Your client says they want Forbes. Here’s what they actually want.

If I had a dollar for every time a client told me they just wanted to be in Forbes, or get on Oprah (yes, this goes back a while, I’ve been doing this for 21 years), I could probably retire tomorrow.

Here’s the thing though. Clients come to you with a wish list. Forbes. Oprah. That one outlet their competitor landed. And most of the time, they can’t tell you why they want it. That’s not their fault. They’re not the PR experts. That’s literally why they hired you.

Our job isn’t to take that wish list at face value. It’s to dig beneath it and figure out what they actually need.

The wish list isn’t a strategy

This happens constantly in the discovery call phase. A prospective client rattles off a list of dream placements, and if you just nod along and try to deliver exactly that, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Not because you didn’t do good work. Because you never got clear on what “good” actually meant to them.

(The “top tier vanity outlet” landscape has shifted too, by the way. Oprah’s favorite things list still happens every year, but it’s basically an Amazon affiliate play at this point. It’s not doing much for what actually matters now: AI discoverability.)

Earned media used to sit at the top of the visibility food chain. Then it got pushed aside by influencer seeding and user-generated content. Now, with large language models and answer engine platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity becoming where people actually go for recommendations, earned media is back at the top of the list. Just for a different reason than it used to be.

The real goal is never actually “get me in X outlet”

It sounds obvious once you say it out loud, but the actual goal behind a placement request is almost never the placement itself. It’s usually one of these:

Credibility. They want to be taken seriously.

Discoverability. They want to show up when their potential customers ask an AI for a recommendation.

Sales. Plain and simple.

Investor confidence. They’re raising money and need to look like a serious player.

Validation. Sometimes it really is “my mom will finally understand what I do.” I’m not kidding. We hear this constantly. One feature in Forbes or Inc, and suddenly mom gets it.

Your job is to figure out which one is actually driving the request. Then build the strategy around that, not around the name of the outlet.

The questions that actually get you there

When you’re on a discovery call (or even mid engagement, when a client is launching something new), these are the questions that pull the real goal out of the wish list:

• What would change for your business if we landed that placement?
• Who specifically do you want to see this coverage?
• What does success look like for you six to twelve months from now, not just in PR, but in your business and your life?
• Why now? What made this the right time to invest in PR?

Then actually listen. Not for the answer. For the emotion underneath it. That’s where the real goal lives.

Be careful what you wish for

Quick story. There’s a guy in New York (day job: taxi driver) with over a million followers on Instagram. His whole thing is finding tiny, undiscovered restaurants run by families who are incredible at what they do and totally unknown. He’ll post about a place, show how empty it is, how good the food is, how hard the family’s working.

Then a week later he’ll go back. Lines out the door. Packed. Turning customers away.

Sounds great, right? Except a lot of these places aren’t ready for it. They didn’t plan the inventory. They didn’t staff up. Some of them have had to close for a few days just to regroup.

That’s the exact same risk with earned media. If a client scales visibility faster than their operations can handle it, that “win” turns into a mess fast. Part of your job as the expert is helping them see that coming, and building toward it gradually instead of just chasing the biggest, splashiest hit available.

Match the real goal to the right strategy

Once you know what’s actually driving the request, the tactics basically pick themselves.

If the real goal is credibility: think authority building and expert positioning. Placements that show how this person or brand does things their own way, based on real experience.

If the real goal is sales, think affiliate opportunities, gift guides, and best-of lists. These convert directly, and bonus, they also tend to carry high domain authority, which matters for AI discoverability too.

If the real goal is investor confidence: think business press and founder-focused thought leadership. This isn’t about the end customer. It’s about showing investors the company is innovative and the founder is a serious player.

If the real goal is validation: think early wins and constant communication. Set expectations early (I do it right on the sales call), and make sure the client always knows what you’re working on and why. Validation-seeking clients need to feel the process, not just see the results.

Present it back in their words, not your jargon

Once you know the real goal, show it back to them plainly. Not in PR speak that makes you sound smart. In their own language.

Something like: “You said you want your investors to see that people trust this brand. Here’s how we build that.”

And when they’re chasing vanity metrics (a follower count, a mention on some random news aggregator nobody actually reads), it’s on you to gently steer them away from it. A press release picked up by twenty irrelevant aggregator sites looks like a win on paper. It does nothing for the outcome they actually said they wanted.

The shift from vendor to strategic partner

When you stop taking the wish list at face value, and start asking the questions that get to the real goal, something changes. You stop being an order taker. You become the person the client can’t imagine working without.

That’s it. Not landing the exact placement someone named on a discovery call, but building the strategy that actually gets them where they’re trying to go, even when they couldn’t have named it themselves.

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