Florida-based photographer Pete Barrett came to us in the middle of an adventurous project titled The American Worker. Pete had decided to pack up his home and travel across the States indefinitely to create this new body of work. The goal of the project was to capture the hardworking people Pete would encounter on his road trip across the country. Over the past few months, he was able to create images that give the viewer a look inside radically different career paths (my personal favorite was the bayou fishermen).
Pete had a solid idea in place for his marketing efforts and was specifically interested in a publicity pitch to get the word out about what he was up to. We immediately jumped into crafting the copy for a brief press release with a selection of images on the following page to give us a simple and concise presentation of the project. After a few revisions, we settled on the language and I began creating a list of photographer-centric blogs and publications that I thought would be excited about Pete’s story and interested in publishing it.
During the first wave of pitches, we wrote a blog post for the Wonderful Machine blog so that the project could gain some attention naturally from there. We also submitted it to the Huffington Post for some additional exposure. In total, I reached out to a list of 30-40 individuals, tweaking my message as I went along to include links to the articles that started cropping up (this helps to add credibility and generate more interest in the specific project). From there, I contacted one of the editors at Creative Boom who thought Pete’s project looked really great and immediately requested a full selection of images.
I also reached out to the folks at American Photography, Popular Photography, and AI-AP who were all thrilled to feature Pete’s work.
Lastly, I was able to connect Pete with Chris Gampat, the editor at The Phoblographer, for an in-depth interview. Chris said, “He does incredible work,” and mentioned that he would be happy to cover more stories from Pete in the future.
Pete was really pleased with the response we got and he is looking forward to seeing The American Worker continue to grow as he goes to new places and adds new images to the series. After we wrapped everything up in publicity, he headed over to our marketing department to work on a list build and outreach. I recently checked in with Pete to see how everything was going and hear about any impact from all the press.
Judging from the analytics that report activity on my website and blog, we are doing something right—people seem to be liking what they are seeing. Traffic on my website and blog over the last month has spiked as much as 15 times my normal daily traffic after some of the articles hit and my overall average has just about tripled on a day to day basis since the articles ran.
We have also had an increase in the amount of estimate requests coming in and have even booked a couple jobs, the most prominent being a global campaign for a major Pharmaceutical company which shoots later this month!
If you’d like to learn more about Pete and follow him along his journey, check out petebarrett.com. If you’re a photographer and you’re interested in a project pitch, check out our publicity consulting services or shoot us an email!