Why There's Nothing Wrong with Paying for Media Attention

You can pay for any media attention you want today.

You can pay to go on a podcast.

You can pay this guy to come on your podcast.

You can pay to be in every publication from Rolling Stone to USA Today to the Village Voice to Paper magazine. You can pay to be on the cover of magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and GQ (but it will be in some other country).

I know people who can make all of those happen.

But should you do it?

That depends. It depends on your goal and how you do it.

A lot of entrepreneurs I know have the same contact at LA Weekly that I do. They know how to pay to get an article in there. So they write a totally self-serving article and then use Canva to create an image that makes them look like they were on the cover of LA Weekly, which they then post on their Instagram.

Why is this not a good idea?

1) A self-serving article is going to sound self-promotional. Good promotion doesn’t sound self-promotional. If you’re going to write an article about yourself, showcase your knowledge, not your awesomeness. I don’t know this person but here’s an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about; no one has ever read an article like this and believed it was legit.

And that brings us to…

2) No one actually believes that an entrepreneur that’s not well-known is on the cover of a magazine. Even if they do, what if they go to look for the publication and realize that you doctored it? You kind of seem like a kid at the fair who got their photo taken to be put on a fake cover of a magazine. (Did they only do that at fairs in California? I have a distinct memory of doing this.)

Also, many of these publications mark these articles, LOUDLY, as “Sponsored Content”—AKA “This person paid to be here.” Obvious point but you don’t want that. You need to know which publications make it obvious and which don’t.

Now any journalism professors would be horrified by all of this. Thankfully they would never subscribe to this. But legit journalists would also be horrified.

Thankfully, during my years as a journalist, I was never all that legit. Or you could put it another way and say that I always saw it as a money play. When I worked at People, Us Weekly and Premiere, it became clear to me that the people who weren’t incredibly famous but were still getting featured were the ones who had the best (that is, most expensive) publicists.

When I became an author, that got even clearer. If you could afford to shell out $15k a month for a publicist, you could get in top tier publications. This doesn’t seem all that different—just more honest and efficient.

In the end, my advice is this: if you have the budget, go ahead and do this. Just please don’t be cheesy about it. Have it professionally written. Don’t do it if it screams I PAID FOR THIS. Don’t make the article into a fake cover. Don’t do it if it’s a site that will bury the post so no one can find it.

But also know that the media attention is not the thing; it’s what you do with it that’s the thing. You need to share it, draw attention to it, tell people that it’s there. Apparently, 402.74 million terabytes of data are created every day and while I have no idea what that means, I understand that there’s a lot of noise to break through and you can’t just pay someone, write a self-aggrandizing press release and wait for everyone to ask for your autograph.

Here’s what you can do today:

1. Ask yourself if you feel weird paying for media attention. If you do, forget this. If you don’t, move onto…

2. Research which publications (or podcasts) you can pay to be in or on. Check your budget and…

3. Time it right. If you’re working on a book, peg it to your book launch or at least until after your book is done.

4. Figure out what you’ll do with that attention when you have it. Yes, you’ll post it on whatever social media platform you use but can you have friends with bigger followings post it? Can you send it out to your newsletter list? Can you use it in an ad or to draw more people to your offer? Don’t let something you paid a lot for (because these opportunities do tend to be ) just sit there languishing.

Oh and don’t run this by a journalism professor because they’ll be horrified. Run it by a realist instead.