Forbes: Earned Media Is the Output. Strategic Counsel Is the Value. — Parry Headrick on Earning A Seat At The Table
Founder & CEO, Crackle PR
On July 24, 2026, the Forbes Agency Council published How Agencies Can Position Themselves As Growth Partners For Clients. Crackle PR founder Parry Headrick contributed the "Earn A Seat At The Table" entry — number 4 on the panel, and the sharpest reframe of what earned media is actually for.
“The agencies that thrive are the ones embedded in the business, not just the communications program. When you understand the competitive landscape, the messaging that moves buyers, and the market shifts shaping decisions, you stop being a vendor. Earned media is the output. Strategic counsel is the value. That's when clients stop seeing a line item and start seeing a growth partner.”
Why "earned media is the output" is the whole reframe
Most agencies pitch clips. Clips are the receipt of the work, not the work itself. The work is knowing which story to pursue this quarter, which reporter's beat is shifting, which competitor move creates a narrative opening, and which market shift means the messaging that worked in Q1 won't work in Q3. That's the counsel. The coverage is what proves the counsel was right.
When a client can't tell the difference between the two, PR gets cut in the next budget review. When they can, PR gets protected — because the counsel is what they can't get from an in-house hire, a freelancer, or an AI tool.
What "embedded in the business" actually looks like at Crackle PR
- Weekly competitive intel — not monthly clip reports. We track competitor announcements, funding, exec moves, and narrative positioning the same week they happen, and flag counter-programming opportunities before the news cycle closes.
- Buyer messaging pressure-testing. Every founder quote, byline hook, and pitch angle gets tested against what actually moves the deals in the pipeline — not against what sounds good in a boardroom.
- Market-shift readouts, not activity reports. The monthly deliverable is a senior read on what changed in the market and what it means for the next 90 days — coverage recaps are appendices, not the headline.
How this connects to the GEO thesis
"Earned media is the output" is also the GEO thesis in one sentence. The citations that land in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews come from the exact tier-one journalists that senior PR operators earn trust with — the same journalists we argued for in the earlier Forbes piece on earned media as AI infrastructure. And the senior-led operating model that makes it possible is the same one from the Forbes piece on restructuring agencies for AI.
The through-line across the four 2026 Forbes columns is the same: strategic counsel produces tier-one coverage, tier-one coverage produces AI visibility, AI visibility produces pipeline. Agencies stuck reporting on clips are stuck defending a line item. Agencies reporting on counsel are being protected as growth infrastructure.
Further reading
Founder & CEO, Crackle PR · Full bio
Parry Headrick is the founder and CEO of Crackle PR, a fully remote, senior-led B2B tech PR agency. With 20+ years in tech communications, he has counseled hundreds of VC-backed startups and growth-stage companies on media strategy, analyst relations, and AI-era brand positioning.
Glossary · Related Terms
- Earned MediaEditorial coverage of your brand in third-party publications you didn't pay for.
- Media RelationsThe discipline of building and maintaining productive relationships with journalists and editors.
- Tier 1 MediaThe top general-business and national outlets — WSJ, NYT, Forbes, Bloomberg, Reuters.
- On the RecordAnything you say can be quoted by the reporter with full attribution to you by name and title.
- BoilerplateThe standardized "About" paragraph appended to the end of every press release describing the company.
- LedeThe opening sentence or paragraph of a news story or press release — the single most important sentence in the piece.
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