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.
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.
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.
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.