Product Startup Podcast Episode 167: Earn Media Coverage for Hardware

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from an author and head of PR firm that has worked with hundreds of hardware startups

00:00:05 Kevin Mako: on best practices for getting free earned media for new physical consumer products.

00:00:10 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in product development, prototyping, manufacturing, product selling, and everything in between.

00:00:18 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for physical product startups, sponsored

00:00:23 Narrator: by PTC's two best in class 3D CAD product development software solutions Onshape and Creo, and produced by Mako Design + Invent.

00:00:30 Narrator: The original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:00:37 Kevin Mako: Welcome back to everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Jackson Wightman of the show. Jackson is the co-author of The Tech PR Playbook, a book that synthesizes 20 years of

00:00:46 Kevin Mako: PR knowledge into a single resource. He is also the co-founder of Proper Propaganda, a public relations firm that primarily works with hardware startups and scale-ups.

00:00:54 Kevin Mako: He is also an instructor at McGill University with an MBA, Masters in Polysci, and a BA.

00:01:00 Kevin Mako: Today, Jackson is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on what earned media is specifically for hardware companies.

00:01:07 Kevin Mako: Why earn media and press is so valuable and what are the best practices for getting free coverage from major hardware journalists and publications. Now on to the episode.

00:01:17 Kevin Mako: Hey, Jackson, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. We're very excited today to talk to you about PR, particularly around earned media.

00:01:25 Kevin Mako: How do you get free media in all these great publications? Like we see tech crunch and everything else where you can get.

00:01:30 Kevin Mako: information about your product to the market essentially for free. And that's a very interesting

00:01:37 Kevin Mako: concept. And this is the whole concept around earned media that can be very powerful. I'm excited today to dive deep into all of that so the hardware startups in particular can

00:01:45 Kevin Mako: learn how they can get free earned media and how they can use that to amplify their brand, whether it's their

00:01:50 Kevin Mako: launch or the scaling of the brand or even things that happen in and around their brand as they're building up their hardware startup.

00:01:56 Kevin Mako: But before we get into all that, give us a bit of a history of your 20 plus years in PR experience, working with hundreds of hardware

00:02:03 Jackson Wightman: startups to where you are today. Yeah, so I've been working in PR for 20 plus years, happy to say I haven't needed therapy yet,

00:02:11 Jackson Wightman: as sometimes felt like a long time, but it's actually been a wonderful career. And I have had the pleasure of running a firm proper propaganda since late 2011.

00:02:19 Jackson Wightman: Our main focus, as you alluded to, is hardware startups and hardware scaleups. We've had the pleasure of working with some very big multinationals as well.

00:02:28 Jackson Wightman: And I think the main thing we've seen over the years is that sometimes hardware startups have a slight misunderstanding about what earned media can and can't do.

00:02:37 Jackson Wightman: And in some instances, when things don't go well, it's just that they don't know a few very simple rules of the game.

00:02:43 Jackson Wightman: So the bottom line is earned media is amazingly powerful for hardware startups and scale ups. It's just one of these games that is a bit different.

00:02:53 Jackson Wightman: It's a very unique kind of marketing channel, I think, quite different than paid media, quite different.

00:02:58 Jackson Wightman: and search quite different than some other things that your audience might engage in.

00:03:02 Kevin Mako: And it's just important to kind of know the rules of the game. It's interesting. You mentioned that there's just some really key simple tips.

00:03:08 Kevin Mako: And when you've been in it long enough, you can see that clearly. But from a new emerging hardware startup, it's a confusing landscape.

00:03:14 Kevin Mako: And it's hard to really understand how these things take place, let alone how to actually achieve those types of results.

00:03:19 Kevin Mako: So before we get too much in depth, just describe what is earned media and how does it

00:03:24 Jackson Wightman: apply to a hardware startup? Absolutely. So earned media is part of the broader kind of topic of PR. And when we talk about earned media,

00:03:34 Jackson Wightman: we talk about editorial media coverage. So it is an article in the New York Times, a review in tech crunch, that kind of stuff.

