You take the good with the bad

September 20, 2007

2 Min Read
Really Bad PR Pitches

2:00 PM -- The other day I wrote about how to get my attention with a PR pitch and maybe get me interested in learning more about your client. If you're going to pitch me, whatever you're selling should be targeted at my beat and include a personal note intimating your potential joblessness and/or homelessness if I don't respond.

Most bad PR pitches I receive are not targeted at my beat, do not interest me personally or professionally, and probably do not include any sort of personal appeal that might make me interested, if only on a purely human level. And most of those I ignore, or delete.

But sometimes pitches are so bad that they deserve to be recognized -- like the following email, which I found so embarrassing that all names and links to the site in question have been removed to protect the innocent:

Dog dressed up as Batman takes web community by storm
- 'BatDog' most visited page on photo site -

The adventures of a dog from the Isle of Wight are becoming a national obsession on the international photo blogging site, [redacted].

BatDog is an eleven year old ‘Labrador/Lurcher’ mongrel who dresses up as the comic book hero Batman. [Redacted] members have been flocking to BatDog's page to see the canine superhero tackle his four-legged arch-enemies 'BatFool' and 'DR X'. The colourful BatDog also adopts various disguises for undercover missions, recently dressing up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

BatDog is owned by two professional thirty-somethings, [redacted] and [redacted] who found him living in a pig sty on an abandoned farm.

"BatDog is the classic story of a superhero," said [redacted]. "Rescued from a humble background and raised by surrogate parents he defied the odds to become a hero and an inspiration to many!"

If you require any further information, quotes from the dog's owners or JPEGs of the dog then please do not hesiate [sic] to contact me.

Regards,
[redacted]



I mean, really. If the most popular content on your site is a dog dressed up as Batman or Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, maybe you need to get into another line of business.

— Ryan Lawler, Trouble Maker, Light Reading

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