- 18 min
- from the first reports to an approved pitch landing
- 43
- national journalists pitched
- 67%
- opened it, 29 of 43
The brief
The client is a European venture capital firm whose partners are judged by founders choosing between term sheets and by limited partners deciding on the next fund. Both audiences form their view partly from whether the firm has anything useful to say when the news is about its market.
Political appointments are the hardest kind of reactive comment. The window is a single evening with every economist in the country competing for space, and a partner will only sign off a view they genuinely hold.
What we did
When John Healey was named Chancellor, we drafted the partner's take on what it meant for UK small and medium businesses, had it approved, and put it in front of the FT, Reuters, the BBC and Bloomberg the same evening.
How it ran, July and August 2026
- 20 Jul
18:17First reports that the Chancellor has been named - 20 Jul
18:20Comment drafted and sent for client review - 20 Jul
18:30The partner approves the quote; the pitch list is generated - 20 Jul
18:35Approved pitch goes to 43 national journalists - 21 Jul
07:49Money Marketing runs the comment word for word - 20 AugThree publications in total: Money Marketing, Sifted twice, and IT Boltwise
The same partner, twice in Sifted
Reactive comment builds a profile when it happens regularly. Over seven weeks we sent 14 tracked pitches to Sifted journalists, and in August Sifted quoted the partner in two features, one of them the day after a pitch on Europe's AI robotics debate. Sifted reaches 1.2 million readers a month, many of them the founders and investors the firm most wants to know it.
Why it worked
The pitch went out in 18 minutes because the preparation had been done in advance. The partner's position on SME funding was already agreed and the journalist list already existed. A single person could approve the comment, so when the news broke the only work left was the writing.