A story with true Pathos

We interrupt the usual series of sarcastic diatribes about incipient fascism and clownish ineptitude at the highest levels of government for something more personal.

It seems like every time I decide to answer a call from an unknown number, something weird happens. Sometimes it’s a scam, and sometimes it’s something that only looks like one. [1]

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a number starting with a +44 country code. I’d been corresponding with an old friend in London, I thought there was a chance it might be him, so I picked up. It wasn’t him. It was a guy named Byron, calling me from Pathos Communications.

This was not the first call I’d received from Pathos. In fact, calls from this alleged PR company had been landing in my voice mailbox for months, on a schedule of roughly every two weeks. Every call had been from a different person in a different area code, and they usually left me heavily accented voice message that I ignored. I’d also get the occasional text message, also ignored. Classic scammer behavior, I thought.

On this day, I happened to pick up the phone. Byron immediately launched into a spiel about how my company (Improbable Ventures) was a perfect candidate for their PR services, which promised to land the name of my small business in a major publication, such as USA Today or the Washington Post.

I think I was in a bit of a mood that day (OK, most days), so I stopped to let him know Improbable Ventures was just a silly name I came up with for my LinkedIn business profile several years ago, which I was somehow now stuck with [2]. And I was on the verge of explaining to him that I didn’t really need the help of a PR agency to get my name into print or pixels – been there, done that, and have a large collection of moldering clippings and dead web links to prove it – when he got huffy and hung up on me.

Well, that didn’t sit well. So I penned the following LinkedIn post, attached to another post by some person I didn’t know talking about how great an investment Pathos was.

It felt good to post that. My irritation with Pathos had been building for a while, and this was a welcome release.

I interacted with a few friends and colleagues in response to that post, some of whom had had a similar experience. They too had been spammed by this mystery company. Then I totally forgot about it.

This morning I got another call from a +44 country code, and I picked up, thinking (again) it was possibly my long-lost friend Adam. But no. The caller identified himself as Omar Hamdi, the CEO of Pathos.

My heart started to race a little. Why did I suddenly feel like I was being called into the principal’s office?

Not surprisingly, he wanted to talk about the thing I had posted on LinkedIn two weeks ago. It seemed like he hadn’t seen my post directly but had been told about it by somebody, and wanted to talk about my experience. I detailed the long history of my interactions (or lack thereof) with Pathos, and the nature of the call that put me over the edge. He asked me when the call happened, and I could pinpoint it with perfect accuracy: 15 minutes before I made that post.

So he then replayed a recording of the call, while we both listened.

I have to say that shocked me a little. Did I know this call was being recorded? I did not. Did I come off as a total asshole? Fortunately not, though (as Omar later noted), I was not “excessively polite” either. How unBritish of me.

(I decided to not point out that recording the call was a violation of California privacy laws; California is a “two-party” state, which requires parties on both ends of a call to be informed it was being recorded before the conversation ensues, allowing one party to disconnect if this makes them uncomfortable. This is the reason why you inevitably hear that canned ‘This call may be recorded for quality purposes’ message on almost 100% of calls you make to a company’s customer service lines. [3])

[Update: Omar has reminded me that my phone number has a North Carolina area code. NC is a one-party state, which means that someone can record calls without having to tell you. He adds that his caller software automatically disables recording for two-party states.]

Omar agreed that hanging up on me while I was in the middle of trying to explain why Pathos was not a good fit for someone with my professional background was not the most optimal form of marketing outreach. I explained to him that the tactics Pathos was employing were exactly the same ones employed by spammers and scammers, which is why most adults of my acquaintance don’t answer calls from unknown numbers (unless, like me, you’ve mistaken them for someone else or you’re just being an idiot).

Omar explained that Pathos’s business model is to approach SMBs (even one-person operations with phony-baloney names) and offer to get mainstream journalists to write about them, with the promise that if it didn’t earn them coverage, they didn’t owe Pathos a farthing. [4] I explained that 15 seconds of Google searching would have turned up enough information to determine that a) I was a journalist (mostly), and b) I have an entirely different relationship with PR firms than people who are not journalists.

In other words, I would normally not be the client in this transaction; I would be the underpaid, desperate-for-story-ideas journo who would then interview one of his clients and write about them.

He assured me that he and HR would be having a conversation with Byron (my unfortunate caller) about his techniques of persuasion. I asked him to please not fire Byron on my behalf.

(Later, during a followup conversation on LinkedIn, Omar sent me an audio recording of himself and Byron, to assure me that yes, he was still alive and employed at Pathos.)

Omar then asked if I would consider taking down my original post – the primary reason being that I had reposted something from one of his investors advisory board members, and that could blow back on his company in unpleasant ways once said board member got wind of it. [5] And this poses a bit of a conundrum for me. If every company got to veto stories that showed them in a negative light, technology reporting would be nothing but rainbows and unicorns 24/7.

On the other hand, I was not entirely fair to Pathos. They are not “just spammers” (though their marketing outreach strategy definitely needs some work) and calling Byron a “joker” was mean spirited, even for me. Omar was doing the right thing by reaching out to hear my side of the story, while also explaining his.

Like actors, professional athletes, and lion tamers, journalists do their jobs in public – which means they also make their mistakes in public. If you flub a line, boot an easy grounder, or lose a limb, everyone else knows about it moments after you do. The right thing to do is not to erase the mistake; it’s to own the mistake and correct it, if possible.

Consider this me correcting the record. Pathos is just a PR company that’s struggling to rise above the noise without being able to drop big bucks (pounds?) on Google or Facebook ads. I think they’re going about it the wrong way, but I couldn’t offer any better alternatives.

Thank god I decided against pursuing a career as a lion tamer.

How are you holding up in these dark times? Share your thoughts in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] And sometimes it’s yet another call/text from some political campaign begging for money. God knows am I sick and tired of those.

[2] I first noticed this, with some horror, when I was moderating a panel at a trade show a few years back and saw my phony-baloney company name projected on a large screen behind the stage alongside my mugshot.

[3] And with increasing frequency, these calls are recorded for AI training purposes, which these companies do not disclose.

[4] This is not how the vast majority of PR firms operate, by the way. The usual method is they charge a monthly retainer, typically costing multiple thousands of dollars, for X number of outreach attempts. If the outreach works, great. If it doesn’t, the money still spends. So you could argue that Pathos’ “pay on results” method is a more reasonable approach that makes such services accessible to a broader range of businesses.

[5] Omar subsequently said he never asked me to consider removing the post. My memory of this is different (and no, this call was not recorded).