TL;DR

For years, I’ve taught clients how to run the PESO Model®—the operating system that integrates paid, earned, shared, and owned media around a business outcome. But teaching a system and living inside it are two different disciplines. Pitching media for Gini Dietrich, the founder of Spin Sucks and creator of the PESO Model, put me on the other side of the desk. It has humbled me in useful ways. This article walks through three lessons that came directly from that work: why inbound interest is not a strategy, why measurement discipline is the first thing to slip under pressure, and why the standards the PESO Model demands are supposed to feel high. If you’re wondering whether you’re doing this correctly, these are the same three things we have to watch ourselves.

Key Insights

• Inbound interest feels like validation, but it is not a substitute for a proactive earned and owned media strategy.
• The PESO Model® is designed to push teams past “good enough” into deliberate, sourced activity.
• A busy season is exactly when measurement discipline is most likely to erode—and when it is most needed.
• Skipping measurement during high-activity periods means losing the data that proves what’s actually working.
• The PESO Model holds every team, including ours, to a higher standard than most professionals set for themselves.
• Our empathy for client frustration comes from experiencing the same friction internally, not from theory.
• Discipline under pressure is the actual differentiator between organizations that run PESO and organizations that just talk about it.
• Holding a client accountable to a standard you don’t meet yourself is not consulting; it’s theater.

What Doing Earned Media for the PESO Model® Creator Taught Me About Discipline

I run earned media at Spin Sucks, including Gini’s own, and I have a confession to make: executing a media relations effort for the person who created the PESO Model® is harder than doing PR for almost anyone else. 

Not because Gini Dietrich is difficult, far from it, in fact, but because there’s nowhere to hide. Every shortcut I might be tempted to take, she’d recognize immediately. She literally wrote the playbook I’m running.

That pressure has turned into one of the most useful things to happen to our client relationships in a long time. It’s given us real, earned (pun intended) empathy for what it actually feels like to run the PESO Model day-to-day, under a deadline, with a full inbox and a shrinking calendar. 

I already knew the model. Living inside it taught me something different: PESO Model discipline is not a knowledge problem. It’s a willpower problem, and it shows up in the same three places for everyone, including all of us at Spin Sucks.

PESO Shows Why Inbound Leads Are Not Enough

In all the years I’ve known Gini, I’ve always witnessed a steady stream of coverage. But when I joined the team full-time in November, I was able to peek behind the curtain to realize it’s primarily a bevy of inbound interest. 

Podcast invitations, speaking requests, and source requests from reporters who already know her name. It’s a constant flow of opportunities, and it’s tempting to treat that low-hanging fruit as the whole strategy. When the inbox has three interview requests sitting in it, proactive pitching starts to feel optional. Why go build something new when people are already asking?

Because inbound interest is a symptom of past earned (or owned) media work, not a plan for future earned media work. It’s proof that the system worked once, and you’ve built some credibility as an expert in your field. 

It is not the system. 

If we only respond to what comes in, we’re managing requests, not building visibility. The moment we stop initiating—stop pitching new angles, stop identifying new opportunities, stop creating owned media that give reporters and podcast hosts a reason to come back, the inbound stream will eventually dry up, usually months before anyone notices.

The PESO Model is intentionally uncomfortable here. It doesn’t let earned media be a passive category, no matter how much thought leadership you’ve built up over the years. 

Earned media creates proof, and proof has to be pursued, not just accepted when it shows up. 

The same is true for owned media: publishing only when there’s a new service offering or team member is not a content strategy; it’s the bare minimum.

This is exactly the trap most of our clients fall into, and we often consult with them on why it’s necessary, even though it’s challenging. 

Now I’ve felt the pull firsthand—the quiet, reasonable-sounding voice that says “we have enough coming in, it’s not that critical to drive new coverage.” 

That voice is confusing sufficiency with strategy. If your team already has warm leads, a referral pipeline, or a founder with some name recognition, that’s not permission to go passive. 

