PR in the US: What It Costs, How to Get Into USA Today and Onto the Cannes Red Carpet

KristinaHi, my dear!

SvetlanaHi!

KristinaListen, PR has become an essential part of life for anyone who wants to be famous. Tell me, is it really true that for good PR, connections matter more than talent?

SvetlanaYes and no. If a person is, let’s say, an empty shell, and a skilled publicist pushes them somewhere, sooner or later it all comes out anyway. When you reach a new level, you get new connections, and even more opportunities come your way. And those same opportunities can expose that you’re an empty shell. They can highlight the very fact that you’re not an expert in your niche, if everything rests on PR alone.

KristinaHow many years have you devoted to this field?

SvetlanaI’ve been doing this professionally for more than twelve years.

KristinaTo be a publicist is, I think, to be a good diplomat, a good psychologist, and a good communicator all at once. How did you cultivate all those personalities in yourself?

SvetlanaI think it happened very organically. I believe you don’t become a publicist, you’re born one. You just unlock all these skills in yourself. In my case, by the will of fate and because my family moved, I changed three schools and four classes. So walking up and introducing myself to someone, just like that, head-on, is totally easy for me. Networking, building connections, is something I had to do as a kid, first at school, and then it started helping me in my profession.

All of this depends on a lot of things: your character, your communication skills. And I also grew a profession out of a hobby, I followed what my soul responded to. So it’s all like a Rubik’s Cube: just different facets of personality, and they all help my profession.

KristinaSvetochka, tell me, how did your story as a PR specialist begin in the first place?

SvetlanaIt all started in my hometown. When I was a teenager, I played electric guitar in a rock band. We played songs by Nightwish, Evanescence, Avril Lavigne, and many others. We had our own songs too, I wrote them, by the way, and one of my songs was the ringtone on different people’s phones. I had some popularity around town: people recognized me on the street and took photos with me.

I was also the co-producer of my band: I organized photo shoots, made deals with the radio, with local stations, put on concerts, made posters. And one day the art director of one of the clubs came up to me and said, “Sveta, you’re so good at this, why don’t you put on a concert, but not with your band and not a rock concert like usual, a pop singer brought in from out of town, and I’ll pay you for it.” I said, “Sure, why not.” For two weeks I did what I love and what I already knew how to do, what I had learned from my own band.

When the concert took place, he took me backstage and counted out the money. It was three thousand rubles, I remember it like it was yesterday, 2011, around June. I looked at those three thousand and thought, “I’ve broken the system! It turns out you can earn money doing what you love.” That was probably the most important aha moment of my life. There are those legendary phrases: “Find a job you love, and you won’t work a single day in your life.” In my case, that’s exactly how it turned out.

After that I did one more concert and realized I wanted to build my life around this. If it worked once, and a second time, then it can keep working. I went to visit my mom and said, “Mom, I want to become a producer, I’m moving to Moscow.” She was like, “Well, here we go.”

Six months later I left for Moscow. I had just finished university, moved, and got a job at the music label ZIL Music, where I started working with big artists right away. At that time we had the band “Fast Family” and Elvira T, then we launched another music label, “Labada,” and “Diskoteka Avariya” partly released their album with us. There were a lot of well-known bands and artists.

Literally a week after I arrived, I found myself backstage at Olimpiysky. It was December 11, 2011, I moved, and around the 17th there was a concert at Olimpiysky, a mixed lineup of artists. Imagine this: a girl from Kamyshin ends up backstage at Olimpiysky a week after arriving! I was calm, but I’m walking around, and there’s Dima Bilan running around practically in his underwear, all these dressing rooms. I was like, “Oh, wow!” But outwardly I kept my cool, no fangirl fit, the way you walk around with everyone and take photos. If you act like that in show business, when you’re working with super famous people, they just don’t take you seriously. Even though I’d come from Kamyshin only a week before, I understood this perfectly well: it’s not professional to act that way, you have to keep yourself in check.

SvetlanaThen, in about three and a half years, I grew from assistant producer to executive director. I’m saying this very casually, but I went through my share of thorns and competition there, and I learned a lot on the fly, didn’t sleep at night, gnawed my way through it all. I came as a small promoter from a small club, I was either twenty-two or twenty-four. And here was big show business, where there’s not much room for error. Obviously I screwed up, and my producers forgave me. Thank you so much to them, I’m endlessly grateful, I still keep in touch and, when possible, we meet up. But still, you can’t screw anything up and damage your producers’ reputation: if you ruin it, that’s the end.

And then I opened my own agency, my own label, and started working independently, in 2015. My agency, my solo work, is almost ten years old. It all started with three thousand rubles.

KristinaAnd how much does Svetlana Khachiyan charge for her work now?

SvetlanaWhat fabulous questions! Straight to the point.

