CTRL/SHIFT - 13 06 2026 PARTHENOPE STAGE - ANASTASIIA KULIBABA - PR THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

I know it's not easy to come back from the lunch and very tasty pizza from Gino Serbilo, but I guess there is a good topic now awaiting us. So just to introduce we have Anastasia Kibaba who is chief of communications and input global with nine years of experience across fintech web free and different innovative spaces. She definitely has many things to tell us and definitely has some strategies to show which may work and put the best result from what we want to always obtain in this world. So, welcome to the stage and floor is yours. Thank you so much.

Hi everyone. I'm really glad to see you all and also thank you organizers for inviting us because honestly this is the most beautiful place um where I see the conf the crypto conference is happening. So really glad to be here and hopefully my presentation will give you some new insights how to do PR well and how to make it work for you and your company. So my name is Anastasia. I'm chief of communications at Input Global.

We are communications agency doing PR, events, skills, marketing and personal brands globally for emerging tech projects. I started my career as a TV journalist nine years ago and I was a presenter and uh like a TV host in Ukrainian TV and I had my own TV show named it for your business meaning that I explored different technologies and gadgets that would help businesses to grow and make and achieve better results. Um, and honestly speaking, um, I see how PR managers sometimes doing a lot of mistakes. And one of them is very funny to me that just last week I've got a pitch from Ukrainian company pitching me something. But I left TV 9 years ago.

So it doesn't make sense to me. And I know that some companies are paying money to those PR managers who are still pitching me as a journalist who left journalism 9 years ago. Meaning that you just I don't know why they're doing this. And if they are not updating their media list, it means that they just spending your money to the wind. Um, and by the way, my slides include GIF images.

So, it should be more fun that now. So, if you want to see the like the whole presentation with with the GIF uh like animation, you can tell me and I'll send it to you. So, usually PR is splitted by two categories and some of the founders that we work with when we start an uh conversation, they sometimes confuse pay paid PR with earned media. And I should tell that paid PR is something that you buy. You're buying uh the articles that will go live about you or about your company in media which is very different from what we do as um PR managers who are pitching the company organically.

Organic PR means that someone decided to write about your company organically. opinion that this is a real proof that your product is needed on the market that like this is the real third party validation about your existence and your needs in the niche where you work. So this is a targeted approach where PR managers are exploring what you are building. They know the market really well and they are trying trying to find the spot how to introduce you or your company to the journalists to be able to achieve great coverage for you. Researchers say that the organic mention in the same media will bring you uh x3 like three times more attention and trust than paid media coverage and also paid ads in the same media outlet.

Meaning that audience is very smart. They will spot paid articles really well because we now are interacting with the content on a daily basis. No one can skip it. So people are smart and they know how to spot something that was paid. Uh I think that you know this uh gif this meme really well and it means that paid media dies when you don't have budget.

Sometimes it's even worse because sometimes paid articles are getting deleted from the media where they were published because sometimes it's doing like you are doing this under the table not like directly and uh from a sales department. Earned media works differently. when you get uh third-party validation from journalists, it leaves long and you can find your coverage in Google in AI answers which is really important right now in reprints that you didn't expect. Sometimes earned media coverage gets dozens of republished articles on different platforms and also in conversations that you can spot attending different events or just from outside requests from the industry players. Yeah,

here you can see uh one of the cases that we just uh released for one of our clients, Quantis. They released a huge report about quantum threat to cryp crypto. They analyzed the market and introduced to the market really thoughtful results and insights about how industry is not really prepared for the quantum threat. And what we did is that we um helped them to shape this report in the form that will work for media. We pitched it and one report generated dozens of links of coverage in the next two days after we started our outreach.

Uh we achieved a clear positioning for this company on this specific topic. We showed real insights to the market and journalists which is very very important and we didn't launch or pay for any ads in those media outlets. This coverage was completely organic and here on the video I was showing that the whole two pages of Google search were full of different mentions of this report which was also gained organically. So we pitched a lot of outlets. We've got about 10 original articles about this report.

highlighting the insights and after that because it's organic coverage it then was covered by smaller and smaller and smaller outlets uh just organically and we even right now see other mentions of this company in different articles on the market.

My clicker is not working. Can you help me please?

