Your agency isn't boring. Your press releases are.

I spent years inside Campaign Magazine's editorial workflow. The pitches that landed and the ones that didn't were never about how good the work was. They were about whether the pitch had remembered there was a reader at the other end.

Most agency press releases read like internal memos in formal wear. The work itself might be brilliant. The writing assumes that's enough.

It isn't.

What editors actually do

Trade editors process hundreds of pitches a week. They open the ones with a first line that answers the question every editor asks before reading anything else: why is this a story this week?

Not why is it impressive. Not why are you proud of it. Why does it earn the space, this issue, against the dozens of other things on the same desk.

If your release opens with "Agency X is pleased to announce…", the answer to that question is missing, and the editor has already moved on.

The four reasons agency releases fail

There are patterns. I've seen all of them, and we all keep writing them. None of them are about the work. They're about what we forgot to put around the work.

One - the lede is the wrong sentence. The first line of a release is almost always the line you care about (we won a brief, we hired a name, we made a film). The line the editor cares about is one paragraph later - the part where you accidentally explain what makes this different. Move that line to the top. The rest of the release usually survives the swap without much editing.

Two - there is no character. Real stories have people doing or saying or deciding something specific. Most agency releases are written in the passive voice with the agency as the subject of every sentence. Put a named human in the lede. Quote them saying something they would actually say to a friend over coffee.

Three - no peg. A peg is the reason this story belongs in this week's publication and not a generic one. New campaigns live on industry context: a category moment, a regulatory change, a client sector that's suddenly in the news. If your release doesn't anchor itself to something the editor's readers are already arguing about, it's competing on novelty alone - which means it loses.

Four - the body buries the proof. Editors don't read the second half of releases. They scan the top, then jump to the bottom for contact details. If the killer detail (the result, the unusual collaborator, the unexpected media buy) is in paragraph six, it is invisible. Move it.

What works instead

The simplest test for any release is to read just the headline and the first paragraph aloud and ask: would the editor reading this learn something they want to pass on?

If yes, you're close. If no, you're describing the inside of your studio to a room full of people who don't live in it.

The bonus is that the same fix improves your social posts, your founder LinkedIn, your award entries, and your sales emails. The discipline of writing for a tired reader, on a Tuesday, who has six tabs open is the discipline of writing communication. The press release is just where most agencies discover whether they have it.

Why fixing this on your own is the hard part

Every one of the four failure patterns above is diagnosable in a draft in under five minutes. Fixing them - actually rewriting the lede, actually finding the peg the editor's readers are already arguing about, actually finding the sentence that makes the story a story - is not a five-minute job. It is the difference between a release you send and one that gets run.

The reason most agencies keep writing the version that doesn't land is that the version that does requires knowing which peg is live for which editor this week, and which of your own facts is the one an editor would use in their write-up. That is unwritten knowledge and it lives inside the people who spend their weeks in these newsrooms.

The work you're sending out is interesting. The pitch is the only thing standing between it and the page. If you would like a second pair of eyes on a release before it goes, get in touch - it is a large fraction of what we do.