As a new brand with innovative technologies in the pet product market, combining the message for the tech world and the pet world seemed a challenge establishing Pet Acoustics in the media. The Max Borges Agency saw the branding opportunity as a great PR uptake to pitch to their vast media reach. Partnering with the MBA team as a full creative force immediately escalated Pet Acoustics into every major newspaper, hundreds of tech blog reviews to valued television features establishing the brand. For tech public relations MBA gets our five star recommendation!

I became aware of and worked with MBA when I headed up marketing at online speaker brand Aperion Audio. While our brand already had great relationships with and access to most of the consumer electronics press, the team at MBA was very effective at helping us reach a larger audience.During our work with MBA, the team went beyond the typical press release distribution and pitching of reviews that most PR agencies will do. They were very creative in designing approaches that helped editors quickly understand how our products and brand were different, and of interest to consumers. The product reviews they set up nearly always came through as expected. The team at MBA worked as part of our internal marketing team as a trusted partner.I was impressed by the quality of the direct relationships MBA has with the media, from trade publications to mass market powerhouses, and how open they are to enabling relationships with your brand. MBA complemented our outreach well. I would enjoy working with MBA again, and recommend them to any consumer electronics company with quality products and a differentiated brand that is looking to grow their overall awareness.

We used MBA for the first time late in 2012 to help promote one of our new products. At first, we found the sales process and approach from MBA to be very slick and professional. They were well organized and wrote a very nice press release to start generating PR for our new product.Unfortunately, this was the highlight of MBAs service. After the press release was sent out via a typical wire release service, we were asked to send an initial batch of 50-60 product samples to various media outlets for review. This amounted to a great deal of additional cost (over and above MBAs VERY expensive fees) to send the product samples (which would never be returned).After 30 days, we received another request from our MBA account rep with a new list of another 50 or so contacts to send more samples out. As time went on, various media outlets would often do very small write-ups that were buried deep in their web and were rarely seen (many would write nothing at all) . Our web traffic and product sales had virtually no improvement from these sample reviews.After 90 days of spending thousands upon thousands in fees with virtually no increase in product sales, we pulled the plug on the service. Afterward, we also found out that MBA was also representing our primary competitor in the same product space, something that was not disclosed to us beforehand. Borderline unethical in my opinion.All in all, I think any of the media outlets contacted would have gladly accepted a free sample of our product to write up a review without MBAs involvement. My recommendation to others would be to not use MBA services. You could save thousands by simply crafting a nice approach letter and then sending it out to media contacts (simply by using the contact us link on their web sites) directly yourself.

Pretty pretty pretty pretttaayy pretttaayy good.