Is the media interested in design and branding agencies?

“We’ve tried PR, and it just doesn’t work for a company like us. The media aren’t interested in writing about branding or design.”

We hear this so often in New York City. Agency leaders shake their heads sadly as they explain how they’ve tried everything possible, but no matter what approach they try, no matter what PR team they hire for it, none of them can get the important media interested. It might work in our home territory of the UK – maybe we have a different media there – but in this market, forget it. It can’t be done.

As one put it to us: “They’ll write about the thing, but not the branding of the thing.”

These agency leaders are wrong.

Since 2018 we’ve been working with branding and design agencies in NYC and elsewhere in the US, helping them appear consistently in the highest profile media.

Of course this is getting their new work into the creative media, but it’s also telling those stories in the leading consumer and business media.

And it’s going deeper, getting their thinking, opinions, expertise, and people into the marketing and business media that clients read and respect.

It’s getting them onto the podcasts that matter.

And onto the biggest conference stages across the world.

It’s why the brilliant AIGA NY came to us to share the news about its new brand identity.

We can do all this because this is all we do. We built Red Setter for the very specific task of helping the world’s best creative agencies raise their profile through exposure in the media.

We started doing it because we saw how design and branding agencies lacked the reputation they deserve. While buildings, clothes and furniture are visible objects, brand is intangible, and so its designers are rarely acknowledged in the way other designers are. Brand is the invisible design, and we need to change that.

Why? Because buyers choose agencies they’ve heard of. They choose them to be on pitch lists. An increasing number of buyers are asking generative AI for recommendations, and one of the key places the AI gets its information from to make those recommendations is press articles. So many agency leaders are asking us about that issue, we wrote a whole article on it.

Even if you can get onto pitch lists or shortlists through a way other than reputation, still the final result is likely to be the buyer choosing the agency they knew beforehand.

We trust what we know, and PR is about making you known to a wider group of people. Media outlets have audiences in the millions. They also deliver editorial endorsement. It is incredibly hard to get mentioned in places like Fast Company, Forbes, and Time Out, or to get a spot on Chris Do’s podcast or as a keynote speaker at the OFFF conference. Getting one confers enduring credibility and authority. It opens doors.

More profoundly, by making the work of brand designers more visible, by showing the transformative effect it has on businesses, people, society as whole, we believe we are helping more people understand it and give it the value it deserves. This is Boards allocating budgets but it’s also parents and teachers advising the next generation. In our podcast My Life in Design we interview leading designers about their route into the industry. Very, very few were pointed to it by parents and teachers, which is hardly surprising because very few people know the industry exists or understand the value it brings.

That’s what we’re changing at Red Setter. Working with a group of the very best creative agencies in the world, half of which are in the US, we are proving that the media is interested in branding and design. PR for creative agencies is possible. You just have to know how to do it right.

We’ll be hosting an AIGA NY event in March where we’re looking forward to meeting more of the brilliant agencies in NYC, and talking to them about how PR can work for them.