Red flags that should end the conversation

Six flags should end a PR sales call on the spot: guaranteed placements, pay-to-play sold as earned media, vanity-metric reporting, no named senior operator, an activity log they refuse to show you, and owned media padded into the hit count. Each one signals the same problem. You would not be buying earned media, and earned media is the only thing a PR retainer is for.

The guarantee is the clearest case. No agency controls what a journalist publishes, so nobody can promise a placement in an outlet they do not own. An agency that guarantees coverage is selling ads, sponsored posts, or paid placement, and billing it at earned-media rates. On r/PublicRelations, the standing line is that "guaranteed placements are called advertising." The sharper version delivers a lookalike domain: pay $3,500 for a "Forbes feature" and the link can land on a Forbes.zone-style site with no connection to Forbes and no editorial standards. That is not a negotiating point. It is a different product with a markup.

The rest of the list, and why each one disqualifies:

• Vanity-metric reporting - reports built on "buzz," "awareness," and impression counts with no outlet names. A real report names the outlet, the reporter, and the date. Vague metrics exist to cover the absence of those three things.
• No named senior operator - partners run the pitch meeting, then unnamed juniors run your account. Ask who will email reporters on your behalf, by name. If they will not give a name, assume juniors will run the account.
• A hidden activity log - pitching is countable work, and every pitch is loggable. An agency that offers a summary deck but will not open the raw pitch log is asking you to take the volume on faith.
• Owned-media padding - your own blog post, your own webinar, or a syndicated reprint counted as a "media hit." An agency that inflates this count will inflate the numbers in your monthly reports too.

One question surfaces most of these in five minutes: what did you do last week, with names? A working agency can answer with its pitch log, who replied, and what ran. If the answer is a summary slide instead of names, end the conversation.

Keep the scope straight. These are screening flags for the sales conversation. The page on questions to ask in a pitch meeting carries the sharper diligence questions, and the pages on reading case studies and checking references show how to verify an agency's claims. Contract-level traps, like retainers with long notice periods or guarantee clauses, belong to the deal pages of this handbook. Competing-client problems are their own category; the page on conflicts and competing clients covers them. Here the job is simpler: recognize a disqualifier and end the conversation.