00:03:43 Jackson Wightman: You are not paying for it. It may not be thus wholly positive. It may not sound exactly like you would have written it yourself, but it is earned in the sense

00:03:53 Jackson Wightman: that it is unpaid editorial coverage, and as a result of that, tends to be very, very trusted by

00:03:59 Jackson Wightman: people. So Nielsen, who your listeners would probably know from TV ratings and things like that, Nielsen does an annual trust in advertising survey.

00:04:08 Jackson Wightman: And every year, for 20 plus years, the results always come back saying that, you know, obviously recommendations from a friend are

00:04:15 Jackson Wightman: very, very trusted, but earned media, editorial media coverage is very, very trusted, a lot more trusted than, say, a banner ad or a 30-second spot on television.

00:04:23 Jackson Wightman: television. And I think when we talk about it, that's what we're talking about. And when we think

00:04:27 Kevin Mako: about why it's powerful, it's powerful because it is perceived as trustworthy. That's incredible

00:04:34 Kevin Mako: because it really tilts the odds, especially in favor of a hardware startup. And people,

00:04:38 Kevin Mako: especially readers, understand that it's trustworthy because it's not like you're a big corporation that maybe even owns a media outlet.

00:04:44 Kevin Mako: You are a small startup getting off the ground. So if a journalist in the space who is educated and knows the industry that you're in is essentially

00:04:52 Kevin Mako: talking about, recommending, is interested in your product. What more valuable of a resource than that

00:04:58 Kevin Mako: to show to the world to say, look, this is a real sophisticated individual that believes in my product

00:05:04 Jackson Wightman: so much that they're publicly writing about it on their respective media channel. Right. You've hit the nail in the head. One of the interesting things about it,

00:05:12 Jackson Wightman: and I think some of the hardware startups that are listening will understand this, certainly some of the scaleups will understand this if they've had coverage.

00:05:18 Jackson Wightman: If a guy like Brian Heater, who's the hardware editor a TechCrunch. If Brian Heater says your robot, your keyboard, your headphone is the greatest

00:05:27 Jackson Wightman: thing since the life's bread, everybody knows that Brian Heater is a very authoritative guy. He's been in the game a long time.

00:05:34 Jackson Wightman: So that quote where he says, this is a wonderful headphone or this is God's gift to keyboards or whatever it is that he says, you can take that. You can put that

00:05:43 Jackson Wightman: on your Amazon sales page. You might deploy that on your Kickstarter page. If you're at the Kickstarter stage, you might put that quote into an investor deck if

00:05:52 Jackson Wightman: you're doing the rounds in Silicon Valley seeking money trying to raise that C round or that A round. So one of the great things about earned

00:06:00 Jackson Wightman: media is that it tends to be evergreen. And the quotes you get out of that CNet piece or that piece in The Verge or that piece in New York Times, they live on.

00:06:10 Jackson Wightman: And they're going to be with you for the life of your business. And there's a range of other kind of contexts, marketing and other, where they can really serve your business goals.

00:06:19 Jackson Wightman: We've even seen stuff. I mean, one of the reasons that we get hired sometimes by scale apps, hardware scale ups in particular, is they're looking to hire. Well,

00:06:27 Jackson Wightman: having good coverage to show that genius engineer who's going to come write flawless code for you,

00:06:33 Jackson Wightman: having good media data points he sees or she sees when they search on Google is very powerful.

00:06:38 Kevin Mako: So there's a lot of context where earned media kind of does things for a business beyond the immediate publication date. That's amazing because there's so many different.

00:06:47 Kevin Mako: avenues beyond just sales and something that you mentioned there is basically repurposing your media.

00:06:52 Kevin Mako: So if you can get this earned media, that's just the tip of the iceberg to what you can do with it. You can then repurpose that on a whole variety of different campaigns or uses to

00:07:00 Kevin Mako: engage various different types of stakeholders, which I also find is very interesting about what you say because it's not just customers.

