For decades, media relations in Washington ran on one transaction: write a good pitch, find the right reporter, land the story. Every communications shop in town built its playbook around that loop — earned media first, everything else an afterthought.
Noah Theran, Executive Vice President and Head of Global External Affairs for the Managed Funds Association, told Brody Mullins and I on The Deciders that the loop is broken, and most organizations haven’t caught up. The next episode of The Deciders airs Tuesday, August 25.
“The pitch is dead. The pitch is dead. If you are operating in a transactional way with reporters, you’re unlikely to be successful.”
The math has changed, Theran said. The news cycle no longer runs on a reporter’s schedule — it runs on the regulator’s. When a final rule drops, the only story that gets written is the one filed in the minutes right after, not the one filed after a week of careful reflection.
“The only story that’s going to be written is within 15 minutes of that final rule coming out. ... That’s not easy, and it takes a lot of trust within the team. But when you get it right, the outcome for the organization can be immense.”
Theran’s answer isn’t to abandon earned media — it’s to stop treating it as the whole job. He runs his team around three legs of one stool: earned, owned and paid, moving together, with nobody boxed into a single lane. Paid media, in particular, he’s stopped thinking of as a numbers game and started treating as an engineering problem.
“The old school Mad Men adage was 50% of your advertising is wasted, you just don’t know what 50. And I am trying to reduce that 50 to like 10.”
That shows up in where MFA spends: connected TV routed through LinkedIn’s targeting, ads built to reach a specific COO or legislative director rather than a general D.C. audience, and — pointedly — skepticism of the newsletter sponsorships and low-ROI events that used to be comms table stakes.
It’s a case for a communications function that looks less like a press shop and more like a campaign — one where legal, government affairs and comms move on the same clock, because increasingly, they have to.
TAKEAWAY
The old model treated earned, owned and paid media as separate jobs on separate timelines. Theran’s version treats them as one campaign, running on the regulator’s clock, not the reporter’s — and organizations that haven’t made that shift are the ones still writing pitches nobody answers.
Excellent points! Blunt but insightful…!