About the office
A small office, built around an idea.
We do two things and we do them better than anyone else on the planet: we find the un-ignorable angle, and we place it where it cannot be denied.
Why this office exists.
For most of the last decade, paid advertising was the default answer to the question "how do we get our name out there?" It worked, in the way that renting an apartment works — you pay, you stay, you leave, you have nothing. The brands that lasted understood, often after spending a fortune learning it, that what they actually wanted was not attention. It was authority. And authority could not be bought.
701am exists for the founders, marketers, and operators who have figured this out — or who suspect it, and want help proving it. We are not the largest earned media office in the world. We are likely not the cheapest. We are the one that will sit with you for an hour, find the angle no one else has noticed, and then prove we can place it.
The sunrise call is free. The work that follows is not. But everything we do is on the same principle: the world does not remember the loudest. It remembers the one it could not look away from. Our job is to make sure that one is you.
Five things we believe.
These are not slogans. They are the conditions under which we choose to work, and the test we apply to every campaign before it leaves the office.
- i.
Generic is a form of dishonesty.
Every business has one true sentence no competitor can copy. If we have not found it, we have not done our work.
- ii.
The pitch is the product.
A reporter decides in eight words whether to open the email. We write for the eight words first, and the rest of the campaign follows.
- iii.
Compounds beat spikes.
A single placement is a moment. Forty placements over a year is an asset. We work for the asset, not the moment.
- iv.
The work is not for everyone.
If we cannot help you, we will say so on the first call, and tell you who can. We would rather lose a client than waste their year.
- v.
Earned, not bought.
Every campaign we run is a campaign we could publish the receipts for. No paid placements dressed as earned media. No pay-to-play. No exceptions.
Who works at the office.
David
Founder
Spent fifteen years running content and SEO businesses for higher education. Now finds the angle for everyone else's businesses. Writes most of the dispatches at 7:01am.
A small bench
Researchers, writers, placement
We keep the office small on purpose. Three to five people work on a campaign at any time, depending on what it needs. We do not subcontract pitching to anyone we have not worked with for two years.