Behind The Scenes: How We Got Drift Into The Sunday Edition Of The New York Times
I’ve been wanting to write a little more about behind the scenes in marketing at Drift, so thought it would be fun (and hopefully a bit different) to start by sharing how we got into the New York Times and how it all went down.
If you’ve ever tried to make it to a morning meeting in Manhattan from JFK, LaGuardia, or Newark you know, well — you can’t.
So Drift CEO David Cancel and I caught a flight after work on Thursday January 19th.
David was being interviewed by Adam Bryant for his Corner Office column, which has run in the Sunday edition of the Times since 2009 and featured everyone from Barbara Corcoran to MailChimp’s Ben Chestnut.
We got to the Times building on Eighth Avenue 15 minutes before the 9:30 AM meeting with Adam (which left just enough time to do a quick little photoshoot outside; it was the freaking New York Times after all).
Adam greeted David a few minutes before, and gave us a quick tour of the building:
After the quick tour, we settled into a conference room for an hour and a half to go deep.
Adam went all the way back to David’s childhood in Queens, a handful of shitty jobs, and when he started to develop his management style (I wish it were a podcast episode looking back).
And I was surprised at how informal the conversation was. Adam is an absolute pro. Podcast hosts take notes: instead of forcing an “interview”, he simply set up his tape recorder and just got David talking to open up.
His process is to record the long form conversation, get it transcribed to see the full notes, and then whittle it down into a ~1,000 word Q&A style interview for the Corner Office column.
After the interview, a photographer took David up a few floors to snap some (some = about 100) photos before heading out.
And about six weeks later, the finished product was published — first online on Friday March 24th, and then in print on Sunday March 26th.
That one article was shared over 1,000 times, earned 620 backlinks, and of course, it was a feature in the New York Times — aka one of those things in marketings that you don’t always see in Google Analytics or the spreadsheets but everywhere you go people are mentioning it (and often have to pay PR firms $$$ to get).
David’s inbox blew up with notes from other executives, CEO’s, and kind words from friends and Drift customers. That part was expected (and awesome).
But then something else started happening.
The emails from marketing and PR friends (and people I’ve never talked to) started to come in from everywhere.
How did we land that New York Times interview? What was the secret Which PR agency do we use at Drift? Can we make an intro to Adam?
I hate to spoil all of the fun, but I thought it would be more helpful if I answered this question people.
- We didn’t use a PR agency.
- We didn’t know anyone at the New York Times.
In fact, we just guessed Adam Bryant’s email address and sent him a cold email.
Here’s the exact email we sent —my typo in the first line included:
Adam replied just a day later:
And then David and I sat down over coffee to plot our response.
This was our opportunity, the door was open, and we didn’t want to blow it.
So we actually sat down together and wrote this reply word for word standing in a conference room of our office at the time at One Canal Park in Cambridge:
That was on November 29th.
And then Adam went silent (did we blow it?? I couldn’t stop thinking about it)
So we followed up 2+ weeks later on December 19th, and Adam came back asking to get on the phone to discuss further:
Then, of course — we kept missing each other over the holidays and through New Years, so we started the chase all over again on January 4th.
After getting on the phone with Adam to pressure test our pitch and make sure David was going to deliver on all the things we promised in the interview, we made plans to head to New York City on Friday January 20th — nearly 60 days after initially reaching out to Adam.
Looks pretty straight forward right? A few emails over the course of two months and we landed the interview.
Well, here’s the truth and why I wanted to write this article in the first place.
The only secret to getting press is having something to say.
That’s is Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s mantra, and more people need to hear it.
There’s no secret email.
There’s no magic follow-up formula.
In a world of constant noise, the *only* way to get press today is to have something to say.
In this case, we had David — a five-time founder, two-time CEO, with a few stories you’d want to listen to over a beer.
So as much as you want the press to write about how your brand new widget can now be programmed to automatically [insert buzz word here], you need to remember: it’s not about you, it’s about them.
Or more poetically, as Steven Pressfield says, Nobody Wants To Read Your Shit
When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer must give him something worthy of his gift to you.
When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, you develop empathy. You acquire the skill that is indispensable to all artists and entrepreneurs — the ability to switch back and forth in your imagination from your own point of view as writer/painter/seller to the point of view of your reader/gallery-goer/customer.
And this same advice can be applied beyond PR to marketing, copywriting, and the cold emails your sales team is sending.
Want hear more about marketing and a few of the things we’re doing at Drift? We share it all behind the scenes on our podcast Seeking Wisdom every week.
Subscribe to Seeking Wisdom on iTunes or just look it up on your favorite podcast app.
