By Mark Macias
Founder of MACIAS PR | Former NBC Executive Producer
I took the photograph accompanying this article years ago after seeing this framed portrait on the street. I didn’t know where she lived, what she did for a living, what she had experienced or even why her portrait was sitting there. There was just a framed photo on the sidewalk and I had to know more.
Every face has a human story. Great PR finds it. For me, that idea gets to something fundamental about storytelling and earned media. Companies often approach public relations with information. Journalists are looking for stories. The difference between the two frequently comes down to finding the human being who can make the information mean something.
Why Characters Matter in PR Storytelling
During my years as an Executive Producer with NBC and CBS in New York, I saw plenty of pitches supported by impressive statistics, legitimate experts and important issues. But television taught me something that I’ve carried into every PR campaign I’ve worked on since: data can establish a story, but people make us care about it.
Imagine telling viewers that thousands of Americans are being displaced from their jobs. That’s significant information. Now introduce them to one 52-year-old worker who spent 25 years at the same factory, walked into work on a Monday morning and learned that his job was disappearing.
The statistic establishes scale. The person gives the statistic meaning.
A journalist can ask that worker what he told his family when he got home, whether he has enough savings to survive, what he’ll do next and whether he ever imagined starting over at 52. Suddenly an economic statistic has consequences we can see and understand. That’s the power of a character.
People Give Abstract Ideas a Face
Many of the subjects companies want to discuss with journalists are inherently abstract. Artificial intelligence, healthcare costs, interest rates, labor shortages, cybersecurity, supply chains and changing consumer behavior can all become collections of statistics and expert observations very quickly.
A character creates an entry point into that complexity.
A healthcare company might possess data showing that patients are struggling to navigate the medical system. That’s potentially useful information. But somewhere behind that dataset could be a 73-year-old woman trying to coordinate three specialists, decipher an insurance denial and find transportation to her next appointment.
Now we understand the problem differently.
The person doesn’t replace the data. The person helps us understand why the data matters.
This distinction is particularly important in PR because companies naturally communicate from the inside out. They know their products, technology and industry so intimately that they sometimes forget how abstract those things can feel to everyone else.
Journalists have to translate that world for their audiences. A strong character can help them do it.
The Best Character Isn’t Always the CEO
One mistake businesses make is assuming the spokesperson automatically needs to be the center of every story.
Sometimes the CEO is the character. A founder may have an unusual background, a personal connection to the problem or an experience that explains why the company exists. Those details can make an executive significantly more interesting to a journalist.
But sometimes the better character is somewhere else.
It could be the employee experiencing a change firsthand, the customer whose behavior illustrates a new trend, the physician encountering the same problem every day, the factory manager watching a supply chain change in real time or the person whose life demonstrates what an otherwise abstract piece of research actually means.
Finding that person requires looking beyond the corporate hierarchy and asking a different question: Who is actually living this story? That question can lead you somewhere much more interesting than another executive quote.
Interesting Characters Create Questions
The photograph of this woman works because it leaves something unresolved. We see enough to become curious, but we don’t have enough information to satisfy that curiosity. Good characters create that same tension for journalists.
When I look at a potential character for a media campaign, I’m interested in the questions that naturally emerge. What happened to this person? Why did they make that decision? What did they see that others didn’t?
If a person naturally generates questions, that’s usually a good sign.
Compare that with a heavily media-trained spokesperson whose answers have been polished until every response sounds like it came from the company’s website. The executive may be perfectly qualified, but qualification alone doesn’t create curiosity. Credentials tell a reporter why someone can speak. Character gives the reporter something to ask.
Emotion Doesn’t Mean Manipulation
There’s an important distinction here because emotional storytelling can easily become contrived.
I don’t believe PR should manufacture emotion or turn someone’s hardship into a marketing device. Journalists can usually recognize when a story is being forced, and audiences are increasingly sophisticated about detecting emotional manipulation.
The better approach is to recognize the emotion that already exists inside a true story. Fear about losing a job is real. Relief after finally receiving medical care is real. A founder’s obsession with solving a problem can be real. Frustration with an industry that isn’t working can be real. Excitement about an unexpected discovery can be real.
PR doesn’t need to invent those emotions. It needs enough curiosity to find them.
Why Companies Sometimes Miss Their Own Best Stories
Some of the best characters are easy for companies to overlook precisely because they’re so familiar.
The employee who has been there for 30 years doesn’t seem unusual because everyone sees him every morning. The founder has told her origin story so many times that nobody inside the company thinks it’s interesting anymore. The customer behavior that seems routine to the sales team might be completely surprising to someone outside the industry.
Familiarity can make interesting things invisible.
That’s one of the advantages an outside editorial perspective can bring to a PR campaign. When I enter a company for the first time, I’m not only listening to what executives tell me is important. I’m listening for the detail they mention casually and then move past. Sometimes that’s where the story is.
It’s similar to what happened when I saw this woman’s portrait. Someone else might have walked past the frame without thinking twice. I stopped because the face made me wonder.
Every Company Has Faces. Not Every Company Finds the Story.
The woman in my photograph never said a word to us. Yet her face alone creates curiosity because we instinctively understand that a lifetime exists behind it.
Companies are filled with those kinds of untold stories. They’re inside customers, employees, founders, experts and communities. They’re buried underneath spreadsheets, corporate bios and carefully approved messaging.
The challenge isn’t inventing something dramatic enough to attract media attention. It’s developing the editorial instinct to recognize what’s already interesting.
That’s something I learned from sitting inside newsrooms at NBC and CBS, and it’s something we still practice at MACIAS PR today. Before we ask how to promote a company, we look for the people, conflicts, ideas and experiences that can make someone outside that company genuinely curious. Because reporters don’t cover companies simply because companies want coverage. They cover stories that make people want to know more.
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About Mark Macias and 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 Senior Producer with 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.