00:07:06 Kevin Mako: It's everything from your various stakeholders, investors,

00:07:09 Jackson Wightman: employees, potential partnership deals that you're working on, other media avenues that you're looking to get into, etc. Right. And this touches exactly, Kevin, on the

00:07:17 Jackson Wightman: idea, I think, of the power of brand equity. And, you know, I know often hardware startups,

00:07:22 Jackson Wightman: when they're right out of the garage, when they're kind of going maybe to their first Kickstarter Indiegogo campaign, they're thinking product. And that's rightly so.

00:07:30 Jackson Wightman: You need to have a viable product, a good product that's going to work, that the market is going to respond to. But once that

00:07:36 Jackson Wightman: is sort of settled, once you've kind of got that dialed in, it's very important to think about brand equity, because brand equity touches everything.

00:07:43 Jackson Wightman: And I think we see some early stage hard or startup founders understand this. Some do not, and that's fine. You know, I know a lot of people

00:07:50 Jackson Wightman: are coming from a product background and engineering background and they may not necessarily think this way, but brand equity touches everything.

00:07:57 Jackson Wightman: And I think earned media is a very powerful way to build brand equity. When you think about the brands we all know and maybe love the apples,

00:08:07 Jackson Wightman: the Teslas, the Nikes, it's the brand. It's brand. It's brand equity that's powerful. And I think media coverage, earned media coverage via PR is a key cornerstone.

00:08:16 Kevin Mako: in the building of brand equity over time. It's very powerful and extremely helpful to a hardware startup because you're building a new brand.

00:08:24 Kevin Mako: So what better way than to actually get that brand being talked about by reputable people in

00:08:29 Kevin Mako: media outlets that are also reputable so that you can amplify that brand from really something that nobody's ever heard about before?

00:08:36 Kevin Mako: That's how you can kind of get off the ground with this sort of thing.

00:08:38 Jackson Wightman: So understanding that there's all these different types of benefits to earn media, how do you actually go about getting it? This is a great question.

00:08:45 Jackson Wightman: And I think this is sometimes when PR programs don't go the way people wish they would have, there were a few kind of common mistakes.

00:08:53 Jackson Wightman: And so there are a few common things you can do to kind of make sure that you're, as a

00:08:59 Jackson Wightman: hardware founder, as a hardware startup or hardware scale up, you're doing the right things to kind of bolster the chances of success.

00:09:05 Jackson Wightman: The first thing is to understand that one, it is very competitive.

00:09:10 Jackson Wightman: If you want to get into an ARS technica, if you want to get into an NGAS, if you want to get of venture beats and inverse, understand that there were a

00:09:20 Jackson Wightman: lot of other hardware companies, some of whom are the Samsung's and Sony's of the world, some of whom are scale up, some of whom are

00:09:26 Jackson Wightman: startups that are trying to kind of generate coverage in those places. So the first thing is to kind of understand, hey, it's a competitive game.

00:09:35 Jackson Wightman: It's not like TechCrunch and Reporter X or Y at Tech Crunch is going to cover every pitch he or she receives.

00:09:42 Jackson Wightman: Once you understand that, if you're competing for very limited airspace in some ways, you have to really think about your story from a differentiation perspective.

00:09:52 Jackson Wightman: So the first thing a tech reporter always asks for when presented with a hardware pitch is, how is this different than what has come before? So if you are building

00:10:01 Jackson Wightman: Me Too products, and I know that Me Too products can work well, they can sell very well on Amazon. We all know we've all probably bought Me Too products.

00:10:09 Jackson Wightman: Me Too products are not worth typically putting PR budget into. But if you have a differentiated product, then you are trying to be.

00:10:15 Jackson Wightman: trying to build a brand based on differentiation, you have to think very carefully about how you articulate the problem you solve, what the status quo solutions

00:10:24 Jackson Wightman: to that problem are, why there are problems with them, and then how you differentiate. And so that's the first thing, is kind of focusing on differentiation.

