How I accidentally invented the UK Digital PR industry.

Gordon Ramsay's new show on Netflix reminded me of the time I accidentally created the industry. We just called it PR for SEO or "authority link-building" back then.

Hello Substack fans. As I sat watching the Gordon Ramsay documentary on Netflix the other day, it reminded me of a campaign I did for Caterer.com. We got a child actor to dress up as Ramsay and swearily berate people. The video is worth a watch, even though it was done in a world where HD did not exist.

The story was a global success and Jay Leno even played it for Ramsay when he appeared on his chat show. More about how it came to be in another story.

It was from a time where creativity was key to PR and when no-one insisted we had to write for the machines of the Search of LLM variety. Have those days gone?

As is often the case, I digress. The Ramsay documentary got me thinking, about how I accidentally invented the digital PR industry. No really.

As anyone who has attended a conference talk that I have delivered (often to a largely unsuspecting audience) will know, I usually open with “I am the guy who invented the digital PR industry that we now live in today”. It’s a hell of a claim.

I have made the same claim online too, I encourage people to call me out if they feel I am wrong. I’m not shy.

How did I do this? Pull up a sandbag, grab a cup of coffee and let me tell you.

I was working inhouse for an absurdly boring financial services company when I asked the bosses if I could do some freelance PR work, but focussing on the consumer media so as not to be a conflict. They said it was ok.

I used the likes of Shell Livewire and UKBusinessForums (still going) to look for freelance work. A few stories that I had placed for brands caught the eye of a couple of people from the affiliate industry. One was Kieron Donoghue and the other was Mark Pearson. Google them, they went on to do ok for themselves.

Around this time, I also met a very clever guy called Chris Clarkson and went to a few Scottish Twitter get-togethers with him. That is where I met Craig McGill and Andrew Girdwood, two others who also knew about the SEO PR goldmine. Both are legends and I encourage you to become cyber-buddies with them. As I remember it, we chatted a lot that night about what is now Digital PR.

Any who, back to Mark and Kieron. They were already ahead of the curve on the value of media coverage, in terms of the links that the media gave out to the brands it wrote about in its stories. Back then (early to mid 2000’s), there were no; follow, nofollow, implied links etc. It was just live links. Mark had MyVoucherCodes and Kieron had a few mobile phone comparison websites.

Another tangent; I didn’t know Kieron very well and I was wary of doing the work and not getting paid. I told him this and he sent me a pic of his Escalade, parked outside his baller house. The picture was a not-so-subtle way of telling me he was ok for the money. I still laugh about this and remind him of the story whenever I get the chance.

For both brands I was mainly targeting the personal finance media, as I knew lots of journalists very well from the day job. When I decided to go full time on the freelance work, and had set up an agency called 10 Yetis, Mark from MyVoucherCodes asked me to take a leap and take the same approach to consumer media (or “front of the paper” as we called it then). I didn’t feel that I was as strong with this media type, but I went for it.

I never looked back. The consumer media loved the types of stories I was doing.

An example if I may. Back then, voucher codes were rare… so were Snow Leopards (natural segway) so I got Mark to sponsor a Snow Leopard breeding program at London Zoo. This involved him actually being in a cage with some of the big bitey feckers for press pics. I still laugh about this with him today. His scouse accent shouting down the phone at me “what the actual fuck have you got me doing Andy?”. It got a lot of links.

Next up, annoying Waitrose. I knew that a start-up that was perceived to be helping consumers, would always get great coverage (and links) from publicly taking on a large brand that was trying to bully consumers into not saving money.

Within minutes of spotting a public comment from a Waitrose comms person that consumers should not be using a money saving voucher code that was meant for NHS workers only, I had issued a comment from Mark to the national media. It went a bit bonkers that one. David and Goliath 101. In modern PR terms kids, think of this as the olden days equivalent of floating something down the Thames or a “Greatest job in the world” campaign. Tired, but effective.