KristinaIf you want a PR pro this great, how much money do you need to pay for that kind of PR?

SvetlanaI created an IT platform called Pay2Pitch. It’s a site where you can pitch a text to the media on your own. If you have a ready text, pitching to the media costs from 500 dollars up to 15 thousand.

I usually recommend placing media features in good outlets. When serious bloggers or business companies come to me, most often they take media packages for 15 to 20 thousand dollars. Then I can arrange features in renowned outlets like the LA Times and USA Today. By the way, I myself have been writing for USA Today as a contributor, meaning as a freelance journalist, for a year and a half now.

But if you want to “test the waters” to start, you can begin with 500 to 1,000 dollars for one article, just to see how it works and how to use it in your warm-ups, in your funnels, on your site. It’s best to do at least three articles so you can put “as seen on” logos on your site. You’ve probably seen this on American sites: everywhere it says “featured on” — Forbes, NBC, the Miami Herald, and so on. Most of our clients, especially businesses entering the American or global market, come to do media features precisely for those badges: to put in a presentation, on a website, on social media.

And personal brands then use it in their funnels, especially if they have online schools. They can send clients: “Look, we wrote an expert article for such-and-such outlet, go read it.” Say you do fitness. We can do a media feature where you write “five tips to get in shape to compete in fitness bikini,” do I have that right?

KristinaFive tips to get in shape in five days. That’s how we do it now.

SvetlanaYes. Only you publish it in the media, not on your YouTube and not on social media. And when you later use it in a funnel for your clients: “By the way, I was interviewed in the media, I added five tips there, go read them.” That’s the basics. You’re kind of just giving a person tips to read and not bragging that you have a feature in USA Today. They open the link, see the tips, but at the same time they understand: “Aha, USA Today writes about her, or she writes her expert article for such-and-such outlet, so she must be a real pro.” Those little puzzle pieces are PR.

But that’s only media features, and there are other services too: PR strategies, red carpets, the Grammys, the Cannes Film Festival, and so on. If you’re starting serious PR, then last week, on December 11, I happened to have three contracts: we’re starting with bloggers, another businesswoman from the other hemisphere, and a man who has a business company. Three contracts, checks from 12 to 20 thousand. And I was like, “Oh, wow.”

SvetlanaOn December 11, 2011, exactly thirteen years ago, I moved to Moscow from Kamyshin, green, with a suitcase and a blanket in plastic packaging that my mom gave me to take along.

KristinaA dowry, right?

SvetlanaYes. I arrived at Paveletsky Station, and my friend’s dad met me. I walked around the metro, and the buildings pressed down on me. Moscow seemed huge to me, I thought, “My God, I’m so tiny, how am I ever going to make it here?” And now I’m driving in Santa Monica, lost in thought, watching the sunset out the window, and thinking, “Wow. Thirteen years ago I had just arrived, I didn’t know where to start or how to approach this show business, this big professional PR on such a scale.” And now I’m signing contracts worth many thousands. It’s great: you can sit down and look back a little, because in the middle of the process there’s no time for it at all.

KristinaYou’re just grinding, charging ahead full speed, no time even to rest, and you need to sit down, look back, savor the process.

KristinaSvetochka, tell us about how you feel in the United States. How in demand is your profession here, and how comfortable do you feel with its specifics, as all of us immigrants do?

SvetlanaRight now I feel very comfortable, but when I moved, it was pretty hard: I arrived with zero English. And I really had no connections, just some new acquaintances through VKontakte, and that was almost eight years ago. Zero English, no connections, and what is a PR person? Someone who knows how to write well in the language of their country. In America, I had to write well in English, and I couldn’t. And the second thing: connections with journalists, with television, with newspapers, magazines, online sites. I had none of that. I arrived and thought, “Okay, what can we do, how are we going to make a living?”

I started out working with Russian speakers, on concerts, helping with PR, and then I moved on, learning English as I went, and started working with museums.

KristinaEnglish as you went. How long did that road take?

SvetlanaA lot of people asked me, even in my first year here: “So, have you learned English yet?” Or: “We were told you can learn English in a month.” I say: “Fine, come on over, show me how to learn English in a month, I’d love to see that.” To be precise, from the day I arrived to being confident in English, able to negotiate, close deals, sign new clients, it took maybe a year and a half.

KristinaNo more, no less than a year and a half.

SvetlanaYes, considering that for the first six months I worked mostly with Russian speakers and my English barely moved. So about a year and a half of more or less intensive study, and you can learn it.

KristinaIs there such a thing as black PR? And is it true that in PR you can, as they say, even wrap air in pretty packaging?

SvetlanaYes, black PR definitely exists. There are even companies you can turn to for campaigns against your competitor. I don’t do that, I’ll say right away, because the ethical side of my work is very important to me. I don’t even take every project. If it’s, say, a casino, the press shuts the door on me right away. And in general I want to work on great, ethical products or projects with a good mission, because in the end it’s all about values.

Of course, everyone has a price...

KristinaSo values matter more than money?

Svetlana“Everyone has a price”: I’ve heard that more than once, but no. For me, values matter more: I want to sleep peacefully and respect myself. And I want everything to come to me, as they say, in a more ethical way. I even have a one-refund rule: if someone has asked me for a refund once, I put that person on a blacklist. Trust is very important to me, and a certain confidence. If we work together, it’s important that we trust each other and understand that we’re going all the way to victory together, even if there are some bumps on the road.

All these working relationships, just like ordinary, romantic ones, especially with a PR person, always involve some kind of projection, sometimes like with a mother, sometimes almost like husband and wife. You can always sort something out on the fly, come up with a different PR campaign. Sometimes the media won’t take it, and that’s that: they say it doesn’t suit us, it’s not within our outlet’s focus. Even though before that we managed to place similar clients more than once, and here, no way: red flag, red flag. And we try to come up with some kind of replacement. So comfort, values, and trust are important to me.

KristinaHow is Russian PR different from PR here?

SvetlanaI’d say it’s very similar. As in marketing, the tools are the same. It’s just that the response can be different, and because of a different mentality, negotiations go a little differently.

Let me give, probably, a harsh example. For five years I worked in show business in Moscow with artists. Not only at a label: on my own I worked with Nikita Presnyakov, and in 2015 I had Mari Kraimbrery, she started out with me. Back then she was a startup, an unknown girl who had just moved from Kryvyi Rih. We did her first photo shoot, shot a couple of music videos, and I went around with that video, pitching it to all the TV channels. Thanks to Russian Music Box, they supported us and put my young artists, my “little ones,” as I called them, into rotation.

Of course, if you’re working for a big artist, you’re already a super pro and cool, but it’s easier to get a big artist into rotation than a nobody, a startup. I had two big A-listers, and the rest were young, talented. And you go around with them, pitching and pitching, and the attitude toward you is directly proportional to your artist. If I show up at an event with Nikita Presnyakov, everyone runs around me exactly the way they do around him. And in 2015 I would show up with Mari Kraimbrery and beg journalists, tugging at their sleeves: “Please, interview my singer.” They’d go, “Oh, who’s that? Go away, I’m interviewing Dima Bilan right now, later, if there’s time left, I’ll do it.” That disdain, my colleagues will surely understand.

And when I got to red carpets here, I had a client, the owner of a music label, they were doing a blockchain project.

SvetlanaThat was about five years ago. We came to an event, 50 Cent and some other artists were there, at a “prizon.” And there I am with my client, the label owner. I walk up, tug at a journalist’s sleeve just the same, and say: “Please interview my client.”

She asks: “Who is he?” I say he has a music label on the blockchain, it’s like crowdfunding. You can ask the community to chip in for your music video, long story short.

She goes: “Yes, yes, okay, I’ll record 50 Cent now and come over to you.” And she really did record him and come over. Without reminders, I didn’t have to stand over her. That’s the attitude I noticed when comparing our markets.

Otherwise it’s the same. You send stories the same way, you pitch, and if they’re interested, they publish without hesitation. If they have edits or change something their own way, they send that to you too.

SvetlanaBut there’s another story here. I know that in our CIS market there’s also the concept of a guest author: when you run your own column. But it’s not as widespread as it is here. I’m a contributor to USA Today and also Times Mono: a year ago they invited me, and now I write for two outlets.

It’s a completely different game. It opened doors for me like a golden ticket. Because now I’m not just a PR person, a PR director, whatever you call me, not just the owner of a PR agency. At the same parties, at the same Grammys, on the same red carpets, I can introduce myself as a USA Today contributor, as a journalist.

KristinaAnd journalists all want to live. So you’re already using the status.

SvetlanaOf course. It’s a level, it’s status. Last year my client and I were at the Balenciaga car show. She says: “Oh, Demna’s here, how great, I love him so much!” I say: “Let’s go meet him.” I told you I changed three schools and four classes, so walking up to people is easy for me.

I go up to Demna: “Hello, my name is Svetlana Khachiyan, I’m a contributor to USA Today. Who’s in charge of PR here?” He says: “Yes, one moment,” and asked his assistant. She ran off to look for the head of marketing, the head of PR. And while she was running around, I introduced my client to Demna. They took a photo together, the client was thrilled, and it all went great.

It’s like a golden key. When you name that status, “I’m a USA Today contributor,” you immediately see something click and change in people’s eyes. You’ve surely noticed how people react here. They look at your Instagram, see the number of followers, and their tone of voice changes right away. It’s no accident they say people are greeted by their clothes and seen off by their mind. Of course, it works both there and here, so you absolutely have to work on your PR, on your personal brand.

For many years I was in the shadow of my artists, my stars, my international projects. And for the last two, two and a half years I’ve been building a personal brand. The only thing I regret is that I didn’t start doing it sooner.

KristinaYou talked about social media and about how journalism is still valued quite highly here. Is it still relevant in the social media era? Do people here read magazines?

SvetlanaYes. The first thing Americans do when they see your ad, say, on Instagram is this: of course, they might go to your page and take a look. For them, the number of followers and having the blue check is great; it builds more trust. If there’s no check, and some big, especially expensive, brand has three thousand followers, there’s less trust.

But first of all, they’ll go and look on Google. They’ll google the brand name, or the person’s first and last name, and see what comes up. Because the American market, and really the world market in general, has a huge amount of scams. America may be the birthplace of advertising and PR, but you could also say it’s the birthplace of scams.

And they will absolutely run a background check on you. I’ve had cases like that: I went to a meeting with the manager of Scooter Braun, the producer of Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, at that time, and Demi Lovato. We were doing a joint project, there was a presentation for Demi Lovato. We met with the manager, and she had looked up my address in advance. We were talking, and she suddenly says, “Oh, so you live over there.” I said, “Yes, yes, yes.” And then I get into my car and think: how does she know where I live? They simply run checks; they can check records, and so on.

And it’s very important that when they type you into Google, they see not only social media or a website, but also stories. If the media writes about you, that’s a third party: it’s not you telling people how great you are, it’s someone else telling them you’re great. And there’s much more trust.

Literally three months ago I ran a study, a survey. We have a marketing platform, SurveyMonkey, where you can run surveys and market research. We used it constantly before, especially when we were opening new museums in different cities. We surveyed our audience, down to what to call the museum. Even clickability and marketing effectiveness depend on the name.

KristinaWhatever you name the ship, so it will sail.

SvetlanaYes. We had several different museums, sometimes with similar names, practically in the same location, but one had one click rate and another had a different one. We tried to find that out this way.

So, I asked Americans three questions. First: which of the listed factors would most influence your desire to buy a product or service from a brand or from a person? I gave several options: media publications, Google search results, strong social media of the owner or the brand itself, reviews and ratings, referrals from friends, a discount system and a loyalty program. There were six options. In first place was a referral from friends, in second, media publications, in third, Google search results, that is, where you rank in the links.

In the second question, I asked what would most influence the desire to buy, and gave just three components: media publications, social media, and reviews. In first place, again, was the media.

The third question: what would you do first to build trust in your brand? And again, in first place were media publications.

SvetlanaSo it’s still a must-have. Even though people say it’s outdated and nobody needs it, nobody reads them. It’s not needed so that people read them. It’s like an element of packaging. Like setting up an avatar, like putting logos on a website. You can do it at least once, for packaging. But of course, it’s better to do it systematically, also because it’s good for SEO, and the cost per click on Google goes down. There are a lot of components to it.

I also worked as a head of marketing. As I told you at the very beginning, I had neither connections nor English, so at first I couldn’t work as a PR person. In the first years I worked specifically as a marketer. In principle, marketing and PR are very adjacent niches. It’s just that in PR you’re responsible for making sure people know and hear about your client, while in marketing you’re responsible for every click, every dollar. So I understand marketing very well too; I just moved away from it a couple of years ago and focused only on PR, and specifically on publicity, on the media.

So I know all about this, and there are plenty of cases. People came to negotiations, and the other side asked, “Oh, is that you in the Yahoo Finance piece?” It works. Clients send me voice messages: “Svetlana, it’s so great, the Bloomberg article really came in handy for us,” or some other article. So all of this works, and all of it is needed.

KristinaBesides such grateful clients, I think the more of a star the client is, the more whims they have. How do you handle it when you propose your PR strategy and the client says, “Oh, Sveta, I don’t like it, I don’t think it’ll work”? How do you work with a client like that?

SvetlanaI don’t work with those. Thank God, I’m lucky: all my clients are good beads. Like I said, trust matters to me: they come and say, “You’re a professional, we trust you.” They can bring something of their own into the strategy, some ideas, we brainstorm, it’s always teamwork. But someone being temperamental, that doesn’t happen. I intuitively just don’t run into those people; they don’t even reach out. I think we attract our own people anyway, so I haven’t had any prima donnas in a long time.

In show business, there were some. Back then I would walk around calming myself down: “She’s paying my mortgage, she’s paying my mortgage, okay, calm down.” But most of the time I work as my heart leads. I even have a motto from the past year: we work with clients we want to hug. Maybe that’s not a very businesslike phrase, but for me comfort matters more. Sometimes a person pays you tens of thousands of dollars, but behaves in a way that frays your nerves so much that there’s no joy in that money at all, and you think, “Damn, take it all back, goodbye.” But I can count such cases on my fingers, and in the past couple of years there haven’t been any.

KristinaYou mentioned the Cannes Film Festival. Where should someone start who wants to attend a festival like that, feel like a star, and leave as a star too?

SvetlanaStart by booking a hotel six months ahead, or even earlier. And that’s not a joke. By the way, I have a great article; I’ll give it to you, you can attach it to the video. It’s called “How to Get to Cannes and Not Lose Your Money.” Because in Cannes, as at all big, high-profile events, there are a lot of scams. There are ticket resellers there too. It’s very important to understand how to get invitations: they’re not on sale to the public. There are concierge services, there are private agents you can get these tickets from. But they have to be vetted people and legitimate tickets, because most often they’re practically Photoshopped, and you just get turned away on the carpet and not let in.

There’s a whole system. This year I did about 15 carpets with six clients. There were different situations and force majeure events, but for the most part everything went successfully.

What would I advise, point by point? Take care of the hotel and flights in advance, because you’ll get the tickets for the carpet itself no earlier than a day before. If you’re told the tickets are already in hand, that’s not true. All experienced PR people know this. They may sell this option simply as a package, like we do, for example. A couple of my colleagues also sell it in advance, but as a bundle. And we already have some chance to organize everything as we go: we know we have good, conscientious contractors who will definitely help.

On the client’s side, it’s the hotel and the flight. And ideally, even if you’re only walking the carpet once, have at least three dresses in your arsenal. Like before a wedding: at the last moment you can suddenly dislike the dress. I had a case like that last year, well, this year still counts: a client suddenly says, “Damn, I don’t like the dresses,” and we were looking for a replacement for her in the last two days before the walk.

Likewise, be sure to do a makeup trial. The girl who will do your makeup on the day of the carpet should come a day or two before and do your makeup so that you like it, so that you approve it. That applies to any red carpet, but Cannes especially, because you can’t just recreate the Cannes look on the spot. And the big American carpets too. So always a makeup trial.

What else? Make sure that, if you’re working with a PR person, there are photographers and videographers on site. We used a little lifehack, I’ll tell you: two or three photographers for clients, so that you’re sure to get beautiful photos. Because taking just one photographer is risky. One of my clients said, “Sveta, can I have two photographers? I don’t always like how I come out in photos, I’m ready to pay.”

KristinaWhat a dress to dislike...

SvetlanaYes, and something else. In the end I booked three for her, just to be sure. I had two girls, already experienced bloggers, and a professional model; I wasn’t worried at all about how they would pose. And with the singer, we went through everything afterward, and she was super happy: she has three sets of photos from three different photographers, plus video too.

KristinaWhat does a person get out of a festival like Cannes, out of walking the red carpet?

SvetlanaFirst, while you’re at the Cannes Film Festival, your reach on Instagram grows two to three times. A lot of bloggers do launches around this. Maybe you’ve noticed. Even if a blogger doesn’t earn from a collaboration with some designer — I can tell you about that too — they can at least do a launch for an info product.

Most often it goes like this. We’ve been going for more than one year now, and last year we went with Aza: she did about four or five carpets. Both the opening and the closing, and the photos came out gorgeous. We had a collaboration with a designer, and Tiffany also provided a piece of jewelry.

KristinaInteresting.

SvetlanaYes, and we made a huge amount of content, her social media was trumpeting it. Then we did three media publications and a press release distribution. And relatively recently our latest article came out, in an interview format. She sends me a screenshot: some brand invited her as a model to this year’s Cannes Film Festival to walk in their dress. She’ll go where everything is included and paid for, and she won’t spend a penny on it. Maybe there will be some additional earnings there. I don’t know, she hasn’t told me yet what the outcome of the negotiations is.

And in general, if a blogger has a good, big blog, they can make a media kit, send it to designers, and sell this option: “I’m going to Cannes, do you want me to walk in your dress? That costs this much. Do you want us to also mention you in the media? That costs this much.” Or make a joint package. The same goes for jewelry, shoes, handbag brands. You can do this in every direction.

SvetlanaFor singers, for businesswomen, for actresses, it’s a good news hook too.

KristinaTo get attention.

SvetlanaTo get attention, yes. The scene, networking, all of that. And some people go just because. This year I have a client who went to the Grammys with us, and she’s planning to go to Cannes this year as well. She goes to these events just to add some color to her life. Her business is wildly successful. I say, “But why?” I suggest, “Let’s do a media feature afterward, after the Grammys, after the carpet.” She says, “Oh, no, I don’t need that.” And I say, “What do you mean? It’s a news hook.” And she says, “Sveta, I’m doing this just to add some color to my life.”

KristinaFor fun.