00:10:33 Jackson Wightman: I think the second thing that hardware startups need to do is make sure they are targeting the right media. You don't want to pitch the automotive guy at NGadgett

00:10:43 Jackson Wightman: with your video game. You want to make sure that you are going after reporters who cover the space

00:10:49 Jackson Wightman: you are in. And at most of these big tech outlets, there is somebody for each kind of division broad category of hardware.

00:10:56 Jackson Wightman: So there's somebody who's going to cover headphones, somebody who's going to cover keyboards. Make sure you find out who that is. Make sure you look at their coverage

00:11:04 Jackson Wightman: and pitch them. And then I think the third main thing that we need everybody to focus on,

00:11:10 Jackson Wightman: if they're going to DIY their PR, if they're going to go out and get earned media, is articulating themselves in kind of a brief way. Media tend to be time crunched.

00:11:20 Jackson Wightman: There's a real need to kind of

00:11:21 Kevin Mako: make your points, make your case for differentiation quickly and concisely. Those are the big three things. Wow. That's very powerful.

00:11:30 Jackson Wightman: And that's really three key things that if you can look at it in that order, that's essentially the foundation for structuring a smart PR campaign for earned media specifically.

00:11:37 Jackson Wightman: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think targeting is so important. Gravity is so important.

00:11:43 Jackson Wightman: There's a couple other things that I might add that sometimes we say hardware startup founders forget,

00:11:47 Jackson Wightman: particularly in the early stage when they're just kind of, say, post crowdfunding or even just coming out of the garage. You need to have good assets.

00:11:54 Jackson Wightman: You need to have a product that is not going to get stage fright when it is demoed, say, for an outlet, you need, if you're sending samples to

00:12:02 Jackson Wightman: a reporter, you need to make sure that those samples work. You need to make sure that the instruction manual doesn't read like it was written by a five-year-old or something.

00:12:09 Jackson Wightman: So there are, I think, some other things if a reporter says, yes, I would like to see this, or yes, I want a sample or yes, I'd like an interview, whatever they say.

00:12:18 Jackson Wightman: There's a few other things you need to look for to make sure are tight. And those, I would say, are assets around the product and then making sure

00:12:26 Jackson Wightman: that prototypes and our samples are working well. And I know a lot of hardware founders, whether they're scale up or startup, have gone through and have tested things.

00:12:35 Jackson Wightman: It's very important, I think, and we always do this for our clients at proper propaganda, it's very important that people

00:12:40 Jackson Wightman: who are not, you know, part of the core team test a product because the way I, a non-techy human who

00:12:46 Jackson Wightman: was not, you know, in the garage with the founder, will test something and will kind of expect

00:12:51 Kevin Mako: something to behave is often quite different than the way the sort of, you know, the chief engineer might. That's great on two fronts.

00:12:58 Kevin Mako: First of all, in differentiation, you really want to focus on what's truly unique. And one of the problems with hardware startups is they're so focused on the details.

00:13:06 Kevin Mako: that they forget about the one or two key differentiators to their product. So they end up spending a lot of time and not being brief describing how

00:13:15 Kevin Mako: it works and functions and the manufacturing behind it and what it took to get there and all these sorts of things

00:13:20 Kevin Mako: where they missed the differentiating factors or that was just a side note, 12 bullet points down the page.

00:13:25 Kevin Mako: So if as a founder you both look at the key differentiators and then make sure that people

00:13:30 Kevin Mako: who don't understand the product, A, understand those differentiators very quickly and very fast. B, can use your product quickly and efficiently via either your instruction

00:13:38 Kevin Mako: manual or very clear instructions on how to actually use that prototype if that's where you're at or first units if you're a little bit further in the production process.

