Dissecting the "go direct" communications debate
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The "go direct" strategy — skirting intermediaries like the media to get out a message — remains largely misunderstood and is leading to major debates within the communications industry.
Why it matters: The evolving media landscape and continued audience splintering make going direct an effective strategy that's possible for some but unattainable for most.
Catch up quick: The term was coined by former Substack and Activision Blizzard comms leader Lulu Cheng Meservey, who founded a comms firm last year based on this thesis.
- She says it's less about tactics and more about ownership: "It's are you personally taking responsibility for [communications], or are you not? If you are, you can have help. You can talk to the media. You can have agencies. You can have advisers. You can have an entire comms team and still go direct, because you are still speaking from your own voice, with your own convictions, and you're not completely outsourcing it."
- Of note: Meservey shared the news of her firm with Axios first, before going direct on social media.
The big picture: Building a personal brand can cast a halo effect on the company and keeping control of the message is good comms. However, it's unlikely you'll reach all intended audiences — much less grow your audience — by only communicating on personal social feeds or owned channels.
- To reach an audience broader than your own echo chamber, you must tap into others' followings.
Yes, but: That's not to say PR practitioners cannot be strategic and targeted in their approach. Think of it this way ...
- Go direct in its truest form: Only use owned channels like a blog or personal social media account.
- Go directly to friendlies: Engage with low-risk content creators, podcast hosts, industry leaders and Substack writers.
- Speak with mainstream publications: Peg media interviews to big moments to show momentum and build credibility. This presents a higher risk — since you can't control the story — but also presents higher rewards.
What they're saying: Media coverage can help attract investors, potential employees and consumers by giving companies a sense of legitimacy, says Aaron Zamost, founder of Background Partners and former head of communications and government relations at Square.
- "Traditional media may be broken and flawed but they're not irrelevant to reputation-building. You need a blended approach," he said.
Case in point: I covered a partnership between media monitoring platform Memo and Marker Collective in late 2024. It was an interesting story about their combined effort to inject real metrics into the practice of PR.
- Since then, I reached out to Memo CEO Eddie Kim to see how the media coverage was received.
- "The newsletter and article resulted in over $2 million in immediately attributable contract value," he said. "This also doesn't account for all the additional awareness and halo value in the industry that resulted from the mention, nor the pipeline value that could result from that awareness down the line."
- "There's just nothing we could ever do on our own as a company of our size that would match this kind of immediate value."
Between the lines: It's easy to go direct when you're Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg or Marc Andreessen. However, there are very few CEOs who can truly "go direct" because they lack the platform and engaged following it requires.
- "'Go direct' is what you tell startup founders so they can feel anti-establishment while paying you tens of thousands of dollars a month to tweet for them," Zamost said.
Plus, direct communication, while an important part of all communication strategies, is always going to carry a self-promotional bent, says Emilie Gerber, founder of Six Eastern.
- Going direct is "kind of content marketing in a lot of ways and it's getting conflated with comms, even though there's no new tool here. The channels are all the same," she said.
The intrigue: Social media platforms have something to gain from big brands and public figures curtailing the scrutiny of traditional media in favor of going direct on their spaces.
- X, for example, is running targeted ads promoting its verified offerings and encouraging a "revolutionized approach to public relations," and declaring "Traditional PR is dead. Long live direct engagement."
Reality check: Retweets don't equal legitimacy, and social media platforms can be unreliable.
The bottom line: There's a world in which traditional PR and going direct exist, and both are needed depending on what you are trying to achieve.
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