Here it is, the worst Dry January pitch of all time
Here it is, the worst Dry January pitch of all time
A foolproof guide to unsuccessfully soliciting trend coverage for any non-alcoholic beverage brand
Editor’s note: Fingers is still on break until next week, which has given me the time to address some not-fun housekeeping/administrative stuff. More on that soon, thanks for your patience! In the meantime, I thought it’d be fun to reprint my piece about publicists’ worst Dry January pitch habits, originally published here at ye olde boozeletter in January 2022. I edited it lightly for accuracy, but I think it mostly holds up! This edition is exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, so if that’s not you, buy a subscription here. —Dave.
It’s Dry January, and as expected, the discourse has been utterly dismal. Trend pieces about non-alcoholic beer, wine, and “elixirs” have once again flooded the timeline. Business outlets are demanding you take note of the massive growth that some1 booze-free brands are showing. Dubious statistics and tedious sanctimony2 abound: PBR’s ass-eating tweeting was apparently part of a since-aborted “Wet January” campaign designed to counter-program self-imposed sobriety for the month. People seemed madder about that than the analingus endorsement!
Strange times we live in, dear reader. Stranger still if you’re a communications professional trying to get the word out about your client’s non-alcoholic potables. With all that noise in the media ecosystem, how will you break through?
Never fear, because your fearless Fingers editor is here. As a seasoned beer business journalist, I’ve been on the receiving end of many a Dry January-themed press release. As you might imagine, this sucks! But having been bombarded with booze-adjacent palaver for about a decade, I’m deeply, painfully qualified to identify what makes some Dry January pitches merely boring, and others downright catastrophic.3 Today, like Dr. Frankenstein assembling the otherworldly beast that bore his name, I’m going to put those hard-won insights to good use. That’s right, dear reader: we’re building the worst Dry January pitch of all time.
🏗️ The building blocks of all bad pitches
Every terrible pitch, Dry January-related or otherwise, has a few fundamental components. Typos and chaotic formatting are IN; coherent, relevant information is OUT. Why would you convert body copy to plain text when you can copy/paste three different fonts and colors into the same message? Exactly, you wouldn’t. Hell, if you’re feeling saucy, run black copy on a black background, so the recipient will only be able to read it if they randomly happen to highlight the text with their cursor. Go nuts!
Attachments should be plentiful. If you know how to make every social button in your company’s signature into an individual .jpeg, do it! That’ll make it a lot harder to find the one-sheet you’ve included about your brand, which must—repeat, must—be sent in .docx format so it’ll immediately crash any Mac that opens it. Always, always be asking yourself: Would this pitch give Mavis Beacon uncontrollable vapors on sight? If the answer is anything besides an emphatic yes, you’ve got work to do. Pro tip: slightly change the subject line every time you follow up—which should be at least thrice—to break Gmail’s threading function!
💃 Notes on tone and style
As with all pitches, you should be slightly condescending and also cloyingly friendly. But for Dry January, it’s very important to add an arbitrary frisson of urgency to your dispatches. This is a pressing item! Assume that your ideal reader, a food & beverage writer, has never heard of, much less considered the concept of not drinking for an entire month, and that you are serving it up on a very-sober silver platter. Act accordingly. Exclamation points, BLOCK CAPS, emoji—for a story this big, there’s no punctuation too overbearing, no syntax too spectacular. Dry January is here, and these dipshits in the content mines need to know about it.
⚡Buzzwords: yes
Some PR pros fret about the relative lack of vocabulary available to concisely describe such an abstract concept as “a temporary sobriety ritual that is sort of a British thing but also now just ‘a thing,’ I guess?” But not you. You’ve got plenty of bars about not going to bars: