PR and earned media is the work of getting other people to talk about your brand: journalists, customers, regulators, industry analysts, employees, and the audiences they reach. It’s the part of marketing where the brand has the least direct control and often the most credibility, because what other people say about you carries weight your own advertising can’t. Done well, it shifts perception, defends reputation, and creates the conditions for everything else to work harder. This page is where we collect STIR’s thinking on PR and earned media: how we define it, how we approach it, the questions clients ask us most often, and the work we’ve done that proves the case.
What is PR and earned media?
PR and earned media is the discipline of building reputation, managing relationships with the people who shape public conversation, and securing coverage and advocacy that you don’t pay for directly. It includes media relations, executive thought leadership, crisis and issues management, public affairs, internal communications, analyst relations, and the work of getting credible third parties (journalists, customers, regulators, partners) to speak about your brand on your behalf. It’s the slowest of the marketing disciplines to produce results and frequently the most durable when it works.
What we believe about PR and earned media
Strategy that can’t be executed is theatre. Execution that isn’t integrated is noise. We do the work that proves it.
PR is where the strategy gets validated externally, or doesn’t. A brand can argue its position all it wants in its own channels, but the moment a journalist, an analyst, or a regulator either agrees or disagrees, the argument changes. Earned coverage is the closest thing in marketing to a public verdict on whether the strategy is credible.
Most PR work fails for one of two reasons. Either it’s been disconnected from the strategy and the rest of the marketing (pitches that don’t reflect how the brand actually positions itself, sending journalists on errands the website would contradict), or it’s been treated as a volume game, where success is defined by hit counts rather than by whether the right people said the right things to the right audiences. Both produce coverage that looks impressive in a monthly report and accomplishes very little.
We believe PR has to do real work, and the work has to be specific. Specific to the audiences whose opinion actually matters. Specific to the messages worth carrying. Specific to the journalists and outlets whose attention is worth earning. Generic PR (the boilerplate releases, the unfocused pitching, the announcements no one was asking for) is PR that produces coverage your CEO can show their parents and that does nothing to shift the business. That’s not media relations; it’s expensive entertainment.
It’s also the reason we don’t separate PR from the brand strategy and integrated marketing that surrounds it. The shops that do (pure-play PR firms, in particular) produce work that’s frequently well-pitched and almost never integrated. Strong coverage, off-brand messaging. Great analyst relationships, no connection to the marketing campaign. The PR program wins on its own terms and fails on the business’s. We’d rather build a PR program that’s slightly less impressive in the coverage report and substantially more aligned with what the rest of the marketing is trying to do.
How we approach PR and earned media
Every PR engagement at STIR moves through four phases. The phases run as an ongoing program rather than a finite project; PR is built through relationships and reputation over time, not delivered in a campaign window.
1. Position
We start by understanding what the brand stands for, who its credible audiences are, and what messages are worth carrying into public conversation. This isn’t a media list exercise; it’s a strategic exercise. The deliverable is a clear sense of the brand’s positioning as it should travel through earned channels, the people whose opinion shifts the needle, and the messages worth the effort of placing.
2. Build
With the positioning clear, we build the relationships and assets that make coverage possible. That includes journalist and analyst engagement, executive thought-leadership development, owned content that gives outlets something to reference, and the practical infrastructure (press materials, executive bios, spokesperson training) that turns opportunity into outcome. This is long-game work, and shortcuts are visible.
3. Activate
Active outreach (pitching and media relations, story development, response to journalist inquiries, executive placement, byline development, awards and speaking opportunities) happens against the strategic plan rather than against an opportunistic calendar. We say no to placements that don’t fit, even when they’re available. Coverage that misrepresents the brand or reaches the wrong audience does more harm than no coverage at all.
4. Defend
Reputation isn’t just built; it’s protected. Issues management, crisis preparation, sensitive-story navigation, and the daily work of monitoring what’s being said about the brand all sit here. The brands that handle crises well are the ones who prepared for them before they happened. We work with clients to build the playbooks, the relationships, and the muscle memory needed when something does go wrong.
Common questions about PR and earned media
How long does it take to see results from PR?
Honest answer: longer than most clients want. Tactical PR (a specific announcement, a single placement, a crisis response) can produce visible results within days or weeks. Strategic PR, the kind that shifts perception, builds reputation among specific audiences, or establishes a brand as a credible voice on an issue, takes months to years. The agencies that promise faster results are usually optimizing for volume metrics rather than impact metrics. We’d rather be honest about timelines than overpromise and underdeliver.
How much does a PR program cost?
PR retainers at STIR typically range from the mid-thousands per month for focused programs (single executive, single topic, regional outreach) to the low tens of thousands for integrated multi-audience work involving media relations, thought leadership, analyst engagement, and issues monitoring. The biggest variable is scope: how many audiences, how many messages, how active the issues environment, and how much asset development (bylines, white papers, executive content) is included. We’re happy to scope to a budget.
How do you measure PR performance?
Against the business question PR is supposed to answer, not against generic media-monitoring metrics. We’ve written about this at length elsewhere on this site. The short version: outputs (what we produced) are the floor; outtakes (who saw and remembered it) are useful; outcomes (what they thought or did) and business impact (what it did for the business) are where the real measurement lives. Most PR reports stop at outputs because outputs are easy. We try to get to outcomes.
Do you do PR without the rest of the marketing work?
Yes, with the same caveats as the other disciplines. PR works best as part of an integrated program where the messages, positioning, and creative all reinforce each other. PR done in isolation, disconnected from the website, the campaigns, the social presence, produces coverage that contradicts the rest of the brand experience, which is worse than not getting coverage at all. If you have strong existing alignment with other marketing partners, we can come in for PR alone; if you don’t, the PR work will surface the gaps.
What about crisis communications?
Crisis work falls under PR, and we handle it for clients with whom we have an ongoing relationship. We don’t take on cold crisis briefs. The time to develop crisis communication capability is before the crisis, not during it. For existing clients, we maintain crisis preparedness as part of the ongoing program: scenario planning, holding-statement templates, spokesperson preparation, and the relationships with journalists who would be the ones calling when something goes wrong.
How is PR changing with AI and social media?
Three real shifts. First, audiences increasingly form opinions through AI-mediated summaries (LLM-generated answers, AI-curated feeds) where the brand has no direct say, which makes earned coverage from credible third parties more valuable, because it becomes input to those summaries. Second, the traditional media industry is contracting, so there are fewer journalists covering more ground, which makes relationships and quality of pitching matter more than ever. Third, the line between PR, social, content, and influencer work is blurring; the brands that thrive are the ones who treat all of it as a single earned-influence challenge rather than as separate disciplines.
What’s the difference between PR and marketing?
Marketing is what you say about yourself; PR is what other people say about you. Both are part of the same overall work of building a brand and growing a business, but they operate through different mechanisms and earn credibility differently. A strong brand needs both, and they need to be saying compatible things, which is the whole argument for not running them in separate organizational silos.
Recent thinking on PR and earned media
The latest STIR perspectives on media relations, reputation, thought leadership, and the work of earning credible attention.
PR and earned media in practice
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Who you’ll work with
PR and earned media at STIR is led by Christel Henke, working with the strategy, content, and account teams to ensure earned coverage reinforces rather than contradicts the rest of the brand experience.
Ready to talk about your reputation?
Whether you’re building visibility, defending what you’ve built, or trying to figure out why your coverage isn’t moving the conversation, we’d like to hear what you’re working on.