In 1993, when an alarming number of sensible adults still regarded the internet as a hobby for people with expensive modems, RLM Public Relations invited 25 technology and advertising reporters to lunch. The subject was not whether the internet mattered. It was how the thing might make money. This is a small detail in the firm’s long chronology, but it explains a great deal. Public relations agencies are paid to make clients look current. RLM built a business by arriving while “current” was still slightly embarrassing.
Richard Laermer founded the New York firm in 1991 after leaving Columbia Business School, where he had been director of public relations. He had also been a journalist, which gave him the occupational advantage of knowing how a pitch feels on the receiving end. The firm’s first technology client made a flat flashlight. Soon came a bulletin-board system, then SonicNet, HBO.com, Nerve.com and SesameStreet.com. It is a fine list of antique futures.
Today RLM is a 25-person, founder-led agency offering earned media, owned content, crisis communications, executive training, digital and influencer programs, events and partnerships. Its clients range from startups to international enterprises, with a conspicuous concentration in technology, fintech, healthcare, consumer brands and media. What it sells is not ad space. It sells the preparation, framing and access that can persuade someone else to spend attention.
A podcast is not a press release with headphones
Consider Wondery. When RLM began working with the young audio network, it lacked much industry presence. A conventional campaign might have announced each new show, collected mentions and produced a handsome spreadsheet. RLM instead treated listening as the beginning of the sale. Reporters received advance previews, which gave them time to become absorbed in the thing they were being asked to cover.
Then the agency built different doors into the same house. It connected the true-crime series Inside Jaws to a real-world mystery involving an unidentified murder victim. It arranged a Smithsonian content partnership for American Innovations and an advertising partnership with TheSkimm for Safe for Work. It used Tina Brown’s guests and editorial biography to broaden interest in her interview show. It organized tours of Wondery’s Hollywood studio so journalists could see how its cinematic audio was made.
These are RLM’s reported campaign figures, not a controlled experiment. Wondery made good shows, had experienced leadership and was operating in an expanding market. Public relations did not manufacture those conditions. It made them easier to notice. That distinction is the quiet center of RLM’s work: an agency can amplify proof, arrange proof and name proof. It cannot substitute for proof.
“Most public relations agencies can get you mentioned in the media - RLM puts you on the map.”Matthew Scott, founder of FeedTheAgency, in an RLM client testimonial
The first story is often the wrong story
Answers.com originally looked like a technology launch. GuruNet hired RLM one day before launch, and early coverage followed in national business and technology media. But usage softened in summer and climbed when school returned. That pattern changed the argument. The service was not merely clever search technology; it was useful educational infrastructure.
So the campaign changed too. RLM sent targeted reporters USB keys loaded with the product. It handed 2,000 Rutgers students shirts instructing them to look up “contumacious,” producing an immediate campus traffic spike. It distributed more than 150,000 citation posters to teachers and proposed subject-specific resource centers for students, parents and journalists. The agency reports that daily visitors doubled from one million in a month and that overall visitor growth exceeded 1,000 percent during the campaign period. The important lesson is not the giant percentage. It is the pivot from “new search site” to “tool people can put to work.”
Find the behavior hidden beneath the product description. Who uses this, and what changes when they do?
Give the reporter an experience, not a packet: a preview, a studio visit, a desk-side demo or direct access to the founder.
Attach the experience to a timely frame: back-to-school season, a holiday, a funding event, a new category or a live cultural question.
Watch for the clue that the frame is wrong. A seasonal traffic pattern can be more useful than the original brief.
Sometimes the mascot has to go
RLM’s fintech work offers a more comic version of the same problem. E*TRADE wanted to graduate from stock-swapping startup to full financial institution, but its public identity still revolved around a chimp. RLM first used the chimp to build anticipation, sending it on a New York photo tour. Then, in a Super Bowl spot, the company fired the mascot and introduced a human spokesperson. The stunt worked because it dramatized a strategic change. First the joke, then adulthood.
For MoneyDesktop, the problem ran in the other direction. The product had to become larger in people’s minds. The company rebranded as MX and made consumer financial health, rather than personal-finance software, the center of the story. A founder tour, funding news, the MX.com domain and new products at Finovate provided reasons to cover the shift. With Gupshup, RLM used founder Beerud Sheth’s limited visits to major cities as genuine scarcity, arranging meetings with business and technology reporters while connecting his decades in conversational systems to the sudden public fascination with AI.
When the story gets away from you
The opposite of a launch is a crisis, but both punish ambiguity. In one case recounted publicly by Laermer, a nonprofit chief executive spoke to a reporter without guidance after a contractor became the subject of scrutiny. The interview made things worse. RLM’s intervention was organizational before it was rhetorical: centralize communication, suspend the executive, commission an independent audit and tell the reporter what concrete steps were underway.
This is also what its training practice sells. The menu includes half-day workshops, longer programs, private concierge coaching, mock interviews and ongoing counsel. There are message grids and social-media simulations. None of this is glamorous, which is precisely why it matters. The expensive moment is rarely the rehearsal. It is the untrained answer that becomes the headline.
The agency’s product is not a mention. It is a sequence of decisions that makes the right mention more likely - and the damaging one less so.
What to steal from the attention business
RLM competes with specialist technology agencies, large global networks, in-house teams and founders who decide to do the pitching themselves. Its public site does not offer a rate card. The business is the familiar agency mixture of custom retainers and projects, where scope changes with the number of markets, the urgency of the problem and the amount of senior attention required.
The more useful question is what a smaller company can copy before it hires anyone. There is quite a lot.
A five-part field guide
- Replace the company adjective with observable evidence. “Innovative” is weak; a reporter using the product is evidence.
- Build access into the pitch. Let people listen, visit, test, compare or question the person who made the decision.
- Use real constraints. A founder’s short visit or a seasonal spike creates a legitimate reason to act now.
- Treat an unexpected pattern as editorial research. Answers.com’s school-year traffic revealed a better market position.
- Prepare the spokesperson before urgency arrives. A clear message grid is cheaper than recovering from improvisation.
These tactics work when the company has something useful, surprising or consequential underneath them. They work when leaders grant access, accept a sharper position and can move at the speed of a news cycle. They weaken when every claim needs six approvals, when the product disappoints on contact or when the hoped-for “story” is simply the company’s desire to be covered. Earned media is called earned for an irritating reason.
Thirty-five years after that lunch about internet revenue, RLM is still chasing the next unfamiliar thing. Yet the archive suggests that novelty is not the true specialty. Translation is. The firm takes the thing insiders have learned to describe badly and looks for the detail an outsider might repeat. Sometimes it is eight number-one podcasts. Sometimes it is a studio tour. Sometimes it is a chimp losing its job. And sometimes it is one wonderfully contumacious T-shirt.