These types of stories always had links to MyVoucherCodes and before you knew it, the brand was at the top of Google for pretty much every associated search term. A few other large affiliate brands spotted this (Confused.com probably being one of the biggest back then) and started to use our PR for SEO services.

We didn’t call it digital PR, we called it online PR, or PR for SEO. It was a crazy time to be alive. However, the more big brand authority link-building campaigns that we won, the more times I kept hearing the name “Matt Cutts”. He was head of the Google web spam team, and he had just about had enough of the kind of thing we were doing (my words, not his!). Soon things like Google Penguin and Google Panda came along… I am not getting into the merits and consequences of that.

We quickly realised that all links were no longer classed as equal and it became all about the Follow link. Our campaigns had to change and hey presto, we came up with online crazy widgets or “on-page” fun stuff to give journalists something to link to. This has been rebranded by the cool digi folk as “content marketing”.

An example. During the horse meat scandal, we put a “What percentage horse are you?” calculator on a MyVoucherCodes spin off site. You said how many crispy pancakes or lasagnas you had eaten from a certain supermarket, and it told you what percentage horse you were. Sigh, and I wonder why I am called puerile by a few in the industry.

No matter how bad you think this campaign was, the tabloid media loved it and even better, they follow-linked to the page with the widget on. We did hundreds of spin-offs of this. Every campaign landed. We charged between £2k and £5k for these campaigns, depending on the amount of legwork needed.

After a few years of doing this for far more brands than I can ever remember, I noticed a few more agencies had started offering this as a service. Not only that, but they were also slick AF and offered things like guaranteed link numbers, something we would never do. PR doesn’t offer guarantees darling.

They were basically SEO agencies (many of which 10 Yetis had worked with on a white label outsource, rude) who were pivoting to try and do “online PR”. They were largely trash because… imho only PR people can truly tell a good story.

I gave it the following analogy during an early day’s online PR conference in London, and it put me in the unique position of being very publicly hated and slated by both the SEO world and basically, anyone with any taste. With hindsight, maybe not my smartest move.

“SEO’s will try and f*ck you on the first date, PR’s will, wine, dine and 69 you”. I was meaning this in the context of trying to get a follow link from a journalist. I have mellowed somewhat now.

It was the start of a long and bumpy relationship between myself and the SEO community. I will always blame SEO’s for ruining the reputation of what is now Digital PR. They spammed it with their Outreach Ninjas and Digital Consultants.

Very few Outreach Ninjas are trained in the ways of a storytelling PR, and yet the PR community was getting nailed by journalists as these SEO types were sending shonky and embarrassingly poor pitches and pretending they were public relations professionals.

I had created a monster. Fast forward to now and the Digital PR industry is worth $bn’s globally. Some of the best PR people I know work in this sector, and it really does hold its own as a credible part of the wider PR industry ecosystem. To me though, there is no “Digital PR”... there is just “PR” and digital is one tranche of that.

Those lofty comms types who shrug off the value of the digital brigade fail to see the positive impact that online PR brings to the crisis comms industry (more on that in a follow up post) or how digital coverage can strategically support a brand in reaching its long-term goals.

Ultimately, no one was doing this before I started doing it and certainly not at the scale that 10 Yetis was doing it.

A funny nugget to end on. At the peak of our work for MyVoucherCodes we were putting out a story per day for the brand, targeting a different sector of press each morning. This is a crazy amount of work, but it was working very very well.

We were achieving hundreds of links every month.Only one journo ever twigged the scale of what we were doing and that was Paul Smith. When he outed us for doing this, I was incredibly rude about him. My rudeness towards him is something I have always regretted and something I have profusely apologised to him about. We ended up working together a few years later, so I know he forgave me.

So that’s SubStack story one done, and I will end it how I want. Thanks to Mark Pinsent for the guidance on my Substacking, and for making me realise that before people search on an LLM or Google, it will most likely be a PR story that has inspired them.

Next up, how I upset Al-Qaeda and they sent stuff to my house. Maybe…