Notably PR is a PR and AI visibility agency for mid-market companies that uses behavioral psychology to earn media coverage. We start with why people pay attention, then dig for the version of your story that gives a reporter (and their readers) a reason to care.
TL;DR
- Most PR starts with the announcement and pushes it out. Behavioral psychology PR flips that, starting with why people pay attention and working backward to the story a reporter would actually write.
- Our MINUTES framework names the seven reasons people pay attention: Momentum, Identity, Novelty, Urgency, Tension, Exclusivity and Surprise. We tested it on 1,225 of our own pitches.
- Notably PR is a PR and AI visibility agency for mid-market companies, and the team behind MINUTES, the Attention Gap and the Expert Vacuum. Co-founders Carly Martinetti and Carin Warner lead a fully remote senior team that works across industries.
Attention isn’t random if you understand human behavior.
Updated October 2026.
Reporters get way more pitches than they could ever read. Readers scroll right past most headlines.
So the stories that break through aren’t lucky. They set off something predictable in the person reading, like a flash of recognition or the itch to know something before everyone else does.
Behavioral psychology is the study of why people notice, care about and remember some things and tune out the rest. We use it for earned media. Before we pitch anything, we ask what would make a person stop scrolling. Then we build the story around that.
Most companies we meet have the same problem, even if they’d describe it differently. What they want to say and what a reporter wants to write are two different stories. We call the space between them the Attention Gap. Companies talk from the inside out, and people pay attention from the outside in. Closing that gap is pretty much the whole job.
Why most PR skips the psychology
A lot of agencies start with the announcement and take it to the media. That skips the very first thing a reporter asks: why would my readers care about this today?
A few habits come out of that, and we see them constantly.
The news gets written in Inside Voice. “Proud to announce.” “Leading provider.” Product names no customer has ever said out loud. It all makes sense inside the building… and almost nowhere else. Usually the interesting part is in there somewhere. It just has to be dug out.
There’s a cap on how far a story can go, too. We call it the Headline Ceiling, because a story can only go as high as the best headline you can imagine for it. If the best you’ve got is “Company X Launches Product Y,” that’s a trade announcement, no matter how hard anyone pitches it.
Then there’s the blast, where one pitch goes to a long list and everyone crosses their fingers. When we went back through 1,225 of our own pitches, the ones written for a single reporter got an interested reply 19.6% of the time. The same kind of pitch sent to eight or more reporters? 3.9%.
And the surprise that only surprises the client. A stat can feel huge inside the company and be old news to everyone else. A finding only surprises a reporter when it flips something their readers already believe.
The MINUTES framework: seven reasons people pay attention
MINUTES is our framework for what makes a story newsworthy. Every pitch is asking a reporter for a few minutes of their day, which is where the name comes from. Here’s each trigger, with a real client story for every one.
| Trigger | What the reader thinks | Where it worked |
|---|---|---|
| Momentum | “Everyone is suddenly talking about this.” | TranQuini rode Dry January with a $1,000 “ditch alcohol” challenge, which drew 800+ submissions and 40 placements, including CNBC. |
| Identity | “That’s about people like me.” | Red Wing Shoes tied its boots to the new generation joining the skilled trades, and landed The Wall Street Journal, Footwear News and GQ. |
| Novelty | “I’ve never heard that before.” | We coined “windowed work” for Range. Coverage followed in TODAY and HR Dive, plus features in TechCrunch, Fast Company and Inc. |
| Urgency | “This could affect me.” | nference’s COVID-19 research with the Mayo Clinic became hundreds of stories, including The New York Times. |
| Tension | “Wait, how can both of those be true?!” | Ladders data put remote work and high pay at odds. Bloomberg ran it as “Forget About Remote Work If You Want More Than $200,000 a Year.” |
| Exclusivity | “I want to know this before everyone else.” | AngelQ’s $4.75 million seed round went to LinkedIn News as an exclusive, and 26 more stories followed. |
| Surprise | “That’s not what I expected.” | An AlEn USA survey found parents were cleaning everyday things all wrong. The result was 400+ placements and nearly 3 billion impressions. |
When a client sends us news, the first thing we ask is which of these it triggers. If the answer is none? It isn’t a story yet, and no amount of pitching will change that.
How we use behavioral psychology on a PR program
- First, we find the Attention Gap. We read your news the way a reporter would and figure out how far it is from what a reader would care about.
- Then we dig past the Inside Voice. That means talking to the people closest to the work -- usually the founder, sometimes an engineer or a customer -- until we hit the detail that makes an outsider lean in.
- We pick one trigger from MINUTES and lead with it. In our pitch review, pitches built on one clear trigger did a little better than pitches juggling two (8.5% versus 6.8%).
- Before anything goes out, we test the Headline Ceiling by writing the headline we’d want a reporter to use. If we wouldn’t click on it ourselves, we keep working.
- Where we can, we fill an Expert Vacuum, a topic reporters keep covering where nobody has become the obvious expert yet. When the U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic in May 2023, Pyx Health had already been working on it for years. Op-eds in Fortune and The Hill followed, plus a Fast Company feature.
- And we plan for the Callback. Coverage brings credibility, credibility brings invitations, and invitations bring more coverage. In our pitch review, reporters who’d replied before answered with interest 34.9% of the time, compared with 7% for cold pitches. So the second story gets as much thought as the first.