00:13:46 Kevin Mako: All of that is key to understanding what they are going to see when they get this product for the first time. Because I think a big

00:13:52 Kevin Mako: conception, this was also in the sales avenue as well. It's not just earned media, but sales too. You

00:13:56 Kevin Mako: understand your product inherently and you expect that a buyer or a journalist within that space

00:14:02 Kevin Mako: is going to instantly be able to figure it out, well, they've got a thousand things on their plate.

00:14:06 Kevin Mako: Even if they have the sophistication to understand specifically your product and your product market, they may not have the time.

00:14:12 Kevin Mako: They may not have had the ability to spend the efforts on the specific things that you wanted them to really review. So it all comes down to that simplicity

00:14:20 Jackson Wightman: and clarity, both A, about what you're actually pitching to them as your differentiation and

00:14:24 Jackson Wightman: B, showing them that that differentiator actually works, which is your actual product, your asset. You know, these are humans. That's an important thing to

00:14:32 Jackson Wightman: remember, your points are very good one, Kevin. The idea that we don't all have the same day every time, at least most of us don't.

00:14:37 Jackson Wightman: There are days when we are at our best, there are days when we at our worst. And you need when dealing with the media to communicate in a way that is very stripped

00:14:46 Jackson Wightman: down and very easy for them to understand, but also to acknowledge and understand that these are humans. And maybe somebody's child had a meltdown that morning.

00:14:53 Jackson Wightman: Maybe somebody had a fight with their spouse. So the simpler you can make things, the easier you can make it for them to test

00:15:01 Jackson Wightman: what you want to see what you want them to see, that's what you need to do. Try to eliminate serving

00:15:07 Kevin Mako: them and all you can eat buffet where they have a million things to try and digest and understand. Keep it simple. Keep it straightforward.

00:15:15 Kevin Mako: And you're going to win the day. Love it. I mean, that's great product development knowledge as well. The simpler you make the product, the more you can

00:15:21 Kevin Mako: focus on those key differentiators, the less on all these other bells and whistles and add-ons and accessories, especially for a hardware startup.

00:15:28 Kevin Mako: If it's your first product getting to market, simplicity is key. about this a lot on the show on the product development side of things. But you can see as a hardware

00:15:36 Kevin Mako: startup how the development, by keeping it simple in development, that applies all the way through

00:15:41 Kevin Mako: to and including not just sales, but also PR and marketing and all these other things. We hear countless people on the show talking about simplicity.

00:15:50 Kevin Mako: And as a hardware startup, that is your job to prevent feature creep and to focus on your winning pieces. And your winning pieces don't have to be massive.

00:15:58 Kevin Mako: Numerous people talk a lot about 5% or 10% differentiation. You just have to prove how you are slightly better or more efficient or more useful, solve a little bit of a pain

00:16:08 Kevin Mako: point that something else doesn't, whatever it might be that adds value to your product.

00:16:12 Jackson Wightman: Focus with laser precision on that. And in hardware in particular, make sure you do a really good job of execution because nobody will forgive quality.

00:16:21 Jackson Wightman: No, and that's the case on the immediate side. So two points just in reference to which he said, number one, we always say internally

00:16:26 Jackson Wightman: of the agency, that feature bombs are the hardest product to get press for it. Because a feature

00:16:31 Jackson Wightman: bomb, even if I can get press for it, which is another conversation, and it's often hard

00:16:37 Jackson Wightman: to get press for feature bombs, even if I can get press for a feature bomb, it's never the press that the founder of the company wants, because there's too much to pick from.

00:16:47 Jackson Wightman: So you often see a journalist reporting on feature X when the founder would have said, hey, come on, get us press

00:16:52 Kevin Mako: for feature Y. It's very hard to do. I just think, as simple as things, can be made. That's what you want to do in your intermediate channel for sure. Amazing. Now,

00:17:01 Kevin Mako: you've got a book coming out fairly soon, and it talks about a lot of these issues, particularly

00:17:05 Jackson Wightman: for the tech industry. Give us a bit of a highlight of what's coming out. I think it's on March 23rd that it comes out. Yeah, March 23rd.

