What to Check Before You Pay for an Executive Media Package

Ask for Published Proof, Not a Pitch Deck

Any vendor can put outlet logos on a landing page. What you want is links to real, published pieces, a byline, a date, a URL you can open right now. If a company selling press placements can't produce that in thirty seconds, treat that as your answer.

A logo on a homepage proves nothing about whether that outlet actually published anyone the vendor sent them, or whether it happened once, three years ago, for a client who's never mentioned since. Ask for three recent examples, from the last few months, with links you can click while you're still on the call.

What Happens After the Interview?

A lot of "media packages" are really just a recorded conversation and a YouTube link. The value is in what gets built from that conversation afterward, the press placements, the written content, the video clips, the distribution. Ask specifically what you receive, in what format, and by when.

Get the answer in writing before you pay, not as a verbal assurance on a sales call. "A few pieces of content" is not a deliverable, "one broadcast segment, one written feature, four short-form video clips, delivered within three weeks of the interview" is. If the vendor can't get that specific, they likely haven't built the back-end process to produce it consistently.

Is the Offer Listed Anywhere Besides the Sales Page?

If the only place an offer exists is the page someone sent you a link to, that's worth noticing. A real, ongoing service usually shows up elsewhere on the same site, in a comparison against other tiers, referenced from other content, indexed and searchable on its own. An offer that only exists in one isolated link is harder to trust, even when it's legitimate.

A quick way to check: search the company's name plus the exact package name. A long-running offer usually leaves a trail, other articles referencing it, customer testimonials outside the sales page itself, a pricing page that Google has actually crawled. A page that exists nowhere else on the internet is a page built for one purpose, closing you.

Who Owns the Raw Footage and Transcript?

You should walk away owning the interview footage, audio, and transcript regardless of what else was delivered. If a vendor treats the raw files as something they keep, that's a sign the relationship is built around gatekeeping, not around building something for you.

None of this is complicated. It just takes actually checking, instead of taking the promise on faith, which is exactly what a legitimate package should be able to survive.

What Red Flags Should Make You Walk Away?

A few signs are worth treating as hard stops rather than things to negotiate around. Vague language about "guaranteed exposure" without naming specific outlets. Pressure to sign before you've seen a single real example of past work. A price that moves significantly the moment you push back, which usually means the first number was never the real one.

None of these automatically mean a vendor is dishonest, but together they describe a sales process built to close you fast rather than earn your confidence, and a legitimate media partner rarely needs to move that fast.

A Quick Checklist Before You Sign Anything

Before wiring any money, run through the basics in one pass rather than trusting your memory of the sales call:

• Three recent, clickable published links, not logos or screenshots
• A written list of exact deliverables, formats, and delivery dates
• Evidence the offer exists outside the single sales page you were sent
• Explicit confirmation you keep the raw footage, audio, and transcript
• A price that stayed the same when you asked questions instead of jumping to close

Any one gap on this list is worth a follow-up question. Two or more gaps together is usually enough reason to keep looking, no matter how good the pitch sounded.

None of these checks take more than a few minutes, and a legitimate vendor will treat every one of them as a reasonable question rather than an accusation. The ones who bristle at being asked are usually telling you something more useful than any answer they could have given.