Behavioral PR for every kind of news
Most of our clients are mid-market companies, usually between $20 million and $500 million in revenue, and they come from just about every industry. The psychology applies to any kind of news. The work is finding the human reason to care.
Funding rounds are a good example, since “we raised money” is rarely the story. Remento’s seed round became a story about saving family memories, and it landed TechCrunch, Fortune, Axios and Forbes.
Product launches need a reason to care that’s bigger than the product. For SKYVIEW, NASA-engineered light turned into a story about sleep and the workday, with 827 million impressions in six months, including WIRED and The Wall Street Journal.
When a company is building a new category, people need words they can repeat. We repositioned TealBook around “supplier intelligence,” and it earned 500+ placements on its way to a $50 million Series B.
Thought leadership compounds over time. A monthly Nasdaq column and steady trade coverage made Aware familiar to national reporters. Then came a Wall Street Journal article and podcast, and 235 million impressions in a single month.
Behavioral psychology PR, behavioral science PR, PR psychology: one approach, several names
People search for this under a bunch of names, including behavioral psychology PR, behavioral science PR and the psychology of PR. They all mean using what we know about how people pay attention and make decisions to do PR better.
But two very different jobs hide under those names, and it helps to know which one you’re hiring for.
Behavior change communications uses behavioral science to change what people do, like getting a flu shot or saving for retirement. You see it a lot in public health, government and nonprofits, and it’s judged by whether people actually change what they do.
Earned attention uses behavioral psychology to get a story noticed and covered. It finds the angle a reporter will write and a reader will remember, and it’s judged by the coverage it gets and who calls you next. That’s our work.
So before you sign with anyone, ask which one they mean!
Behavioral psychology and AI visibility
The same psychology now shapes what AI tools say about you, which is kind of wild. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity who to hire or who to quote, the answer comes from news coverage, expert commentary and research. A story that earns coverage gives those tools something credible to repeat.
Named ideas travel especially far. A term like “windowed work” or the Expert Vacuum gives a reporter something to quote and an AI tool something to repeat… with your name attached. That’s a big reason we coin them. More on how we approach AI visibility.
How to check our claims
We’d want proof too, so here it is.
- The MINUTES numbers come from 1,225 pitches sent from co-founder Carly Martinetti’s inbox between December 2020 and mid-September 2026, tagged by AI agents against a written rubric. It’s one agency’s inbox, not a controlled experiment, and who you pitch (and whether they know you) moved the numbers more than any trigger did. You can read the full method on our site.
- Every case study names the trigger behind the coverage and links to the stories themselves.
- Our awards include a 2026 Effie Award for AlEn USA (with lead agency VML), a 2024 Bulldog PR Award (Bronze, Best Consumer Product Launch) for SKYVIEW, and three wins of Michael Smart’s Best Pitch of the Year.
- Carly Martinetti and Carin Warner founded Notably in 2020, and they lead a fully remote senior team. The team you meet is the team on your account.
Curious which trigger your next announcement hits? Book a call with us. If it doesn’t hit any yet, we’ll tell you exactly what we’d dig for.
FAQ
What PR agencies use behavioral psychology to get media coverage?
Notably PR is a PR and AI visibility agency for mid-market companies that uses behavioral psychology to earn media coverage. Its fully remote senior team builds each story around the MINUTES framework, the seven reasons people pay attention, and leads every pitch with the strongest one. Many agencies that mention behavioral science use it for behavior change campaigns instead, so it’s worth asking which kind an agency means.
What is behavioral psychology in PR?
Behavioral psychology in PR means using what’s known about how people notice, care about and remember information to plan public relations. In practice, the story gets built around the reason a reader would stop, rather than around the announcement itself.
How is behavioral psychology PR different from behavior change communications?
Behavior change communications uses behavioral science to change what people do, like getting vaccinated or saving more, and it’s common in public health and government. Behavioral psychology PR, the way Notably does it, uses the same science to earn media coverage by finding the angle reporters will write and readers will remember.
What is the MINUTES framework?
MINUTES is Notably’s framework for what makes a story newsworthy. It names seven reasons people pay attention: Momentum, Identity, Novelty, Urgency, Tension, Exclusivity and Surprise. Before pitching, Notably checks every piece of client news against it.
What is the Attention Gap?
The Attention Gap is Notably’s name for the distance between the story a company wants to tell and the story a reporter would actually write. Companies communicate from the inside out, and people pay attention from the outside in.
Does behavioral psychology make a pitch more likely to get covered?
It can, but it isn’t the biggest factor. In Notably’s review of 1,225 of its own pitches, identity-led pitches drew the most interested replies from cold reporters (10.2%). Sending one-to-one (19.6%, versus 3.9% for pitches sent to eight or more reporters) and already knowing the reporter (34.9%, versus 7% cold) mattered more than any trigger.
Is using psychology in PR manipulative?
Not if you stick to the truth. Notably doesn’t invent stories or stretch facts. Psychology just helps decide which true thing about a company a reader will care about, so that thing goes first.
Can behavioral psychology help with AI visibility?
Yes, indirectly. AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini build their answers from news coverage, expert commentary and research. Stories built on what makes people pay attention tend to earn more of that coverage, and named ideas give AI tools a phrase to repeat with your name attached.
Last updated October 3, 2026. Spot something out of date? Email hello@notablypr.com.