Oh okay. So if you ask me how do we get there? I want to give you some advices about what to do and what not to do when you interact with a PR agency or when you work to do PR yourself. So my first advice would be to do not feel the brief for PR activities with AI. Why?

Because your input affects output. If you will just brief the company that is doing PR or marketing for you with AI, it will not be different from any other company that would pitch their product on the market which is very bad for us as PR specialists. We really need to understand what exactly is different you are building. What is important for the market to know what is your founder story that can be shared with the journalists across the globe. We know journalists really well and you need to understand that they're getting paid to be able to reduce the noise in the market and spot something that is really really important and that's why they understand what is AI generated company pitch and what is the real story behind it and we can help you understand that and present it to the market.

What we need or what any other marketing or PR specialist need to be able to promote you really well organically on the market is data your story you need to give us meat to work with. This is very very important because be because like without it any good specialist on the market just can't get it for you. You need to also give uh the the company that you're working with some really important inputs. If you would ask me what is the worst communication strategy that you can implement for your company, it will be speaking just about yourself. This is also the biggest mistake that I see companies are doing in marketing or in any communication honestly not just PR.

Uh, I could start this presentation telling you about how good our agency is. I have a really good pitch about our company and I can tell you why we are the best in the market. I have all of the things to prove the statement. But the the sad reality is that nobody cares that you are the best. You need to understand who are the readers of the media that are reading the journalists that we are pitching.

Even for investor relations, this is very important. And I was speaking to someone who raised $20 million last week. And he told me that once he shifted the positioning of the company and once he shifted his speech to investors trying to target them, not presenting the company, his response rate was much higher than before. You need to understand that fund is protecting someone's money. So you need to explain to them why they won't lose investing in you and and the same thing is about partners.

So partners and communities they are managing their own risk. So whenever you communicate with them you just can't tell that you are the best in the market and you're presenting the best solution possible. You need to tell them why they will be safe with you, why they will be good with you and why they need to use the product and what will make them like how they will feel after interacting with you. And same with the journalists. So if your pitch starts with we, they starts with so what because they don't care.

Also I need to tell you that PR is a huge industry. Last year in June, I attended ECC in Khan and I was on a meetup of PR and communication specialists from around the globe and I can tell you that we had more PR people in the room than journalists. So you can imagine that every PR specialist they would present not one but a few companies meaning that all of us are pitching same reporters which and and the number of reporters is very very limited and we have a huge competition. So you have to be prepared for the events if you want to interact with journalists while in advance. I would suggest two months or months and a half will be the minimum of time when you need to understand what exactly you will present to the market.

What will be your message? What will be your insight? What will be your thought that you want to share with the journalists and with that meet uh PR managers would be able to introduce you to journalists and journalists will be interested in speaking with you and not with all of the other people that PR managers would pitch. Another thing that I wanted to tell you is about the report that we launched with uh one of the companies that we work with babies. It was introduced just last week or week and a half uh during money 2020.

We did a report on stable coins which gained huge engagement, a huge interest from media outlets with a feature story on Cointelegraph and many many other outlets, financial and crypto outlets that cover the news and also reprints on the most visible platforms in uh crypto industry. And from this the insight is that your data is gold and I suggest you to mine it. Meaning that every company they have an opportunity to get data from somewhere. You have your users, you have your community, you have your partners, you have your product and I strongly recommend you to see and look like what are the insights that you can present for to the market from it. do survey, do Google forms, ask them questions, do surveys on uh and polls on X and on other platforms, send newsletters asking questions from your partners.

And then when you get some data or if you get the data from the app that your users are using, you can get a lot of insights that then can be converted into news versus story that journalists will like. Because I started with that from the very beginning that journalists are getting paid to like reduce the noise on the market and spot something really insightful. And if you give them those insights, it will be much easier for them to make a decision to speak with you, to make an interview and cover this story. So how I want to end is that PR doesn't just get you coverage. It has its role on the top of the funnel to prove you belong in the market to build trust before the deal to attract partners, investors, and users.

And I suggest to do it right. Thank you so much. Would we have any questions for Anastasia? If not, no. Okay, then I I think you can found the team.

We also have co-founders here somewhere outside to enjoy the sun and maybe some conversations. Thank you for your presentation.