SvetlanaYes. She says, I worked my tail off for forty-two years, and now I go out, walk around, and enjoy life. And I think: wow, what inspiration, how great is that.

KristinaI think there are a lot of competitors in your field, especially here in Los Angeles. How do you deal with the competition? And how do you take criticism?

SvetlanaListen, I take criticism positively, because criticism is how I grow. I think back on it now, and I always give thanks: when I worked in show business, I worked with Lena Kiper, a producer and director, the songwriter for the group t.A.T.u. and one of their co-creators, let’s say. She taught me. I was writing press releases. We were shooting a music video for Lolita Milyavskaya, I sent her a press release, and she tore it completely apart. A woman with a journalism degree from Moscow State University just demolished my press release: “Sveta, this isn’t right, this is wrong, that is wrong.” Maybe I took offense at first, and then I listened and thought, “Damn, she’s teaching you. Let’s switch off the ego and switch on the student.”

So I listened, I did the work on my mistakes, came up with great headlines, sent them to her, and she loved them all. To this day I remember her fondly whenever we come up with headlines. Not only do I pass it on to my PR people, showing them how it’s done, so that knowledge keeps moving forward. I myself, to this day, whenever I write a great, catchy, loud headline, always think of Lena Kiper with gratitude. Because it matters to learn, to do, to grow. Growing has always been important to me: it’s what brought me to America in the first place, growth and scaling.

As for competition, of course, it sometimes annoys me, especially when people start repeating me. On one hand, everyone calms me down: “Be happy they’re copying you, it means you’re ahead.” And I’m like, “No, let them come up with their own hooks.” A greedy streak kicks in. Especially when it gets to the point where they’re practically repeating my own words. Say I’m doing storytelling, and then I see someone writing a post on a similar topic.

SvetlanaI always try to take it more calmly: not look back at them, but focus on myself and the goal ahead. That’s probably how I’d put it.

KristinaPR is about deadlines, about media stress. How do you cope with that, how do you recover and avoid burning out, so you can keep moving forward and not lose that fire?

SvetlanaI’d say PR is also about working with journalists. Our deadlines are softer than those of marketers, for example. We don’t have that thing where you have to pour in leads and close something. Here, thank God, Bloomberg ran a piece, and thank goodness. And it doesn’t matter that four months have passed. The most important thing is that it got published.

Overall, I’ve now organized my work so there’s a minimum of stress. Of course, when events like Cannes or the Grammys come around, I’m still a little on edge. But professionalism is precisely about having that capacity, having so much experience and everything so well organized that there are no stressful moments.

Last Cannes we arrived in a rush, we had a collaboration with a celebrity designer, and this year I came not with one client but with six. And I had processes set up, so I was able to handle that load. That’s six times the work, and several carpets for each client. The more professional you are, the more clearly you build processes that run, roughly speaking, like a conveyor belt. When everything is dialed in, there’s less stress and more comfort: you just do your job, put out the materials, clients are happy, everyone’s happy.

KristinaWhat does a productive day look like, Svetlana?

SvetlanaWhen interesting, good strategic negotiations take place. And I really love the days when media features come out. I send the client the link, and it’s magic, the magic of joy: the client opens it, sees their first article, or fifth, or twentieth, and is always delighted and so grateful. I love those days. And it’s also a kind of release, a relief.

Because over the last year, and I first thought it was because of the election, but it’s been the same after the election, the media have started nitpicking texts much more. Especially the big outlets. It’s become like defending a small talent visa: they send me red flags, requests for clarification. Say we’re writing an article about you and I write that you’re an award winner, they ask for proof. I send your diplomas, certificates, photos with the trophy. So it’s a kind of pitching, a small talent visa. They ask for something else, and we send it. Then we follow up, follow up, follow up. And when the article comes out, for me it’s, of course: phew, thank God.

KristinaArtificial intelligence is developing very fast right now. You can make a request: “pretend you’re a PR specialist and build me a strategy,” and it will create a whole strategy, point by point. What do you think about that? Is it possible that PR managers like you will soon lose their reason for existing and everything will go to AI?

SvetlanaFirst of all, even major press doesn’t accept AI-generated texts yet. They have detectors everywhere, and they automatically reject such texts. It’s important to them that the text is handwritten, unique, and not generated by AI. Because it also writes the same thing over and over, it repeats itself. That’s for texts.

