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Retail Media Breakfast Club
Retail Media PR Secrets: What Actually Gets Coverage in 2026 (Please, Spill Some Tea)
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A few months back, a PR named Francesca Baker Brooker fangirled into my inbox, her words, not mine, and pitched me on a conversation with her client, a tech company called Loyalty Lion. It wasn't for any kind of announcement, but a conversation with someone who she reckoned had interesting data on retail and loyalty. Now, there's nothing unusual about this kind of pitch, by the way. I get quite pitched conversations all the time. An intro to an executive, a chat with a founder, 15 minutes with someone who has a quote unquote contrarian take. And I say no to most of them, partly because of timing and partly because of the quiet burden that a yes creates. If I take the call and the person says nothing I can use, or I've got no upcoming piece where it fits in, I'm left feeling like I owe them coverage that I just can't give to them. And so the bar for a yes, even just a conversation, is higher than people think. But for this one, I said yes. And I told them on the call candidly that I probably wouldn't use anything from the discussion for a while. The material was pretty evergreen and I had lots of other things in the queue. But here's what Francesca did next. Nothing. She didn't pester me. She didn't follow up three times asking when it was running. She trusted that good things take time. And the good thing eventually did come. A few weeks later, I worked some of the Loyalty lion leadership comments into a broader piece about retail media and loyalty. And that's where this company fit naturally in, into this thematic kind of piece that frankly got a lot more eyeballs than a whole feature on a tech company would ever get. But more importantly, because Francesca and her client were genuinely helpful and I never over indexed on them, this time they're going to be the first people that I hit up the next time I write about loyalty. And Francesca wrote a little post about their experience on LinkedIn afterwards, talking about how a hill I will die on is that these background meetings with relationship building chats are gold dust and always worth it. So why am I telling you this? Why am I of all people telling anyone how to do their job? Well, let me be clear about what I am and what I'm not. I'm not a trade media journalist. I don't call myself a journalist or an analyst that would give both of those honest professions a bad name. I. I'm just a regular person who fell into this field and never really quite climbed back out of it. And these days, because I run a newsletter a podcast, I write a column. It has happened organically, and what I am is someone who does, for those reasons get pitched and cajoled quite a lot from a seat that doesn't fit some of those usual boxes. So what I want to offer is really my lived experience of being on the receiving end of these pictures, because I am in a position where I'm talking with retailers and tech vendors and brands and agencies, and I want to explain what it's like on the receiving end so that maybe we can all get a little better information and insights and be smarter and not accidentally waste anyone's time. The first thing I'll say is that the experience of marketing and communications and PR is changing. And that is not just for me. For a long time, the PR playbook had a clear hierarchy. You landed the big trade or mass media placement first. That was the quote, unquote real coverage. The newsletters, the podcasts, the LinkedIn crowd. Those were all afterthoughts, if anyone thought of them at all. But that is all changing. The Reuters Institute 2025 digital news report, built on responses from nearly a hundred thousand people across 48 markets, found that in the US more people now get their news from social and video platforms than from TV or news websites. The report describes traditional outlets struggling to connect with audiences, while a fragmented environment of podcasters, creators and newsletters picks up the influence that they're shedding. And the LinkedIn Think Boy. I have to give credit to Mike Malazo for that term. The LinkedIn Think Boy is having a moment too. Semrush published analysis of LinkedIn's AI visibility in in March of this year, looking at 89,000 LinkedIn URLs that were cited in AI search. LinkedIn content is increasingly appearing in AI generated responses, especially when users query professional topics, companies, executives, categories or brands. Now, I want to be very careful here because the lazy version of this argument is that traditional media is dead. It is not. I'm a columnist at the Drum. I love contributing there. I love working with that team. And in fact, we've got a very exciting project coming up that I'll be able to talk about more soon. A strong placement in a respected traditional media outlet still creates credibility that a LinkedIn post simply can't. But the sharper true acclaim is one that Joe Gallo, who Leads communications at PayPal ads, made in his own LinkedIn post recently, saying that authority has fragmented the reporters who cover any given space stretched thin. They're covering more beats with less time, and a niche newsletter sees open rates that embarrass legacy publications. And as Joe put it, the programs that drove real narrative shift created those channels as primary, not as add ons. By the way, Joe Gallo at PayPal Ads is a PR pro that you absolutely must follow if you want to learn from the best. And he talked about in his post Megan Matthews, who is now the executive director of communications at Ford Motor Company who Jo worked with in the past, and she chimed in on Joe's post to make two points. One, that trust has fragmented into psychographic tribes and influence depends on understanding the internal logic of each tribe. Something to think about. And the second one is that micro communities are replacing mass influence. Influence has become precise, not broad. And that makes me think of the position that I'm in as a very, you know, inch wide and mile deep co commentator in the retail media space, along with a few other folks who are independent operators who are really being legitimized as outlets in their own rights. I think of people like Andrew Lipsman who writes his substack newsletter Media Ads and Commerce. I think of Jason Del Rey who writes a newsletter called the Aisle, who both hold individual sway that rivals the institutions that they used to work for. Andrew was an analyst at Emarketer. Jason was at Fortune and Recode and I say bring it on. Just understand that landing with an independent someone like Andrew or Jason or me sometimes works a little bit differently to traditional media. So I want to share some observations and tips of how to make your narrative as a vendor or as a retailer or a solution provider land with people like us. But also some of this is also true for traditional media as well. So I've got four things to share with you. Number one is know your audience. Now this is so painfully obvious and it should really be the easy part in the age of AI, but somehow it's where so many pictures fall down. So with my particular coverage you might have noticed I don't have guests on my podcast except for my sponsor produced executive series which are very sporadic. I don't cover product announcements or executive appointments and yet I'm pitched all of those things constantly. And yes, I do notice when it happens and it tells me that you found my email but never spent 10 minutes really reading what I do. And that is extremely off putting, not just