00:17:11 Jackson Wightman: The book is written with my agency co-partender Borianus the Peachovich. March 23rd on Amazon, the title is the tech PR playbook. Pretty simple title,

00:17:20 Jackson Wightman: pretty self-explanatory title. What we've done is we've taken 20 plus years in the business each of us

00:17:26 Jackson Wightman: and sort of said, okay, what is it that leaders tend to miss? Founders at hardware startups,

00:17:33 Jackson Wightman: founders at hardware scale ups, where do they go wrong? What are the common misperceptions we've seen

00:17:38 Jackson Wightman: that lead to sometimes failures and what are the common perceptions, correct perceptions, that have led to successes. And we really tried to distill those.

00:17:48 Jackson Wightman: And so the book, I would say, focuses first and foremost on what is this thing for? What is earned media for? Because I think

00:17:55 Jackson Wightman: successful hardware startups, successful hardware scaleups, understand it is for a very limited set of business activities.

00:18:03 Jackson Wightman: And obviously that primarily revolves around brand equity. But there's only about five or six other things that earned media really delivers well for a business. And I would say

00:18:12 Jackson Wightman: those are recruitment, if one is soliciting investment, if one wants to boost employee morale, if one has

00:18:18 Jackson Wightman: SEO goals, or in some instances, if one wants to try and bolster direct sales, there are certain

00:18:23 Jackson Wightman: types of earned media that can sort of service each of those broad six business goals. So we really touch on that. We touch on kind of some of the pitfalls that we've seen people

00:18:32 Jackson Wightman: make. And often those pitfalls are not only around perception, but sometimes in how one approaches a reporter.

00:18:39 Jackson Wightman: As you've alluded to a few times in our conversation, reporters are very time crunched people. So, you know, you got to keep it simple. You got to keep it straightforward.

00:18:46 Jackson Wightman: We lay some of that out. We lay out a range of kind of things if one is at that moment that many

00:18:52 Jackson Wightman: hardware scaleups are where they're thinking about agency helps that we sort of have a chapter on

00:18:56 Jackson Wightman: here's how you'd screen an agency here are some questions to ask here are some red flags to look out for if an agency says x y or z the book is peppered with you

00:19:05 Jackson Wightman: know a range of kind of useful tools templates all of that that people can use whether they're working

00:19:11 Kevin Mako: with an agency or whether they're DIYing their PR so march 23rd tech PR playbook on amazon and yeah hopefully

00:19:18 Kevin Mako: it's useful for people amazing i'll put all those links as well to proper propaganda your agency for hardware tech firms as well as putting the link to the book so that people can

00:19:27 Kevin Mako: click there when it comes out March 23 or later in 2023 and pick

00:19:31 Jackson Wightman: up a copy and learn all of the

00:19:33 Kevin Mako: insights from 20 plus years of both you and your co-founder's experience working on hardware products getting to market with earned media. Yeah, sounds great.

00:19:40 Kevin Mako: Thank you. Thanks so much for all your words of wisdom today. Really appreciate it and we'll look forward to talking again soon.

00:19:45 Narrator: Amazing. Thank you, Kevin. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup

00:19:50 Narrator: podcast. If you found some value in the show, please do us a huge favor and leave us a quick five-star review.

00:19:55 Narrator: If you have any questions, guest suggestions, or anything else, feel free to reach out to us any time at our email, podcast and MakoDesign.com. That's podcast at MakoDesign.com.

00:20:04 Narrator: This show is hosted by Kevin Mako. North America's leading expert on product development for physical product startups. Huge thanks to our sponsors, PTC, and their two

00:20:12 Narrator: best-in-class 3D CAD product development software solutions Onshape and Creo, and Mako Design

00:20:17 Narrator: and invent the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored specifically to startups small manufacturers and inventors thanks for joining and

00:20:26 Narrator: see you next time