In shortAccording to Svetlana Khachiyan, pitching a ready-made story to American media costs $500 to $15,000, a media package with outlets like the LA Times and USA Today runs $15,000–20,000, and her agency’s Cannes red carpet package (the walk, two photographers, a videographer and three media placements) is $15,000, not counting flights, hotel or the dress. Americans google a brand before they buy, she says, so press coverage works as “trust packaging.” Getting her English to negotiation level took about a year and a half.
Santa Monica, sunset. Svetlana Khachiyan is driving, looking out the window, when another day comes back to her: December 11, 2011, Paveletsky station in Moscow, a girl from the small town of Kamyshin with a suitcase and a blanket in a plastic wrapper her mom sent along. Back then the city’s buildings pressed down on her: “My God, I’m so tiny, how am I ever going to make it here?” Thirteen years later she signs contracts in America worth tens of thousands of dollars.
I had the questions everyone building a business or a personal brand in the US asks: how much does PR cost, can you get into American media without connections, and does a red carpet really change anything? I brought them to Svetlana when we were recording interviews in Los Angeles. The conversation turned out warm and surprisingly frank: when we talked money, she answered in numbers, not hints.
How much does PR cost in the US?
I asked point-blank, and Svetlana laughed: “What great questions! Straight to business.” Then she gave me the prices. If you already have a story written, pitching it to the media through her platform Pay2Pitch costs anywhere from $500 to $15,000. Serious bloggers and companies usually buy media packages for $15,000–20,000: placements in outlets like the LA Times and USA Today.
To start, she suggests “testing the waters” with one article for $500–1,000, though three is better, so you can put an “as seen on” strip of logos on your website. Those logos, she says, are what most clients are really after: they go into pitch decks, onto websites, into social media.
I immediately tried this on myself. We were just putting together “five tips to get in shape in five days,” and Svetlana suggested publishing tips like that in the media instead of on YouTube. People click for the tips, and they see that USA Today is writing about you. “These little puzzle pieces are what PR is,” she said.
Кадр из выпуска «Без границ»Why does a business need press if nobody reads magazines anymore?
I asked her straight out: in the age of social media, does journalism still matter? Svetlana said that when Americans see an ad, they check the Instagram first, but then they always go to Google and search the name or the brand. The reason is simple: there are a lot of scammers here.
“America may be the birthplace of advertising and PR, but it’s also, you could say, the birthplace of scams,” she says.
And they check for real. Svetlana told me about a meeting with a manager from Scooter Braun’s team (the producer behind Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato): in the middle of the conversation, the woman casually mentioned where Svetlana lives. They had looked her up in advance.
That’s why your search results need more than your own social media. They need what a third party says about you. Svetlana even ran a survey of Americans on what most influences a decision to buy. Referrals from friends came first, media coverage second, Google results third.
Press coverage, Svetlana explains, isn’t there so people will read it; it’s part of the packaging.
How do you build a career in the US with zero English and no connections?
Eight years ago, all Svetlana had in America were a few acquaintances from VKontakte, the Russian social network. A publicist, she says, is someone who writes well in their own language and knows journalists. Here she had neither.
When I moved, it was pretty hard: I arrived with zero English.Watch this moment · 14:56
She started with Russian-speaking concerts, then moved into marketing and launched museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, New York and Las Vegas, learning English as she went. By her count, it took about a year and a half to get to confident negotiations and signing clients. And to everyone who promises you can learn the language in a month, she says: “Come show me, I’d love to see it.”
Listening to her, I thought of our first months in Miami: hostels with cockroaches, pasta boiled in an electric kettle. She had the blanket in plastic, we had the kettle. America greets everyone differently, but it resets everyone to zero. The only question is who pushes off from the bottom.
Кадр из выпуска «Без границ»Can you become famous on connections alone, without talent?
“Yes and no,” Svetlana said. A good publicist can promote an empty shell, but every new level brings new opportunities, and sooner or later those same opportunities expose it.
Her own story started with an electric guitar. As a teenager she played in a rock band in Kamyshin, wrote the songs herself and promoted them herself, too: photo shoots, radio, posters. One day a club’s art director offered to pay her to bring in a pop singer. Two weeks later he took her backstage and counted out three thousand rubles.
I’d beaten the system! It turns out you can make money doing what you love.Watch this moment · 5:22
Six months later she moved to Moscow and got a job at a music label. A week after arriving, the girl from Kamyshin was walking around backstage at the Olimpiysky arena, trying her hardest to look unimpressed by the stars around her. In three and a half years she went from producer’s assistant to executive director, and in 2015 she opened her own agency.
How are American journalists different from Russian ones?
The tools are the same, Svetlana says; the difference is in attitude. In Moscow, she took a completely unknown young singer to events and tugged at reporters’ sleeves, and they brushed her off: “Go away, I’m interviewing Dima Bilan.” In Los Angeles, at an event with 50 Cent, she did the same and asked a reporter to interview her client. The reporter finished with the rapper and came back on her own, no reminders needed.
Her column at USA Today, which she writes as a contributor, is a story of its own. She calls it a golden ticket: at a Balenciaga show she introduced herself to Demna as a USA Today contributor, and a minute later her client was posing for photos with the designer.
How do you get on the red carpet at Cannes without getting scammed?
Her first piece of advice sounds like a joke, but it isn’t: book your hotel six months ahead. Invitations aren’t sold to the public; they come through concierge services and private agents, and plenty of them are fake: show up with a “photoshopped” ticket and you’ll be turned away at the carpet. Real tickets are issued no earlier than a day before, so if someone says they already have tickets in hand, it isn’t true.
Her other rules: three dresses for one walk (you may hate the last one two days out), a mandatory makeup rehearsal, and two or three photographers instead of one. This year Svetlana handled about 15 red carpet walks with six clients.
What does it get you? Instagram reach goes up two to three times during the festival, bloggers time their launches to it, and after Cannes one client was invited by a brand to wear its dress there, all expenses paid. But the story that touched me most was a different one. A client with a very successful business goes to the Grammys and to Cannes and turns down any press afterward.
Sveta, I do this just to make life brighter.Watch this moment · 41:15
She worked for forty-two years, and now she goes out and enjoys life. To me, that’s PR too, the best kind: PR for yourself.
Кадр из выпуска «Без границ»Will artificial intelligence replace publicists?
Svetlana uses AI herself, though mostly to count calories. But major outlets, she says, run detectors and won’t accept generated copy. And strategy is experience, which a machine doesn’t have: every state responds to different tools. When they opened a museum in Miami, the only thing that saved them was banner ads, which she had written off as a relic.
What AI lacks, she says, is the main thing: it never ran around Cannes or walked the Grammys red carpet.
The ones who will suffer, she believes, are copywriters and logo designers, not the people who come up with unconventional ideas.
What I take away from this conversation
I walked away from the recording feeling I had talked with someone who isn’t shy about her ambitions and doesn’t hide the numbers. The girl with the blanket in plastic at Paveletsky station and the woman watching the sunset in Santa Monica are the same person; she just never stopped. Her last piece of advice I wrote down for myself.
Build up your media presence, because you can’t monetize modesty.Watch this moment · 1:04:16
If you’re building a business or a personal brand in the US, watch the full episode; the episode is in Russian, and YouTube can auto-translate the subtitles into English, and our entire conversation, word for word, is on the next page.
Kristina Samofal
Photo & Video Production