Public relations is the work of earning attention from people who do not work for you and are not paid to say nice things — journalists, analysts, podcast hosts, conference programmers, regulators. Every example below is a real piece of that work. Most lists of PR examples show you three famous consumer stunts and stop. The unglamorous categories underneath are where almost all professional PR actually happens, so this page covers eleven of them and says what each one realistically produces.
What separates PR from the things next to it
| You control | You pay for placement | Credibility with a sceptic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advertising | Everything | Yes | Low |
| Content marketing | Everything | Distribution only | Medium |
| Public relations | Almost nothing | No | High |
That third column is the entire reason PR exists. A journalist writing that your product works is worth more than you saying it, precisely because you could not make them.
1. Earned media coverage
The core of the job: a reporter writes about you because the story is worth writing.
What it looks like in practice is far less glamorous than the output. Someone identifies the fifteen reporters who cover the category, checks each has written about it recently, and sends each a short email with something they cannot get elsewhere.
What it produces, measured. Between December 2025 and August 2026, 63% of graded replies to our pitches were a yes, with zero unsubscribes. That is what a functioning programme looks like from the inside.
"Coverage is a byproduct of being genuinely useful to a reporter on deadline. Everything else is theatre."
Justin Mauldin, Founder, Salient PR
2. The funding announcement
A company raises money and tells the market what it is for.
Example — Brickeye. The headline carried the amount, the round and the specific use of funds, and the body led with traction proof rather than investor adjectives.
What it produces: reliable trade coverage, occasional tier-one, and a permanent record that recruiters and customers find later. It rarely produces sustained attention, because a raise is only interesting for about 48 hours.
3. The product launch
Example — Tenstorrent. A launch release that made the narrowest true first-in-category claim rather than the broadest one, and put the specification and the price in the subhead.
What it produces: the strongest coverage of any announcement type, provided the product is genuinely new. Reviewers and analysts need a hook, and a specification is one.
4. The company launch, from zero
Hardest version of the job: nobody has heard of you and there is no category to slot into.
Example — SkipLabs. Launched as a runtime for AI-generated software, a category that did not have a name in the press yet.
What it produces: this is where the data is genuinely surprising. A pre-revenue company launching into a category the press does not cover yet ran a 54.3% open rate and a 10.6% reply rate — statistically indistinguishable from an established name. Being unknown costs you far less than agencies imply.
5. The executive hire
Example — BuildOps, announcing a Procore veteran as Chief Product Officer.
What it produces: modest coverage on its own, but it is one of the few announcements that reliably works on a slow news week, and it does real recruiting work. The rule is that the headline must say what the person did before and why it maps onto this market. A hire announcement that only names the title is not news.
6. Original research
A company runs a survey or analyses its own data and publishes the finding.
Example — Sauce Labs, publishing research where the finding itself, as a percentage with a subject, was the headline.
What it produces: the longest tail of anything on this list. A good data point gets cited for years, feeds AI answers, and gives reporters a reason to call you as a source rather than a subject. It is also the most expensive category to do properly, because a survey that is not methodologically sound is worse than no survey.
7. The partnership announcement
Example — a fintech lender, announcing a master trust facility to fund growth.
What it produces: usually the weakest of the announcement types, because most partnership releases describe a relationship rather than a capability. The ones that work say what the partnership produces for a customer.
8. Compliance and certification
Example — a developer platform, announcing SOC 2 alongside its existing FedRAMP authorisation.
What it produces: almost no press, and it matters anyway. It removes a procurement objection permanently. This is the clearest case of PR work whose value does not show up in a coverage report — worth doing, wrong to measure by clips.
9. Podcasts
Consistently the most under-used channel in B2B, and the easiest to land.
What it produces, measured. Across 143 tracked podcast responses, 16 became confirmed bookings and 44 more were actively scheduling — 60 of 143, or 42%, moving toward a booking, against only 24 flat declines.
"Of 143 podcast responses we tracked, 60 moved toward a booking and only 24 were flat declines. Podcasts are the most under-used channel in B2B because everyone assumes they're harder to land than press. They're easier."
Kayla Haines, Media Relations, Salient PR
10. Executive thought leadership
Bylined articles, op-eds and analyst briefings that put a named person's argument in front of the market.
What it produces: slow, compounding credibility rather than a spike. Its real value in 2026 is that AI assistants assemble answers from published sources. An executive with no published position is invisible in that layer.
11. Speaking and awards
Conference stages and industry awards are PR, run through a different door: a submission process with deadlines rather than a pitch to a reporter.
What it produces: a credential that outlives the event, plus video and quotes you can use everywhere else. The cost is lead time — most calls for speakers close six to nine months before the event.
The famous kind, and why it probably does not apply to you
The examples that dominate every other list are consumer stunts. The best documented is Burger King's "Whopper Detour," which offered a one-cent Whopper to anyone who opened the app near a McDonald's, and was widely reported to have produced around 1.5 million app downloads and 3.5 billion earned-media impressions, along with a Cannes Grand Prix.
It is a genuinely great campaign. It is also almost useless as a model, because it required a national retail footprint, a competitor with a bigger one, an app, and a brand people already found funny. Copying the shape without those conditions produces a stunt nobody covers.
What the good examples have in common
Something happened. Every example above has a verifiable event at its centre. No amount of writing rescues an announcement where nothing occurred.
A number, a name, or a document. Reporters need something they can check.
One specific claim, narrowly true, rather than a broad one that is arguable.
"The pitches that get answered give the reporter something they can't get from the press release. A number, a customer who'll talk, a person who'll say the uncomfortable thing on record."
Lindsey Ranger, Account Lead, Salient PR
What example lists never show you
The base rate. Every campaign in every roundup is a survivor. The honest denominator is that most pitches get no reply, and a good programme produces a handful of meaningful placements a quarter, not a viral moment.
The failures. Most of what looks like failed PR is failed targeting — the pitch went to a reporter who left the beat a year ago.
The timeline. Nothing on this page happened in week one. Month six is the first fair point to judge a programme.
How to build your own
- Write down what has actually happened in the next two quarters. Launches, hires, raises, customers who will talk, data you already hold.
- Match each to a type above. If an item does not match any, it is probably not an announcement.
- Find the fifteen reporters who wrote about your category in the last 90 days.
- Send one short email each with the thing they cannot get elsewhere.
- Log every reply and classify it. The pattern in the replies tells you what to change faster than any coverage report.
The short version
- PR is earning attention from people you cannot pay or control. That constraint is the whole value.
- The eleven categories above cover almost all professional PR work. Consumer stunts are a rounding error.
- Original research has the longest tail. Podcasts are the easiest win. Compliance news matters even though it earns no coverage.
- Most pitches get no reply, and 63% of graded replies are a yes. Judge any example list against that base rate.
- Being unknown costs you less than you think — a pre-revenue launch and an established name landed within a few points of each other.
Salient PR runs earned media programmes for technology companies. Client examples are drawn from our own work; outreach figures come from our database covering December 2025 to August 2026.
Sources
- Salient PR outreach database, Dec 2025 – Aug 2026
- Salient PR podcast outreach tracking, 143 responses
- Burger King "Whopper Detour" results as publicly reported, including Cannes Lions recognition
- Generative-engine optimisation study, arXiv 2311.09735 (KDD 2024)
If you want this run by people who do it every day — Salient PR is a technology PR agency working with technology companies. See how we work or start a conversation.
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Eleven kinds of public relations work with a real example of each, what they produced, and the honest base rates most example lists leave out.
