Most marketing teams are measuring PR wrong.
They're counting impressions, tallying article placements, and reporting publication names. But none of those hard metrics can tell you whether anyone actually trusted you more, considered you more seriously, or moved closer to a decision. Earned media strategy lives in a different category, and if you're judging it by the same scorecard as paid ads, you're going to keep undervaluing the channel that compounds.
In this episode of Humans of Growth, Aly Hathcock sits down with Pierce Kafka, founder of Kafka Media Group, a boutique PR and media relations agency working in health, technology, and entertainment. Pierce breaks down why publicity beats paid advertising for long-term brand trust, how his team built a proprietary framework called soft analytics to measure what impressions can't, and why the next frontier of influencer relations isn't macro celebrities or big-budget deals.
Pierce walks through the practical difference between hard analytics (impressions, article count, unique visitors) and soft analytics (brand sentiment, the "cool quote," ideas and insights that shift campaign direction). He explains how KMG used earned media to support a funding round for one of their clients, why micro influencers with 2,000 followers often outperform those with 2 million, and what a cascade of genuine influencer content actually looks like when it's working.
In this episode, we cover:
✔ Why hard analytics can't capture what earned media actually does to brand trust
✔ Soft analytics explained: how to measure PR outcomes that don't fit in a dashboard
✔ The "cool quote" framework: turning third-party praise into a reusable marketing asset
✔ How to use media coverage to build investor trust before a funding round
✔ Earned media vs paid advertising: why publicity is more durable than rented attention
✔ Micro influencer marketing: why 2,000 highly engaged followers can outperform 2 million
✔ Why unpolished influencer content converts better than produced brand ads
✔ How to get influencers to post without paying them, by crafting stories that offer them value
✔ The difference between B2C and B2B storytelling, and why the audience changes but the structure doesn't
✔ Why Instagram is overrated right now (and what Pierce thinks is underrated)
✔ How AI is being used to organize and analyze large volumes of media and testimonial data
✔ Beginning, middle, and end: the simplest framework for any marketing story that actually resonates
If you're a founder, CMO, marketing director, or agency owner trying to figure out how to measure and scale earned media without blowing budget on macro influencers or celebrity deals, this conversation will change how you think about publicity as a growth channel.
Because when you stop paying for attention and start earning it, it doesn't disappear when the budget runs out.
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Learn more about Kafka Media Group here.
