Publicize

Please describe your company and your position there.

I run Thrifted - a large online retailer of vintage & secondhand clothing.

For what projects/services did your company hire Publicize, and what were your goals?

We hired Publicise to help build our digital presence through high DA score articles with reputable websites.

How did you select Publicize?

I found them online after some searching, and having already talked to a number of more traditional agencies. There sales pitch was good - results seemed to be a given, although not guaranteed each month.

Describe the scope of their work in detail, including any steps and the final deliverables.

They began with a discovery phase - with a SEO audit of the site. Each month they ran '2 tactics' - which would be based around a particular outreach or content strategy. We would take fortnightly calls to review what the latest tactic was and where it had got to.

How many people from the Publicize team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We had 2 people on our account.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Unfortunately we received no benefit from working with Publicize for 7 months. We gained only 2 results - both of which were for articles on spam / clickbait paid for websites. Its appalling that they can run a campaign for 6 months, costing £1,000s, without any real result. What is everyone paying for ?! We have an interesting business, in an industry that is being written about constantly in mainstream media.

During the time with Publicize - ON OUR OWN we gained 2 results in The Guardian's Saturday magazine - a.k.a. one of the biggest and respected papers in the UK. This clearly demonstrates that it was the fault of Publicize for a complete lack of results. Their outreach emails are dire, untailored and under researched. The quality of a lot of the articles Publicize produced was dreadful, our interns are able to create better content.

The grammar was appalling. Little to no theme or structure to hold any of the writing together. 'C' grade GCSE English at best.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Regular zoom meetings were a positive. However there project management style seemed incoherent - their team is spread across the globe in different timezones. There were clear language issues on some of our calls, and more worryingly, in some of the content produced.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They give the impression of a 'startup pr agency' with a lower cost base than traditional London based agencies. This suited us as an Ecommerce business.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

 They should be clear throughout when they are not receiving any responses from their outreach. It was left to us to realise this - when they quickly moved onto the next tactic without as much as a word on the previous failure. Communicate better about what is going wrong so that we can work with you to fix it Publicize.

You are tied into a contract with or without results - we worked hard to include a 6 month break in our contract. A rolling 2 month break would keep them more accountable. We experienced a real dwindling of efforts over the summer. It was obvious from the calls that there was no clear strategy.

What was then appalling and showed a clear lack of professional standards, was during this period the date for us to give notice to end the contract came around. Suddenly their team sprang into action - claiming that there were great results on the horizon, that they were sure of... none of these results came in. Our contract notice date passed and they had locked us in for another 6 months.