Bad. Pitch.

Lately I’ve been a bad blogger. I haven’t had the time to keep my thoughts together, much less post the interesting happenings in our world of integrated marketing madness. We’re all entitled to moments of being ‘off our game’ even sometimes downright ‘bad.’

Today I experienced what can only be described as someone else having an incredibly ‘off ‘day…and that’s putting it nicely, because, well…this pitch was downright bad.

I had the unique opportunity to be on the other side of the table last week, and play journalist. So, as many do, I sent out a query through the appropriate channels and was suddenly inundated by pitches, stories and sometimes what could be construed as a short novel.

I’ve changed the guy’s name because I’m embarrassed for him.

“I have a great story for you
-Dave”

No contact info provided. No tease of a story. Nothing. Not even a subject in the subject line of the email! I sure hope this guy doesn’t do PR for a living.
Out of sheer curiosity, I responded (something no journalist is ever likely to do to such a query)…

“Hi Dave,
My deadline is Friday, I would love to hear your story if you could just type something up and send it over to me by then.”

His response [paraphrased]:

“I’m only able to tell the story by phone I’m [enter important job title/organization here] and simply can’t send you an email. You’ll love this story though. Send me your number, I’ll give you a call.”

Wow. Typically I have a pretty low tolerance for people with such toxic levels of self-importance, and this guy was all around baffling. He was too busy to pitch, but he pitched me anyway, sans contact info, subject or even a story for that matter, and then proceeds to try and impress me with his credentials after such a lackluster offering.

It’s because of people like that with [pardon my French] half-assed pitches that make PR people look bad.