Dig, if you will, a picture:

You sign up a new client! (Yay!)

From there, you immediately do everything (and then some) to deliver for them… only to strike out completely until, inevitably, despite having gone above and beyond, you are forced to face their understandable disappointment before they up and walk out the door.

Never to return.

What, I ask esteemed fellow PR folks, could be more painful and frustrating? What could be worse?

I’ll tell you what’s much worse: absolutely crushing it — scoring outsized results you could neither expect nor dare promise — only to have the client’s response be… anyone? Anyone?

The same.

That’s right. Your newly-minted media stars split. Check, please!

[Closes eyes. Breathes in. Remembers New Year’s resolution to start a meditation practice. Exhales.]

This scenario happened so many times last year — and so deeply haunts my plans for this year — that I needed to either get in my car with cigarettes and rage-sing along to Alanis Morissette for three hours before having an even longer cry in a Target parking lot…

…or write this piece.

And since there is little you could possibly gain from my musical gifts, let’s get uncomfortably real right now. Because, yeah — something tells me I’m not the only one in our industry facing this fuckery, er, phenomenon.

And looking for a tobacco-free fix.

Client ghosting story number one

I genuinely like their stuff. The kind of products I could see adorning the cozy Kauai beach house of my lottery-winning dreams.

Dreams aside, it was September 1, 2024, when this brand onboarded with Press Hook.

Now, as I always emphasize to clients (and have written about repeatedly), PR results typically take time. Especially for newer brands, the proposition is far more like dating than shopping: don’t expect instant gratification.

Nonetheless, with the holiday shopping season just around the corner, we hit the ground sprinting. Within a superhuman turnaround of just three months, we managed to wrap this client in a large blanket of coverage. They graced the coveted pages of Oprah, Parents, Southern Living, Real Simple, Taste of Home, and the list goes on.

We’re talking about 24 articles for the fourth quarter.

Could their mad-dash of a holiday campaign have gone any better? We crushed it. Overdelivered by any reasonable standard.

Then, first week of January: they’re out. Happy New Year.

Tell me if this sounds familiar

Why the dumping, you ask? What happened?

It’s not you, it’s us.

That’s the dating lingo translation. The more detailed business-speak version (and, hey, at least we got one — it’s far worse when clients just peace out without any feedback or clarification) goes as follows.

Since they’re all-in on scaling up the business, “short-term direct ROI is critical.” To that end, they believe Meta Ads and affiliate/paid placements are simply a better marketing investment.

Yes, they appreciated all the press hits. We weren’t their first PR partner, but performed way, way better so, sure, they’d return to Press Hook if/when they’re ready to incorporate PR back into their marketing strategy.

Okay.

In a way, what they were ultimately saying was: It’s not you, it’s PR.

They’re discounting and discarding the whole endeavor; the entire genre, premise, industry. When exceptional results are still insufficient, they’re devaluing PR categorically — a problem that calls for consideration, conversation, and solutions at a communications community-wide scale.

But before drilling deeper between those lines, let’s quickly review another recent case study in frustration.

Client ghosting story number two

You might know the type: attention-grabbing name (inviting NSFW humor) attached to innocuous, inexpensive products.

Notice that I said “inexpensive.”

It would be unkind to say cheap.

This brand entered the Press Hook fold guns blazing. Alongside a wholly unrealistic insistence on scoring at least 10 press features during the highly competitive, prime time holiday season, they routinely micromanaged and disrespected my team along the way.

Despite having never generated any press for themselves, they were know-it-all backseat drivers. Nonetheless, we’re professionals. We soldiered on.  

And so how, ultimately, did we fare?

A total of 24 media hits from October into December.

Yes. Once again, 24 was the magic number. Another over-delivery special.

Amazing, right?

So what happened come January? You guessed it.

Only this time, the special cherry atop the suck-sundae of dropping us without warning was disputing their last payment.

But hey… they still may want to come back and work with us again at some point.

Can’t wait!

[stares straight to camera]

Something’s got to give

And I know I’m not alone in getting dropped by clients without warning in the immediate wake of off-the-charts wins; I hear this story from PR peers all the time.

What are we all missing here? Seriously?

For, alas, this is not one of those thought-leadership pieces where I now whip out the winning workaround, detail some effective cheat codes, then bask in the glow of my own PR biz mastery.

Nope. This is one of those thought-leadership pieces where I practice the humble yet ascendant standard of “radical authenticity and accessibility” — a phenomenon I’ve analyzed recently — by admitting that I don’t have the winning workaround or cheat codes.

But I’ll at least share my back-of-the-napkin math to kick off this comms biz self-help group session.

When I consider ROI and PR, they feel to me like two programming languages that have not yet been successfully integrated. You can’t win in a partnership where there isn’t a baseline consensus around what success looks like. PR professionals traditionally assess campaign success around the number of press hits and their quality in terms of outlet tiers and prominence.

Are there other relevant metrics to consider? Absolutely. But we have to start out aligned around the same goals, as well as on a fair and open tracking process.

I think a sound PR strategy typically needs at least six months to ramp up, and even that timeframe is pretty tight. If three months is not enough runway for a campaign to reliably score press hits, how can that be sufficient time to assess the ROI of what those press hits are impacting or generating?

As someone who has bootstrapped a business before, I very much get the mindset and no frills realities of “every dollar counts” mode — especially on the marketing side. But when the PR payoff is very much there, just not being accurately counted or understood, caught somewhere off the spreadsheet radar, how can we bridge that gap as an industry?

Isn’t getting that piece right essential to working effectively, collaboratively, and fairly with our clients?

2025: A “PROI” Odyssey

Getting past the “PROI” problem is one of my top professional goals for 2025 (and I’m working on some alternative pricing ideas as we speak).

We need clarity for our sanity. Clients need an education for their success.

“PROI” factors

Sales 

• Of course.

• But what are we using to track this?

Web traffic 

• Absolutely.

• But when they link to Amazon or a retailer, how are we tracking that? Does the client collect feedback from customers like “how did you hear about us”?

• What other sources can we pull from?

• How and where are we linking/showcasing the press hits and are there any metrics we can track there (e.g., an increase in conversions on the website, in ad campaigns, ROAS, CAC, etc.)?

SEO ranking or authority

• What will be the SEO tool that lets us track the value and ranking of the press coverage we secure?

•  Ahrefs?

Or maybe the key objective for a campaign is to increase online presence relative to a specific competitor? How do we track for that?

Maybe the mission is to enhance and grow the founder’s profile? Let’s set up a goal to get on podcasts and submit some thought leadership articles, maybe push out some bylines, establishing those as the ROI metrics?

Again, I’m still calibrating and searching here, so I want to hear from you. Please reach out, PR peeps, and let’s fortify against the shortsighted “f-f-frustration” together.

For sure, this is also a roundabout way of acknowledging that — venting aside — the real issue is not about specific clients. This a me-and-you problem, not a them problem. The flameouts are merely illustrations, symptoms, sign posts.

As an industry, we need to better define (and align around) priorities, goals, and expectations right from the start — establishing a persuasive “PROI” framework for each and every campaign.