By Mark Macias
Founder of MACIAS PR | Former NBC Executive Producer
The little dog in this photo is Einstein. He’s my dog, and despite his size, he has never had much trouble getting attention.
There’s a lesson here for startups trying to compete for media coverage against much larger companies: You don’t have to be the biggest dog to get attention. You just need to give people a reason to notice you.
Why Smaller Companies Can Compete for Media Coverage
One of the misconceptions I frequently hear from startups is that the largest companies have an inherent advantage with journalists. Bigger companies have more employees, larger marketing budgets, established brands and communications teams with substantially more resources. From the perspective of a startup founder, competing against that can feel intimidating.
But earned media doesn’t work exactly like advertising. A Fortune 500 company can outspend a startup on advertising without blinking. It can’t simply outspend that startup for the attention of an independent journalist. If the smaller company has the more interesting story, the playing field can change quickly.
I saw this firsthand during my years as an Executive Producer with NBC and Senior Producer with CBS in New York. When we evaluated stories, the size of a company’s marketing budget wasn’t what determined whether something made air. We were looking for an interesting story, a compelling character, a new idea, surprising data or something that helped our viewers better understand what was happening in the world.
That distinction creates an enormous opportunity for smaller companies.
Journalists Aren’t Shopping for the Biggest Company
Imagine a reporter covering an industry with 100 companies. Most of those businesses will probably tell that journalist some variation of the same thing: we’re growing, we’re innovative, our technology is different and our executives are experts.
Eventually, those companies begin to resemble the people walking behind Einstein in the photograph. They’re all there, but your brain starts treating them as background. The company that breaks the pattern gets noticed.
That could come from proprietary data that reveals something unexpected about consumers. It might be a founder whose personal experience gives the company a fascinating origin story. An executive could have a contrarian perspective on a developing news event. A small company might be experiencing something internally that reveals a much larger shift taking place across its industry.
Those are storytelling advantages, and unlike advertising budgets, they aren’t reserved for the biggest corporations.
Your Company’s Personality Can Be a PR Asset
Einstein doesn’t get attention because he’s the largest dog on the sidewalk. He gets attention partly because he has personality. There is something about him that makes people stop.
Companies can have personality, too.
Unfortunately, businesses frequently remove that personality from their communications because they’re trying so hard to sound professional. Founders start speaking in corporate language. Interesting observations get converted into safe talking points. Websites fill up with the same words competitors use. Before long, a company that might actually be fascinating starts sounding remarkably similar to everyone else.
Professionalism and individuality aren’t opposites. Einstein is wearing a tie in this photograph, after all.
The goal isn’t to manufacture some outrageous corporate personality simply to attract attention. It’s to recognize what is authentically interesting about the company and make sure that distinction isn’t buried beneath generic messaging.
At MACIAS PR, that’s a large part of the creative process. We’re looking for the element that makes a journalist stop scrolling through emails and think, Wait, that’s interesting.
Being Small Can Actually Give Startups a Better Story
Large companies certainly have advantages with the media, including established name recognition. But size can also make organizations cautious, complicated and slow. A startup can sometimes tell stories that a large corporation can’t.
Founders are often closer to the problem they’re trying to solve. They can have stronger personal motivations for starting the business. Younger companies may see changes in consumer behavior before established competitors recognize them. And because startups are fighting to disrupt an existing market, conflict can already be embedded in their story.
The mistake is assuming the startup itself is automatically newsworthy because it’s new.
A reporter doesn’t necessarily care that you’ve launched a company, raised money, hired an executive or released a product. Those are developments inside your business. The PR opportunity comes from identifying what those developments mean outside your business. That’s where storytelling becomes more important than size.
Earned Media Rewards Interesting Stories
This is one of the reasons I have always viewed media contacts as an assist rather than a PR strategy. Knowing journalists can help get an idea in front of the right person, but a relationship can’t force a reporter to find an uninteresting story interesting.
The story still has to earn the attention.
That’s especially important for startups because they often don’t have the brand recognition that gets an established company’s announcement noticed automatically. Their PR strategy has to work harder creatively. The company needs to give the journalist a reason to care that has nothing to do with how badly the founders want publicity.
I learned that lesson from the newsroom side of the equation. Today, as the founder of MACIAS PR, I apply the same editorial thinking from the opposite direction. Rather than asking why a journalist isn’t paying attention to a client, I want to understand what we can show that journalist that deserves attention.
There’s a subtle but important difference between those two approaches.
Attention Isn’t the Same as Making Noise
Companies have more ways than ever to make noise. They can publish constantly on social media, distribute press releases, create AI-generated content and send pitches to thousands of journalists. None of those tools guarantees that anyone will actually care.
Attention happens when something interrupts the pattern. It makes us curious. It gives us something to feel, think about or remember. That’s why personality, characters, conflict, ideas and unexpected details matter so much in storytelling.
Einstein doesn’t walk down the sidewalk shouting, Look at me. People notice him because there’s something about him that naturally draws them in. The best PR works the same way.
Find Your Einstein
Every company isn’t going to have a charming little dog in a necktie, nor should it. But most interesting businesses have something distinctive hiding somewhere inside them.
It might be the founder, or the data. It could be something customers are unexpectedly doing with the product. Maybe it’s a problem the company sees developing before everyone else, or an opinion the CEO holds that challenges the conventional wisdom of the industry.
That’s how a startup with a fraction of a competitor’s employees, revenue or marketing budget can sometimes command disproportionate media attention. Earned media isn’t necessarily about being the biggest company in the room. It’s about having a story that stands out from everyone else in it.
Einstein figured that out without a PR agency. The rest of us have to work at it.
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About MACIAS PR
Mark Macias is the founder of MACIAS PR, an earned-media public relations agency specializing in media coverage, media relations and thought-leadership campaigns for healthcare, technology, AI and financial companies. Before founding MACIAS PR in 2009, Mark was an Executive Producer with NBC and CBS in New York, where he evaluated and approved story ideas. His newsroom experience now shapes the media strategies MACIAS PR uses to identify newsworthy angles and secure earned media coverage for clients.