As for strategy, yes, of course, people can use AI, and that’s great. I use it constantly myself, though more to consult with it about nutrition, to count macros, and so on. But what is a strategy? It’s studying competitors, gathering ideas for your client based on competitor research and on your experience. Say I’m writing a strategy for you: I study all your competitors, I map out who does what, how they do PR, what they put out, what their tone of voice is, where they appear, what events they attend. Plus I have a track record of twelve professional years, almost twenty years of experience. Plus I watch your interviews, your social media, and get inspired. My PR portal opens up, ideas come to me, and based on your competitors, my experience, and my inspiration from you, taking your goals into account, I start writing the strategy. You write the goals for me in the brief, of course. AI can write something similar, but it still won’t be the work of a living person: it has no practical experience. It hasn’t run around Cannes or walked the Grammys red carpet, you understand? It hasn’t run creative sessions. It has no practical marketing experience in America, and here every state has its own rules. We launched a museum, several museums in Los Angeles, then San Francisco, Miami, New York, Vegas. Different tools work in each state. In some places targeting works better, in some the media, in some outdoor, and in some, forgive me, banner ads, which I thought had already died out. No, in Miami only banner ads saved us, you understand?

KristinaInteresting.

SvetlanaGPT doesn’t have that experience, so our profession is unlikely to go away because of it. But copywriting will most likely suffer, is already suffering. And graphic designers: logos are being stamped out like on an assembly line with this AI. But where creative thinking and ideas are involved, probably not. Because you need to come up with something great and creative, PR stunts. Like when we came up with a photo shoot with grandmas in black and white for a brand of sex toys and lingerie, plastered the whole city with billboards, and sent it all to Vogue. GPT is unlikely to come up with something like that, because it’s way out there. It’s non-standard thinking, exactly the kind of campaigns that can blow up and provoke resistance in people: they’ll snap photos, tag, post, some will be outraged. And that’s great. Any PR is good PR, except an obituary.

KristinaThat’s a very dark joke in a story about grandmas, but still.

SvetlanaBut in PR the main thing is that nobody stays indifferent. The main thing is that people talk, whether it’s good or bad. Sometimes when they say bad things, it actually works better for the brand and recognition than when we try to look good everywhere. Like on YouTube: you open the comments, and the hate has started, and you realize: it worked.

KristinaYes, yes, yes.

KristinaName the three most important qualities a PR professional should have to grow here in the United States.

SvetlanaFirst: they should love networking, because networking is the single biggest key. English, learn English. And if you don’t have English, then at least online networking. When I talk about networking, it’s also about courage: to start a conversation, to walk up first, to knock on someone’s DMs or on LinkedIn, to offer something, not to be shy. I can group all of that under networking.

Second is persistence, determination, “no brakes.” In show business they called me a steam locomotive. Because when you work with projects or with the media, you constantly have to keep hammering, reminding, pushing your client so they get taken onto an award show, into some outlet, or onto a red carpet. They don’t take them? Okay, fine, then we’ll give you some press too. I have a method like that, trading. I can tell you about it a bit later. We offer not only that the client will walk the red carpet, but also that I’ll write about it in the media as well. And then my clients get taken more willingly, if I also promise media coverage on top. Carpet organizers become more accommodating, because they get media coverage, essentially for free.

And third, probably passion and affinity. I think PR is a profession where people really have to love their work, their clients, and their projects. I see it both in the PR people who work for me and in my colleagues. Sometimes clients are like our little kids: you fuss over them, you work with them. Especially artists: when I worked with artists, you’re like an older sister to them. And also, let’s call it hard work.

KristinaWhile we were talking about the Cannes Film Festival, you mentioned outfits, photographers, and so on. I think our listeners are sitting there counting on their fingers: okay, one dress costs this much, the Cannes carpet costs that much. So how much does a single trip to Cannes cost? With hotels, with flights? Let’s take it all and pack it into one number.

SvetlanaFlights are hard to estimate, because people come from all over the place.

KristinaRoughly.

SvetlanaAnd then there’s the question of which hotels. Here’s how I’d put it: at my agency, the package, which is a walk on the carpet, two photographers, a videographer, and three media outlets, costs fifteen thousand dollars.

KristinaOkay.

SvetlanaThat doesn’t include the hotel, the flights, or the dress. You can get a dress through a barter deal with designers, you just have to arrange it in advance. By the way, I offer this on my Instagram: if anyone’s interested, message me “media kit” in my DMs, and a chatbot will send you a sample media kit made for the Cannes Film Festival, though it works for any other purpose too. It’s really like a business card for your personal brand. If you put together a media kit like that and send it out at least three months ahead, starting to reach out to designers, you can definitely find a dress, they’ll provide it. And if you also have a good, big blog, you can even earn money from that designer: ask for a fee so that they pay you. You can give them advertising on Instagram and photos from the Cannes carpet, so they get something out of it. Plus, we get published in the media and we always credit who provided the dress, and we try to tag the photographers too. That’s a campaign as well, and you can sell it to the designer.

As for the flight and the stay, it depends on your appetite: some people fly economy, some fly business, some stay in an Airbnb for a hundred dollars a night, a hundred euros a night, and some stay in a hotel for a thousand dollars a night.

