The useful thing about an accidental business is that nobody has had time to make it grand. In the 1990s, David Gerzof Richard was building a telecommunications company that worked on technology behind what we now casually call a video call. He also advised startups. Then the telecom company was sold, the advice kept multiplying, and in 1999 the side work became BIG FISH PR. Its name came from Daniel Wallace’s novel about imagination, exaggeration, and the difficult business of telling a life well.
This was a charming choice until Tim Burton adapted the book into a film. Overnight, searching for “Big Fish” no longer produced a young Boston agency. It produced Ewan McGregor. Hollywood had accidentally run the agency out of its own name.
That minor catastrophe is a better introduction to BIG FISH than an awards shelf. The firm had to learn the problem it would later sell to clients: a good story can exist and still be practically invisible. Attention is not a moral reward for building something useful. It is a system of timing, framing, proof, access, and repetition.
“A good place to start is just to be a human, and not send a templated email or pitch.”David Gerzof Richard, on pitching journalists
The first failure is usually a sentence
BIG FISH now works with consumer and enterprise brands - the kind of companies that make doorbells, 3D printers, handheld gaming computers, airline routes, workplace drink machines, medical wigs, drones, and ideas that need more than a product sheet. It sells earned-media strategy, launches, press relations, product reviews, corporate narratives, executive visibility, events, awards, media training, crisis work, and, lately, visibility in AI-driven search.
The common problem arrives before any of those services. The company knows too much about itself. Its language is built for engineers, executives, or investors. A reporter needs a clean answer to a different question: why should a reader care right now?
Consider TarDisk, a plug-in storage product for MacBooks. The startup had approached magazines itself and received what its CEO later called a “quite poor reception.” This is the first failure in a surprising number of product launches: not the product, but the sentence used to introduce it. BIG FISH’s advice sounded reckless. Stop sales. Take down the website. Wait two weeks.
Then, at noon on launch day, the timer reached zero and coordinated stories went live together. Traffic arrived in a concentrated wave. The company said the launch drove its traffic and, ultimately, its sales. Scarcity did not manufacture a better drive. It manufactured a moment editors could recognize.
The coordinated-news machine
A doorbell is not a neighborhood
The firm’s longest-running example is Ring. BIG FISH joined in 2014, when the product had been called DoorBot, investors had passed, retailers hesitated, and the founder had left Shark Tank without a deal. A video doorbell is a feature. Making neighborhoods safer is a purpose. BIG FISH helped with the rebrand to Ring and pushed the second story, then stayed through the company’s expansion and Amazon’s acquisition.
The agency reports 30,785 press hits and 81 billion impressions over 56 months of work. Those are exposure figures, not audited sales. The more instructive detail is the change in category. Ring stopped sounding like a peripheral attached to a front door and started sounding like a security company with a social mission. The product remained visible; the meaning grew larger.
The same sequencing appears in the ASUS ROG Ally campaign. BIG FISH first arranged embargoed previews for gaming and lifestyle journalists. Preorder day became one news event. The shipping date became another, stocked with reviews from people who had already handled the device. Father’s Day and graduation supplied two more doors back into the story. Six briefings and 23 preview attendees led to 16 press hits and a reported 922 million impressions in three months.
The turtle explains the agency
Technical companies often describe capability with nouns: speed, reliability, materials, resolution. A green sea turtle named Charlotte offered Formlabs a verb. Charlotte suffered from “bubble butt syndrome,” which made it difficult to swim normally. Formlabs, Adia, New Balance, and Mystic Aquarium collaborated on a custom 3D-printed harness.
BIG FISH gave the first story to Popular Science, prepared the technical voices, supplied behind-the-scenes material, briefed a broad mix of science, technology, regional, broadcast, and lifestyle reporters under embargo, and invited local media to see Charlotte. The campaign produced 237 reported press hits and 1.12 billion impressions in one month.
Why did it travel? The harness made additive manufacturing legible. A reader did not need to understand selective laser sintering to understand an injured animal swimming. The lesson is not “find a turtle.” It is to locate the consequence of the technology that can be seen without a glossary.
The price of choreography
BIG FISH is an independent agency, not a software subscription. It makes money from project work and ongoing retainers. Public client reviews place its minimum project at $10,000 and its listed hourly rate at $150 to $199. The most common reviewed project falls between $50,000 and $199,999. One Formlabs communications lead disclosed spending $15,000 a month for an account manager and two or three coordinators.
That expense buys labor and judgment: learning the product, sharpening messages, finding the right journalists, producing materials, arranging briefings, preparing executives, distributing news, chasing follow-ups, and measuring what happened. It also buys the willingness to tell a client that its announcement is not yet an announcement.
The alternatives are familiar: a large network agency with international scale, a technology specialist, a freelancer, or an internal communications team. BIG FISH occupies the middle - senior boutique attention with national media ambitions. Its public client list runs from young companies to Amazon brands, and its focus moves between B2B, B2C, and the awkward hybrid where the buyer, user, and story audience are three different people.
What to steal
Gerzof Richard teaches public relations at Emerson College, and his best pitching advice has the unfashionable quality of common sense. Read the journalist’s work. Use the correct name. Understand the audience. Treat the subject line as the headline you are temporarily allowed to write. Be a human.
- Begin with the reporter’s constraint. Hundreds of pitches compete for attention. Make relevance obvious without making the email generic.
- Turn specifications into consequences. A printer is faster; a turtle swims. Both are true, but only one supplies an instant mental picture.
- Give the story room to be reported. Early units, knowledgeable spokespeople, strong images, and embargo time improve the odds of useful coverage.
- Plan the second moment before the first. Preorder, shipping, reviews, awards, partnerships, and seasonal uses can extend a launch without repeating it.
- Share the uncomfortable facts. Messaging, goals, customer personas, competitive weaknesses, and technical limits help an agency avoid empty claims.
News cannot be wished into existence
The method has conditions. A weak product does not become strong because eight reporters receive it early. A company that hides its experts, withholds useful proof, or changes the message after briefings makes coordinated outreach brittle. Consumer launches need samples and visual assets. Complex enterprise stories need patient access to people who understand the technology. Crisis work needs authority to respond quickly. And if a company expects social growth from an earned-media brief, it may be buying the wrong job.
One client offered the most precise boundary: BIG FISH are publicity experts, not the client’s subject-matter experts. The client has to explain what is unique and why. Another wanted the agency, as it grew, to take on more strategic counseling. Those caveats matter. Boutique responsiveness can thin as an agency expands, and press coverage is not the same thing as revenue attribution.
Still, the original movie problem lingers usefully. BIG FISH could not make Tim Burton’s film smaller. It could only become more specific, more persistent, and easier to find. That is also what it does for a product in a crowded category. The fish does not have to be the biggest thing in the ocean. It has to give the right observer a reason to look.