for me but for anyone in this position now on announcements and appointments. So specifically that is a very deliberate choice. There are many trade publications that do a fantastic job of covering launches very well. They have the capacity to do it properly and I don't want to compete with that. And frankly, every time that I have wandered into that realm by accident or because I forget my position on this, someone else gets quietly wounded that I didn't cover their announcement. And so that is why I generally stay away from, from that. But from the amount of pictures that I get in this area, you would think that that was like a state secret. So that's number one, know your audience. Number two is spill some tea. Now I mentioned a little earlier this burden, this feeling that saying yes to a conversation puts me in debt to someone they've made the time, their PR person set it up, they probably got coached. They've took time out of their day to prepare for it and to be there. And I feel that really as an obligation. Maybe I shouldn't, but I do. And so here is how you can make that worth carrying and really make this time a good investment for everyone involved. And that is have something real to say once I'm on a call, I'm invested. I want to help. I want to find a place for you. I want to find your viewpoint, what is interesting. And the worst version is when I can't. When you stick to the talking points, the polished narrative, the thing that is already on the website or the press release and there's nothing for me to do with that. And now we've both spent that time for nothing. And this isn't just over. Eager vendors who do this, retailers, retail media network leaders often have this challenge, maybe more so because they've usually got interesting things to say and the most layers of approval stop them from saying it. But there has to be some tea spilled and I and anyone else worth their salt out there covering the space, protect the sources. That's the whole point of saying something on background. I won't tell anyone who spilled it. But I do need something real to work with and overly media trained executives reciting the press releases is the fastest way to waste both of our time. The agentic AI revolution is here and the competitive edge belongs to those who move faster than disruption itself. Join Miracle Ads and me in New York City on June 10, 2026 for strategies, insights and connections built for the era of agentic commerce. Discovery is shifting, media economics are following and the brands and retailers who figure out what comes next won't be the ones who wait, they'll be the ones already moving. Join me at the Miracle Summit in New York City on June 10th. Link to register in the show notes observation number three make it a no brainer. Now here's something I'd love to see more of. It's called a famil. Now, that might not be in your vocabulary because it's actually very specific to the travel industry. It's shorthand for a familiarization trip. It's where a host shows the media something best understood in person. And a lot of the time we're talking about ads on a website, but there really is still so much in our world that is genuinely better seen seen than described and in store. Retail media is an obvious one. Last year, one retailer hosted me for a tour of their stores and walked me through what makes them different because they really were trying to do something different that people didn't really understand. It wasn't excessive, they didn't try and pay me off, they didn't lean on me for positive coverage. But because my understanding of their value proposition deepened so much, I genuinely had more positive things to say and I found many more organic reasons to reference them in coverage months later. It really works. Now contrast that to an invitation I got recently from a PR at another retailer. Come to our three day media event, pay for your own travel and oh, it's in three weeks. That was a pretty easy no from me. So those are, I think there is a huge opportunity here to build individual relationships with the media by doing these kind of familles and it doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't have to involve first class flights or five star hotels or anything like that, but walking the store with an executive, them pointing out things to you, that is a very compelling way to showcase what you're doing and build a personal relationship. I'd love to see more of that now. Other big industry events. This is a huge part of our industry and I'll just share a couple of things that get my attention personally. One example was from Shop Talk. In the spring, Burns and company, who is a big PR firm, hosted a really great press breakfast. At Shop Talk. They brought in Zia Danielle Widger, who is the global president at the event's parent company Hive, and she shared some behind the scenes insights from the event, which was great. It was a little bit of, you know, behind the scenes and they brought in an interesting panel with a tech vendor and a retailer. It wasn't flashy, it wasn't seemingly too difficult to organize, but media people love an opportunity to meet each other and yes, exchange a little bit of gossip. And it is frankly a welcome break from the pitch treadmill as well. So that was, that was great. And it got people talking and it got people talking about that vendor on the panel as well, which otherwise I wouldn't have engaged with. So great job there. Secondly, with big industry events, this is an opportunity that a lot of vendors and retailers take to make a big announcement about some new capabilities, some new integration. And if that is the case, if you've got an announcement to make, please preview it under embargo. From the outside, I have no way of knowing whether your news is genuinely big or if it's a minor feature that you're hyping. So just please, just share that in confidence so I can digest it ahead of time. Because the alternative of a surprise reveal that you spring on me on the spot, that might not land the way that you really want it to. And finally, observation number four. One ask if you're commissioning research. Research is a wonderful tool to get into the news cycle, but this is my big ask and this one's for the companies because you're the ones who decide what gets commissioned. Please, and I say this with love, don't fund another survey about media buyers attitudes toward retail media. We have enough. We already know what buyers want. They want better measurement, they want more transparency and they want lower costs. And another self reported preference survey isn't going to produce a novel perspective at this point. But you know what would and we don't get nearly enough of, is research built on your own data. Tech vendors mining their own user behavior, click streams, outcomes, what people actually did with their budgets rather than what they say they do in a survey. Now that could be harder to produce, but it's also genuinely novel and it will stand out in a sea of sameness. So this is a little bit of a rant and I want to just underscore that this doesn't come from a place of ingratitude. I am so privileged to be in this position where I get to comment on the industry and share different perspectives and highlight different voices and really great PR people make this whole thing a pleasure. I have met so many wonderful, generous, insightful PR people, but I just want to share how those pictures land because I suspect many of you genuinely want to know and very few people on my side of the inbox share it candidly, so consider it said. Now please spill some tea. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you tomorrow.