KristinaHow do you manage to sell your work at a high price?

SvetlanaFirst of all, it’s the quality of the services. I’ve been in the industry for so many years and have built such a reputation that when people come to me, they already know what they’re going to get. Everyone comes by referral, or these days from my blog, like you did when you wrote to me in my DMs: “I’ve been following you for a long time, let’s meet.” Clients may also have watched me for a while and understood my expertise, my value. When they come and hear my rates, they’re not surprised at all, because they’re already prepared for it.

Plus, I always work by a principle that a lot of American marketers recommend: give a hundred and ten percent. I always give a lot of bonuses. We overdeliver, we give much more. And because of that, clients are left with a very good impression of the campaign, and when we pile bonuses on top, they’re like, “Everything’s just great,” and they go and recommend me to friends and colleagues.

KristinaThey say one person can’t do it alone. How are you growing your PR agency, and how many specialists do you bring in so that the agency really gains momentum?

SvetlanaOh, right now I’m actually at a point of rebuilding. I’m at a minimal team: I have a partner, I have a project, and I have a handful of PR people and copywriters who help run client accounts directly. Over these two years we grew to fifteen employees, and I even have an office in Studio City. But I realized that you can actually do all of this on a small budget, and a bloated team isn’t always good and isn’t always success. I had a marketing department, a PR department, that whole structure, as Vysotsky would have it. But a PR agency isn’t the kind of business where you can pour in leads and close a pile of clients. A PR agency gets clients only when the PR person has strong word of mouth and strong PR. Right now a huge number of people are coming specifically to break into the American market, because you know yourself what’s happening in our CIS countries. They’re either ready to scale, and so on. That’s about our immigrants. As for Americans, they, of course, look at case studies and reviews. I always tell my clients, too: how do you avoid getting burned? There are so many scammers, so many PR people who talk a lot and do nothing, take the money and disappear. There are some like that among Americans too. The most important thing is to look at reviews and case studies. And Americans do exactly that.

KristinaThree powerful tips that will give PR a quick boost.

SvetlanaReels. We all make reels. I haven’t made reels for a long time myself, since I was busy with my apartment. But it’s self-PR, self-promotion, because personal brand decides everything. We all see Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other successful businesspeople who build up their media presence, and because of that they get even richer. Elon Musk is the richest person in the world not because he’s smart, but because he’s media-savvy.

KristinaIt’s both. And because he comes from a wealthy family, I saw that in the comments: he originally comes from some kind of well-off family, in a good way.

SvetlanaBut still, yes, build your media presence in every way you can, whether it’s the press, reels, collaborations with bloggers, podcasts, interviews. In other words, scale your word of mouth. A lot of clients come to us for PR, or, back when I was still doing marketing, for marketing. I always ask for the backstory of the business and how clients are coming to them right now. They say: mostly by word of mouth. I ask: okay, what do you want to get? We want more clients, we want more marketing, or more PR. What should we do? I say: scale your word of mouth. Now I’m being recommended not just by clients or clients of clients, but by my followers, friends of followers, relatives of followers. Before, they’d tell me, “So-and-so recommended you,” and I knew those people. Now they name people I don’t know at all. Apparently they’re either my followers or colleagues of my clients, meaning people who simply know me, know my case studies, trust me, know my clients, bloggers with millions of followers, and see me in their vlogs.

And the third component is to build up great, strong case studies, and with popular people. Because whatever you say, be it a beauty brand or a beauty salon: if we see that a star gets her nails or brows done there, we’ll be more likely to go there than to some no-name salon, right?

KristinaOf course, it builds trust.

SvetlanaYes, because if celebrities trust this specialist, then I can trust her too.

KristinaSvetlanochka, this has been a very warm, heartfelt conversation. Wish something for our listeners who are interested in PR today, and maybe even want to become PR people themselves. Why not? Wish them something from yourself.

SvetlanaDear viewers, first of all, thank you for watching the interview to the end. Be sure to come to my DMs, write “media kit,” and I’ll send you this file. And be sure to build your media presence, because modesty can’t be monetized. If you want to earn well, you can build a career in a corporation or in an ordinary business, but if your media presence is built up, your business will grow many times faster too, and there will be much more trust, and more customers. So build your media presence, and everything will be great. And don’t be shy.

KristinaThose were expert tips from a leading PR professional in Los Angeles, and not only in Los Angeles, Svetlana Khachiyan. Svetochka, thank you so much. It was a great interview, everything was warm and heartfelt, and thank you for your sincerity, it was really felt today. On behalf of our channel, I wish you prosperity. You’re like a rocket that doesn’t stop despite the difficulties in life, and that’s a huge, strong quality of yours.

SvetlanaThank you so much. Thank you for inviting me to the interview, it’s a real pleasure.