Brett Farmiloe

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How Brands Get Subject Matter Experts in Front of Journalists: Featured CEO Brett Farmiloe on IN CLEAR FOCUS

IN CLEAR FOCUS27 min

Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured and owner of HARO, joined Adrian Tennant on Bigeye's IN CLEAR FOCUS to explain how brands get their subject matter experts in front of journalists (one point of contact, a trusted core of 15 to 20 experts, an outer tier) and why human-written pitches are accepted three times as often as AI-generated ones.

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Takeaways

  • 15 to 20Getting subject matter experts in front of journalists is an operating model, and Brett Farmiloe points to universities as the organizations that run it best. One internal point of contact, the PR person or team, monitors and filters media opportunities, increasingly with AI. A trusted core of 15 to 20 experts gets the first call. An outer tier of experts is there for everything else, at the cost of more time and a lower hit rate. Farmiloe says the same model scales to companies.
  • 3xHuman-written pitches are accepted about three times as often as AI-generated ones. Across more than 1.4 million pitches Featured has analyzed with AI detection, 1 in 3 human-written pitches was accepted versus 1 in 10 AI pitches, which is why Farmiloe says the place human judgment stays irreplaceable in a PR workflow is writing the pitch yourself.
  • 15 minutesTime is the first reason expertise inside a brand stays locked up: PR agencies do PR nine hours a day, while most experts have maybe 15 minutes a day for it. AI monitoring that surfaces relevant journalist requests is starting to open that door, and the roster of who speaks is widening with it. Most companies make the founder or CEO the thought leader, the safe play, but HR managers, CIOs and CTOs are now speaking in depth on technical subjects only they can address, and one consumer brand's press room links to a profile page for every expert to encourage each of them to be featured in the media.
  • 100 million+HARO has sent more than 100 million emails since Featured revived it in April 2025. Farmiloe attributes the growth to demand for earned media, as every brand asks how to show up in ChatGPT and Claude: earned media is hard to manipulate, which is why backlinks anchored search for decades and why LLMs now treat it as trusted authority.

“Most companies will designate a founder or CEO to be the thought leader, which is very much the safe play. You're now seeing more human resource managers, more chief information officers, more CTOs who are talking in depth about a very technical aspect that only they could speak on. And by association of sharing that knowledge, it's an incredible marketing activity for those companies and those brands.”

— Brett Farmiloe, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Featured

Companies discussed: Featured, Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

Episode notes and full transcript: featured.com/press/podcast/in-clear-focus

Cite as: Brett Farmiloe on IN CLEAR FOCUS, “How to Get Subject Matter Experts Into the Media,” September 22, 2026.

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