Restaurants Should Stop Wasting Their Money on Paid Influence

Last week Ashok Selvam of Eater Chicago reached out to me with a couple questions to support his excellent story on the surprise demand for Warlord (a restaurant you read about here the week before).  I sent him kind of an essay, most of which didn’t make it in to his piece (understandably)…but as I looked at it, I thought, this is actually a decent commentary for restaurant owners and dining interested people who want to know how the secret story “sauce” behind restaurant and food news is made. So, I made some edits and expanded a few points from what I sent Ashok.  

What I describe below is based on my two decades as a food journalist interacting with both traditional PR and other forms of paid influence.  As you likely know, because I talk about it all the time, I generally do not attend free media dinners, or take free food. I did a few times early on in my career and the experience made me feel like a prostitute. I estimated that I have received less than ten (I’m hedging), maybe even less than five, free dinners in my entire career.

I avoid them because it’s impossible to report on, criticize or celebrate a restaurant fairly when you have an entanglement like this.  That being said I get a lot of pitches and invites and see how this process of influence works daily based on what gets covered online and what was offered for free to writers and content creators just weeks before.  

I welcome disagreement in the comments from people, especially those in the industries I’m talking about. If you do disagree with what I say and you’re a person who goes to media dinners, gets paid to post, or works as a PR person, please disclose those facts in your comments.

“What does Warlord’s media strategy say about the need for PR/Social Media Influencers?”

You only have a few choices promoting a new restaurant in 2023.

You can spend a lot of money on PR or you can spend less money, i.e. pay a per post fee or give away free food and or experiences i.e. have a “media” night to attract influencers and whatever remaining food journalists still exist.

You can call a few respected journalists, maybe place an exclusive or just talk to a limited handful because you respect them, which kind of creates a limited and coveted scarcity of information that might get other writers and influencers to want in on the pie.

OR

You can differentiate your product, be a real creator and build a truly inspiring concept, gently let people know you’re open, and provide democratic access to people who are willing to pay for your work and value it. I.e. you’re waiting and seeing if indeed you have created the high-quality experience you believe.

Almost every restaurant or food service group chooses the first two. Warlord clearly chose the last one. Given that a lot of what they do marches to its own drum, it’s not surprising they chose to zag when everyone else is zigging. 

While being open to everyone seems like the least likely to generate demand, it turns out because no one does it, it’s actually the best form of scarcity.  I.e. for the first time, powerful media folks, PR mavens, and influencers stop navel gazing, get a little insecurity and say, ‘Wait, everyone says yes to me.  Why did they say no?”  

Influencers might start in the game out of passion but once they shift to revenue generation, they quickly realize the fastest way to make a buck is to take free meals and/or get paid to post or promote restaurants.

If you put up a gate like not offering free meals or pay for play, most influencers will walk by that gate until they find another open house without an alarm system to rob.

Now, I know, you’ll be like, but Mike, my competitors will get pimped instead. Maybe, but if they suck, eventually that influence won’t work. And if you’re good, you will get those people soon enough as I describe below. You didn’t want these people anyway, i.e. these people don’t really care about you and they’ll likely represent your business tepidly or inauthentically.

But, the ones who really care, whether influencers or journalists or just passionate writers, they will see that gate like a Limited Virgil Abloh X Supreme X Nike X Louis Vuitton sneaker drop. They will click feverishly. They will line up the night before.  And if they like what they bought (partly because they’ve invested their own skin in the game), they will hopefully return the restaurant’s delivery of creativity and value with even more creativity and value in the form of an extraordinary story or piece of content.

The irony is even some of the navel gazers will follow because no one likes being left out in the cold.  If a restaurant becomes hot and you don’t cover it and your subscribers or readers follow you for hotness, they will question your value and start to unfollow.

How much vindication do you have in seeing something unique like this?  

No one who delivers real value needs a lot of PR or paid social media influence. People use them out of weakness.  The weakness is you aren’t creating real inspired value or differentiation in your business so you know you have to pay for promotion because you know or believe you can’t earn it through your work. 

Chicago’s arguable best restaurant (even before they were “best”) doesn’t really have formal PR. Alinea’s PR was all in house and generally non-existent – rather Chef  Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas created their own buzz directly on the internet with their actual high value and creative work.

Jenner Tomaska of Esme has more social media followers (because he offers an experience no one else does - see a theme here) than many of the content creators and PR firms. As such he has been able to bypass them and continue building his customer base with direct marketing through his social channels and personal social media presence.

In 2023 what are you actually paying for with most restaurant PR?  As a food journalist who has seen the industry evolve over 20 years I believe now you are paying an incredible amount of money, thousands of dollars a month for generally the following services:

Press releases written by a recent English major (if you’re lucky, maybe majored in marketing) that almost includes the choice phrase “to name but a few” and some form of inflated merchandising around typical story tropes like the chef being the “best”, the “youngest”, cooking the cuisine of their “family” or “country” etc.

Maybe the PR agency organizes a media/influencer night where a team of PR people spend the night watching content creators and “journalists” graze on free food while gazing deep into those same creators eyes while giving them metaphorical ego masturbation.

The whole time some of the PR people and the influencers and journalists are also imagining themselves in some kind of Emily in Paris fantasy whereby the chef will legitimize them by shining a tiny bit of their light on them. And listen I know this is dark, but many of these people are just hoping to literally smash with the chef or restaurant owner. Some of them actually go beyond the hoping phase.

Sometimes the “pay” is more subtle. The PR or restaurant teams extend an offer to the food editor of the publication. This person doesn’t write the piece so it seems like it’s an arm’s length proposition. The truth is these editors are actually more influential because they tend to assign stories. It’s actually a more effective pay for play.

Sometimes this becomes a circle jerk. You invite the editor for free. The editor likes your thing. Then they assign a story to a writer. The writer gushes in the publication on a “best of” list. The advertising department from the publication calls the restaurant and says, hey you’re on our “best” list, we’re doing a marketing event to promote the publication, will you cook for free at it for “exposure”?

And the circle keeps going and you keep burning money for promotion you already got. This is not theory. I have a bunch of restaurateurs tell me they do these events out of fear that the publication or journalist will retaliate against them if they don’t.

Back to PR though, in most cases you’re just getting an email gopher who will send file photos and chef bios and act as an unnecessary intermediary for Q and A with the restaurant team. 

In the best cases, you’re getting someone who is connected to graphic designers and social media experts who can optimize those channels for you. But, you could also just be paying those people directly and saving yourself money.

Not all PR is like this.  There are a few folks in Chicago who do their research, pitch stories of depth tailored to the kind of things individual journalists have established that they like to explore. They do not promise pay for play. But these are truly rare, like 1 in a 100. If you have one of these people and they get you regular unique placement, not placements you were going to get without them anyway, then sure, they’re probably worth thousands a month.

In the case of Warlord if they had the dollars to pay for these services, they’d get very little value in return.  How would a PR person who usually spends their time on restaurants of “craft” declaring things like “chef’s Nashville hot chicken pasta is a unique and awesome offering” even begin to tell the story of an artistic experience like Warlord?

Warlord is maybe the only restaurant that mixes its own peculiar floor dye colors, builds fallen log flower arrangements, doesn’t use dumb miltary-derived chef brigade titles in its kitchen, and dry-ages fish.  The PR agencies don’t know what to do with this because they’re only used to promoting known tropes, not actual uniqueness. That’s the story and it doesn’t need a PR person to tell or spin it.

If there’s vindication, it’s that restaurants will see Warlord’s success here and invest the dollars they would have spent on influencing and PR instead on reinvesting in their employees or providing even more value to the diner.