The PR Masterclass Creators Actually Need with Emily Blair Marcus, Founder of Emily Blair Media

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Welcome back to Creator Etiquette®.

This week's guest is the founder of Emily Blair Media, a PR agency that works with celebrities, reality TV talent, founders and creators. Emily started her career as a journalist at Us Weekly, spent years as a red carpet reporter, and then used everything she learned from the inside to build an agency that does things differently. We covered when creators actually need a publicist, what good PR even does for you, media training, backlash, and a whole lot more. If you would rather listen in, catch the full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

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Emily was not looking for a gap, she was just burnt out writing articles about celebrities and started noticing something strange. The people pitching her at the magazine were creators she had never heard of, representing talent who were building real audiences and real influence, but being pitched to press in ways that were robotic, generic, and completely mismatched to who they actually were.

She realized that these creators had two versions of themselves: their online self (casual and deeply personal), and their media self, (refined and intentional). Nobody was helping them bridge the gap. So when the pandemic hit and the creator economy exploded, Emily reverse-engineered everything she knew about what worked and did not work as a journalist drowning in pitches, and built an agency to do it right. The result is Emily Blair Media.

When someone Googles you, what comes up is your first impression. For a lot of creators, especially early in their careers, what comes up is clickbait, tabloid headlines, or comments taken wildly out of context.

Emily has worked with clients who were driving billions of dollars in brand revenue and had enormous influence, but when you Googled them, none of that showed up. What showed up was a salacious quote from a tabloid that had nothing to do with who they actually were. That is a credibility problem, and it is one that most creators do not even realize they have.

Good press shapes what Google surfaces about you. It builds a digital footprint that reflects what you are actually building, and it compounds over time. Every article, every podcast appearance, every speaking credit adds to the picture of who you are when someone searches your name.

The first question to ask yourself is… do you have a why? A reason someone should care about what you are doing beyond the content itself? Emily has worked with clients who had 20,000 followers and were generating more press and more income than people with a million followers because there was a compelling story behind what they were doing. If you cannot articulate your why clearly and quickly, PR is not going to fix that for you. It can only amplify what is already there.

The second question is about readiness. Emily described having clients with incredible businesses who simply were not responsive enough to make PR work. If you are not checking emails, if you are in the middle of a transition with no clear point of contact, if you are going to forget to tag the brand at the event you said you were going to, a publicist cannot save you from that. The relationship only works when both sides are showing up.

For creators who are not quite ready for a full retainer, Emily created lower-commitment entry point that lets you test whether showing up to events and building that visibility is right for you before investing in the full thing. It is month to month, unlimited, and it covers events movie premieres, influencer events, music festivals, launch parties, fashion weeks, Coachella, and more.

Media training is more valuable to a creator than actual press coverage. Here’s why:

Media training is not only a permanent skill, but also transferable. It makes you better at panels, at podcast interviews, at brand conversations, at speaking engagements, at navigating difficult questions in any setting.

Emily builds a media training Bible for every client she onboards. It covers the difference between a podcast interview and a print interview, how to handle questions you do not want to answer, what off the record actually means and when to use it, and how to prepare for the worst-case scenario so that the real interview feels easy by comparison.

She also shared the four things she tells every client to avoid talking about unless those topics are the entire point of their platform… bank accounts, booze, relationships, and boys. Those four topics open doors you cannot always close, and unless you have intentionally built your platform around one of them, bringing them up creates exposure without adding anything useful to your brand story.

Emily does crisis management, and says one of the biggest mistake creators make when they go viral for the wrong reasons is responding publicly. If you issue a statement, that statement becomes the next headline. Then someone responds to the statement, and you feel like you have to respond again, and suddenly your entire character arc is defined by a conflict that started with one misread video. The story you did not want told ends up being told louder and longer than it ever needed to be.

Her rule is simple: if you genuinely hurt someone personally, reach out to them directly. Swallow your pride and apologize privately. You never want the media to tell your story for you. But if it is just general internet chaos, the best move is almost always to keep moving. There will always be something more interesting tomorrow. The one guarantee of media is that someone will always out-crazy the current situation.

And if you are scared to post after backlash, Emily's take is that every single day she makes mistakes. She learns from them, and tries to never make the same one twice. That is the whole framework…accountability without paralysis.

Emily tracks everything for her clients: the outlet, the date, the link, and a note on what it drove in terms of views and impressions. At the end of every month, her team calculates the total reach and puts together a report her clients can share with their agents, their brand partners, and anyone else who needs to understand the value of what has been built.

If you are doing this yourself without a PR team, here is the minimum; keep a running spreadsheet with the outlet name, the publish date, the link, and a note on what the piece was about. Do not let it get away from you, it is much harder to reconstruct retroactively than it is to log as you go. And that record becomes something real when you are pitching brands, applying for speaking opportunities, or building out a press kit.

“I went viral two weeks ago and got hit with my first wave of real backlash. I did not do anything wrong — people just misread my video. I responded to comments trying to explain myself and I think it made it worse. Now that it is dying down, I am scared it will happen again. What should I have done and what should I do next time?”

Emily's answer, and I think she is completely spot on ~obviously~ responding publicly was the mistake. Explaining yourself in the comments gave the situation more oxygen than it needed and created more content for people to react to. The move is almost always to let it die. Noise on the internet has a very short shelf life when you do not feed it. The audience will follow your lead. If you treat it like a crisis, it becomes one. If you keep moving, most of them will too.

Emily and I are seeing each other again soon at Cannes, and I already know the sequel episode is going to be even better. Go follow her on Instagram and check out her website!

Welcome to Creator Etiquette®. I am so glad you are here.

Xo, Gigi Robinson Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom

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