the average agency spends per year on pitches, at a cost of over £11,000, and 40% say existing clients get neglected because of it
Perspectus Global and PRCA survey of 107 PR agency leaders (2021)of PR professionals say reporting is a major part of their job, time that mostly cannot be billed
Muck Rack Fourth Annual State of Measurement in PR (2024)We build a reporting flow that gathers the coverage, pulls the metrics and drafts the wrap-up in your voice, then assembles the branded report. Your team reviews and sends instead of building from scratch. The monthly grind goes away.
We build a monitor that watches for mentions of your clients and their competitors, then surfaces a daily digest of what ran and why it matters. The team stops trawling. You spot the story the day it breaks, not the week after.
We build a pitch generator that drafts from the brief, your past campaigns and your case studies, pulling the angle and the proof into a near-final deck. You edit rather than start from a blank page. Pitches go out without burning a week.
We pull matching journalists and outlets against your brief, enrich them to a verified contact and structure the list ready to use. The research that ate an afternoon builds itself. Your team spends the time on the pitch, not the spreadsheet.
We build a follow-up engine that watches for untouched enquiries and stalled prospects, then drafts the next message for one-click send. The low-risk nudges go on their own. New business keeps moving without the founder chasing it.
You do not automate everything at once. You start where the time is worst and the payback is clearest. In a PR agencie, that order tends to look like this.
Start here. It is the biggest recurring time sink and the easiest to measure. Every client expects a monthly wrap-up, and building one means collecting clippings, screenshotting results, pulling reach numbers and writing the same commentary by hand. We build a flow that gathers the coverage, pulls the metrics and drafts the wrap-up in your voice, then assembles the branded report. The team reviews and sends instead of starting from scratch. Because it repeats every month across every client, the hours you save compound fast.
Next. Right now someone trawls for mentions by hand, and the agency still hears about a story too late to act on it. We build a monitor that watches for mentions of your clients and their competitors, then surfaces a daily digest of what ran and why it matters. The team stops the manual trawl, and you spot the story the day it breaks. It comes second because it feeds the reporting you just automated and keeps the account team ahead of the client, not behind them.
Then this. Building a list against a brief is manual searching, copy-paste and guessing at contact details, and it eats an afternoon before a single pitch is written. We pull matching journalists and outlets against the brief, enrich them to a verified contact and structure the list ready to use. Do this once reporting and monitoring are banked, because it speeds up the front end of every campaign and frees the team to spend the time on the pitch itself, not the spreadsheet.
Plenty of the work should stay human. If a tool promises to take this off you, close the tab.
The actual relationships your team has built with reporters and editors. That trust is the whole job, and it is exactly what AI cannot do. We automate the research and the admin around the relationship, never the relationship itself. The call, the coffee and the favour stay human.
The judgement on what makes a story land, the angle, the hook, the read on a journalist's beat. That is the work a client pays a PR agency for. AI can draft from a template, but it cannot find the angle that gets coverage. That stays with your people.
If your team cannot quickly sanity-check the output, it does not go live. A wrong pitch sent to the wrong journalist burns a relationship you spent years building, and you do not get it back. We build the human review in, not as an afterthought. The team always approves before anything reaches a reporter.
Three ways PR agencies try to fix this. Here is what each one actually does.
| Off-the-shelf AI | An in-house hire | A Nifty build | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A general tool your team prompts by hand. | A full-time AI or ops person on the payroll. | Automation built into the tools you already use. |
| What it costs | Cheap per seat. The real cost is the hours spent steering it. | £80k to £120k a year, plus ramp and management. | Fixed scope from £4,000. You own it. |
| Time to value | Instant, but shallow. | Six months to ramp. | Two to four weeks. |
| What it changes | Helps one person work faster. The process stays the same. | A lot, eventually, if you keep them busy. | How the work runs, not just how fast one person types. |
| Who runs it | Each person, every time. | Them, until they leave. | It runs itself. You keep it, we keep it sharp. |
We are new, so this is the shape of a typical build, not a client we are dressing up. It is the pattern we build against in a PR agency, end to end.
A ten-person consumer PR agency. A founder, a couple of account directors, a handful of execs. Winning work on reputation, but the team loses the last week of every month to coverage reports and the founder writes every new-business pitch.
Each month the execs collect clippings, screenshot results and rebuild the same branded report for every client by hand. Monitoring is a manual trawl, so a competitor story gets spotted a week late. A new-business brief lands and the founder blocks out two evenings to build the pitch deck from scratch. The retained clients get neglected while the agency chases the next one.
Two things, built into the tools they already use. A coverage-reporting flow that gathers the clippings, pulls the metrics and drafts the wrap-up in the agency's voice, then assembles the branded report. And a media monitor that watches for client and competitor mentions and surfaces a daily digest. Two to four weeks, fixed price, success metric agreed first: hours back and billable time protected.
The monthly report becomes a review-and-send instead of a week-long build. The team spots stories the day they break rather than the week after. The execs get their time back for client work, the founder stops building decks at night, and the retained accounts stop getting neglected because someone finally has the hours to look after them.
Send us the one workflow eating the most time. Within 48 hours we send back a short walkthrough and a straight answer on what is worth automating.
A fixed-scope build, shipped in two to four weeks. We agree the success metric in writing first, in hours saved or pounds back. Then we build it into your tools.
An optional monthly retainer keeps the work current as your tools and your desk change. You run it. We keep it sharp.