Send Me No Bad Pitches

Let no one unversed in geometry enter here.

Go Look It Up.

Maybe it’s seasonal – but there’s been no lack of bad pitches coming into my PRBC inbox lately.

Bad in the sense of one or more of the following:

  1. It’s on a topic we don’t cover
  2. It’s completely non-personalized
  3. It’s apparent the pitcher hasn’t read any PRBC posts, or
  4. It’s just very poorly written.

Now I’ll be the first to admit, PRBC has a bit of a bizarre editorial scope.  We cover tech (as it relates to SM/Digital) all the way to traditional media relations and even touch on advertising, communications generally, etc. so I’m usually quite forgiving when it comes to off-topic pitches.  I’ve been there, I’ve done it, it happens.

But today, this appeared in my Inbox.  It’s a direct copy and paste – email addresses and all (email addresses have been adjusted to avoid spambots):

from

The Daily <thedaily [at] rubenstein.com>

to

Peter Cognoscenti <prcog1 [at] gmail.com>

date

Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:41 AM

subject

The Daily: Next Wave with Gary Vaynerchuk: High on the Blog

mailed-by

rubenstein.com

Gary Vaynerchuk breaks down his favorite blogs, gives you the basics of Blogging 101 and tells you how to make money on your blog in the latest episode of Next Wave with Gary Vaynerchuk, featured in today’s issue of The Daily.

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA2W6Eq-uUw

If used or referenced, please credit The Daily.
Follow us on Twitter: @Daily

ABOUT THE DAILY:

The Daily is a first-of-its-kind daily national news publication built exclusively as an application for tablet computing. It provides readers the engaging experience of a magazine combined with the immediacy of the web and the need-to-know content of a newspaper, all while elevating user experience beyond the printed word. The Daily is a subscription-based news product, published 365 days a year, at the cost of $0.99 cents a week or $39.99 a year. For more information on The Daily go to: www.thedaily.com.

What’s wrong with this pitch?  I’ll just provide bullets:

  • “[T]ells you how to make money on your blog” – that’s not what we do and not what our audience is interested in.
  • “[G]ives you the basics of Blogging 101” – if I’m already running a blog and in a media dbase, I’m pretty sure I’ve got the basics down
  • There’s no contact info?  No name, no person I can respond to.  Even the email address is “thedaily@”  the agency.
  • The agency in question is Rubenstein – a sufficiently large and reputable agency to know better.  Take a look at the client roster. Yes, the Yankees are on that list.
  • I’m sure there’s more but I’m short for time.  I’ll update more as they occur to me.

This is simply lazy work.  Gary, The Daily, and anyone who got the pitch deserves better.

2 thoughts on “Send Me No Bad Pitches”

  1. I know a few folks who came from Rubenstein and only heard horror stories, therefore, I’m not surprised. It’s a spam factory, not a PR agency, and that’s an insult to Spam, the canned meat. Gary’s been drinking too much of the wine he hawks. He didn’t crush this one.

  2. I wonder if Gary would have been happy with this pitch. I say that because does EVERYONE know who Gary is? You do a cut and paste job, you are going to get exactly what happened here.

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