story, don’t ruin it with bad pitching.

A. Find Journalists Who’ve Covered Similar Topics

You already how to find competitor PR stories (linked above).

• Enter competitors with PR in Backlink Analytics for all media outlets linking to their stories or assets (think reports). From there, you can find the journalist who covered them.

• Scan Google News for similar story themes, then check bylines to find journalists covering them.

• Check social media (Twitter/X, LinkedIn)—many journalists openly ask for sources or share the kinds of stories they’re looking for.

B. Prep your outreach

Give them a frontpage-worthy press pack that’s ready to publish in 30 minutes flat.

• Email body > PDF – Quotes are easier to grab from an email than an attachment.

• Send high-quality visuals – Stand out by providing something better than stock photos.

• Write it out – A ready-to-go draft makes it effortless for them to publish.

C. Don’t trigger them

JJ Jegorova & Mauro Battellini of Black Unicorn PR gathered a bunch of journalists’ pet peeves on X. Here's the tl;dr:

• No personalization (forgetting to remove the [NAME] tag = instant trash can)

• Saying a story is “exclusive” while pouring it to every journalist you can find

• Insincere flattery

• Asking for a hyperlink for SEO

• Using tragic current events as a hook

• Cramming it full of jargon and hyperbole

The Keys To PR

You only reach out to highly relevant journalists when you’ve got REAL news. Doesn’t mean you have to wait till something happens, though. You can engineer newsworthiness.

Whether you do or not, the next step is just as crucial - pick the right journalists, and treat them right.

LESS GUESSWORK, BETTER ADS

CULTURE

The “Pratfall Effect” in marketing

Looking bad looks good on you.

If you get a thrill when a celebrity trips on stage at the Oscars, or you rush to open an email with the subject line ‘We got it wrong!’, does this make you a bad person?

No. 

There’s a psychological reason why we like to see people make mistakes.

The Pratfall Effect, first studied by social psychologists in the 1960s, says people are more lovable when they make mistakes. Because it makes them human. 

The same goes for brands.

The effect shines more when the person or brand is thought to be highly competent to begin with. If someone “commits a pratfall” but they’re already perceived as a prat, their level of pratness just gets higher. Science.

The Pratfall Effect in action:

• KFC ran out of chicken and responded with their famous ‘FCK. We’re sorry’ campaign (and grew the brand’s ad awareness score, purchase considerations, and positive impressions, according to YouGov)

• Ska Brewing signed a 5-year hops contract for a new beer with the tagline ‘Rudie can’t fail.’ Rudie did fail, but the company, which now had an almost endless supply of hops, created a new beer called ‘Bad Hops Contract’

• Avis confidently (and honestly) positioned itself as second to Hertz through its ‘Avis is only No. 2…We try harder’, making number 2 seem even better than the top spot (Avis car rentals jumped 28%, according to Time)

DATA POINT

In 2024, enterprises were STILL wasting an average of $18 million a year on software

Haven’t they heard of software bloat yet?

2024 Zylo research found that after years of budget tightening around SaaS spending, large companies with about ~$45 million software budgets were wasting about $18 million of those every year.

Smaller companies with 100-200 employees aren’t much better, with about 34% of their software budget going out the window, according to a 2025 Cledara report.

The most common sources of wasted spend:

• Duplicate functionalities across departments

• Maverick buying - AKA rogue spending

• Lack of employee training

• Employee offboarding 

• Redundant tools

• Unused licenses

After a couple of cautious years (Zylo reported that SaaS spending dropped for all companies with fewer than 10,000 companies in 2023), 2024 saw a YoY increase of over 9% in SaaS spending. 

This is mostly down to rising SaaS costs; think premium AI features and more complex software. But when combined with unstructured approval processes, companies inevitably end up with software bloat. 

We hate to say it, but you might need to go on a diet. A software diet, that is.

HELP US HELP YOU

This week’s issue was written by Amy Hawthorne and edited by Catherine Solbrig.