A PR expert’s guide to landing brands on a gift guide
Some brands have been pitching year-round, but it’s never too late to start, Dreamday founder Lauren Kleinman told us.
Credit: Illustration: Amelia Kinsinger, Photos: Adobe Stock
By Katie Hicks
November 8, 2024
There's power in a good recommendation.
According to recent data from influencer platform Mavely, a quarter of consumers, and nearly half of Gen Z consumers, said they have used a gift guide to make a holiday shopping decision. As the founder of PR agency Dreamday and co-founder of product recommendation website The Quality Edit, Lauren Kleinman has experience seeing both sides of the gift guide pitching process. In her experience, she said the majority of her clients’ press coverage is published in November. Kleinman starts pitching legacy gift guides that have long lead times (like, for instance, Oprah’s Favorite Things) in June and targets digital-first outlets that tend to have shorter lead times in September, she told us, but pitching for gift guides is an ongoing process. In other words, it’s never too late for brands to jump in—especially if they’re looking to land on a last-minute shopping list or pitch a creator’s gift guide. We spoke with Kleinman and Mavely CEO and co-founder Evan Wray about some strategies brands can use to help their chances of making the cut.
The power of print
At The Quality Edit, which has a primarily millennial audience and often highlights DTC brands and start-ups, Kleinman said her editors test products and vote on which will make it into its gift guides. While pitching her Dreamday clients for other publications, Kleinman said she thinks about how to get product into the hands of editors even before that final testing period through year-round product seeding and meetings. “We’re thinking about gift guides and relationship-building around the year,” she said. “Ideally, it would be that the editor you’re pitching for a gift guide, you’ve also gifted that product to back in February, and they’ve been using the product for six months.” When pitching, Kleinman recommends targeting publications that match the products’ audience and auditing their past gift guides to fit the products into the publication’s previously defined categories, whether that’s gifts under $50 or gifts for foodies. She also said that including an “interesting and compelling” founder story doesn’t hurt, nor does sharing growth metrics or finding ways to give the product some kind of cultural relevance. “Make sure that you make the editor’s job as easy as possible and help them understand that this is exactly where we see our brand fitting from a demographic perspective [and] here are things that you’ve worked on in the past that align with that,” she said. “Serve it to them, ideally, on a silver platter as best as you can.”
When it comes to trends she’s seeing this year with gift guides, Kleinman said “value-focused” products that are multipurpose and “affordable luxuries” seem to be popular given many consumers’ cost concerns. Self-care products, gourmet foods, and personalized items are “inherently really giftable,” and likely to catch the eyes of editors, she said. Kleinman said that some of the “highest-coveted placements” for clients are Oprah Daily’s Oprah’s Favorite Things, New York magazine’s The Strategist, the New York Times’s Wirecutter, and CNN’s Underscored because they tend to deliver results. “One of those publications, in particular, drove over $400,000 in revenue for one of our clients last Q4,” she said. “They can be hugely impactful on a business.”
The influencing game
Outside of traditional media, Kleinman and her Dreamday team pitch influencers, bloggers, and Substackers that compile their own gift guides. Because some outlets have deadlines for submitting products for consideration, that could make some of these other avenues worth pursuing if a brand is starting the pitching process later in the year. With media industry layoffs and other industry factors, Kleinman said it can feel more challenging to land coverage these days. “Not only are there way more brands than ever before, but there’s less editors writing the pieces, and there’s more brands being pitched to them,” she said. “I think it’s a lot more competitive.” Still, she said, even with the results she’s seen from traditional media, “it’s important to have a very diversified approach and make sure that you’re not overly reliant on one category of partner.” Exposing people to a product through multiple channels, she said, can be an effective strategy given how many ads people see every day. If Kleinman were to read an article in Vogue mentioning Dreamday client and cookware brand Our Place, she said by way of example, “I don’t purchase off that Vogue article,” she said. “I then go onto Instagram, check my feed, and get served an ad from them, and then, ultimately, I sign up for their newsletter and convert from the newsletter.” In its research on creator gift guides, Mavely found that a majority of consumers said they would “need to see a product promoted by a creator or influencer two to three times” before they would consider purchasing. “I think where consumers are gravitating towards and what the data suggests is that [consumers are] getting smarter about what’s an authentic recommendation versus what’s just a pure play,” Evan Wray, CEO and co-founder of Mavely, told us. “That puts a lot of responsibility on platforms…and on influencers and creators themselves to make sure you're promoting brands and services that you actually resonate with, you actually use, and you actually trust.”
“Not only are there way more brands than ever before, but there’s less editors writing the pieces, and there’s more brands being pitched to them. I think it’s a lot more competitive.”
—Lauren Kleinman, founder of Dreamday and co-founder of The Quality Edit