That’s a head start. 

The PESO Model still requires you to get up off your tookus and chip away on new PR activity, not coast on what you’re taking for granted.

Measurement is the First Thing to Slip. Don’t Let it.

There’s a specific kind of chaos that hits during a launch window, a conference season, or a run of earned media landing all at once. 

Everyone is heads-down producing, pitching, and publishing. It feels like momentum. It often is momentum. And it is exactly when we’ve watched our client’s measurement discipline start to slide, because tracking a placement feels less urgent than landing the next one.

That instinct is backward, and lest we sound too high and mighty, just know that we’ve had to correct for it in our own operation more than once. 

Activity without measurement is just noise with good energy behind it. If we don’t track which pitch angle earned the placement, which owned asset got cited, or which channel a lead actually came from, we lose the only evidence that tells us what to repeat and what to stop doing. 

A flurry of activity that isn’t measured doesn’t compound. It evaporates. 

Measurement is storytelling with numbers, and a busy month is precisely the story you most need to be able to tell—to your clients, to leadership, to ourselves.

This is where the Measurement Module of the all-new PESO Model Certification® has been a useful tool for us, not just for clients. 

It exists because “we were really busy and it went well” is not a standard of measurement, and marketing and comms teams across the industry have historically let it pass for one. 

The PESO Model Operating System® forces the same question we now ask ourselves mid-crunch: does this activity connect back to an actual business outcome, or are we just describing motion?

We understand the temptation to let reporting slide when the wins are piling up. We’ve caught ourselves doing it. The correction isn’t complicated, it’s just disciplined.

Keep tagging, keep sourcing, and keep the dashboard current, especially during the weeks it feels least necessary. 

That’s the difference between a system and a sprint.

Yes, the Standard is High. That’s the Point.

At some point, almost everyone running the PESO Model says something similar: this is a lot to hold ourselves to. 

They’re right. It is. 

Governance, sourced measurement, integration across four media types, proactive earned pursuit even when things are going fine is a materially higher bar than “post something and see what happens,” which is still how a lot of work gets done.

Here’s what running Gini’s earned media confirmed for me: we’re not asking clients to meet a standard we’ve set for them and exempted ourselves from. We hold our own earned media efforts to the same governance, the same measurement rigor, and the same proactive requirement we ask of every one of our clients. 

There’s no separate, easier version of PESO reserved for the people who invented it. If anything, the scrutiny is higher because Gini will notice the gap first.

As an almost 20-year veteran of this industry, that makes me nervous, and that’s also the whole point. 

The PESO Model isn’t supposed to feel like a light lift. It’s supposed to feel like an operating discipline, because sticking to the process is what separates organizations that build durable trust from organizations that generate occasional attention. 

If you’re in the middle of this work and it feels like more rigor than you expected, that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. That’s a sign you’re working towards a monumental achievement, and you should be proud.

So don’t give up on it. Don’t quietly downgrade to “good enough” because inbound looks healthy this quarter. Don’t skip the measurement because the month got busy, and it felt fine anyway. 

We don’t get to skip those steps either, and we work for the woman who created it. 

You’ve got this—the standard is high because the outcome is worth it, not because anyone expects perfection on day one.

So, Whatever Shall We Do Now?

Running earned media for the creator of PESO stripped away any excuse to treat the system as optional in the moments when it’s least convenient. 

Inbound interest, a busy stretch, a standard that feels demanding—I face all three internally, the same as everyone else. 

The next practical step is simple: choose one of these three temptations that’s active on your team right now, name it out loud in your next status meeting, and decide as a group not to give in to it this quarter. 

That’s a smaller, more honest move than trying to fix everything at once, and it’s the move that actually keeps the system running.

Which of the three temptations is your team giving in to?

Take the PESO Model Diagnostic here – it’s free, it’s scored, and you can take it as often as you’d like.
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