Deep Tech PR · Media, Analyst & Industry Trust
Your PR agency is selling coverage. Your buyers are shopping for proof.
There are hundreds of firms that will get a deep tech startup written about. We run a strategy none of them run — one that decides which voices carry you, in what order, and what each one has to prove before the next one matters. We’ve run it three times. All three companies exited.
We’ve won Gartner, Shell, Apple, AT&T and The New York Times as analysts, champions and coverage — for startups nobody had heard of.
These analysts, outlets and enterprises said yes to startups they’d never heard of.
- Gartner
- The New York Times
- CNN
- Discovery Channel
- Shell
- Apple
- Microsoft
- Caterpillar
- AT&T
- McKinsey
- Accenture
- Samsung
- ExxonMobil
- Chevron
- Johnson Controls
- Deloitte
- Salesforce
- Halliburton
- IBM
- Boston Scientific
- Philips
- Panasonic
- DHL
- KONE
- Veolia
- OTIS
- Trane
- Vinci
A partial list · Won for our clients, not by us
Why you were right to want this
The shortlist is written before anyone talks to you.
Your instinct to go get attention is correct. Deep tech doesn’t lose deals in the demo — it loses them months earlier, in a room you weren’t invited to, when a buyer assembles a shortlist out of the names their trusted sources already validated. If you aren’t in that assembly, the best product in the category never gets evaluated.
So the question was never whether to invest in this. It’s what you get back.
of buyers already have a shortlist before the purchase process formally begins
already have a single vendor in mind
Source: Forrester, June 2025
The honest part
What a traditional PR retainer actually buys.
Not because agencies are dishonest. Because the model works exactly as designed — and it was never designed around your pipeline.
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01
Activity is the product.
An agency’s month is judged on what it did — releases sent, pitches made, placements landed. Whether any of it changed a buyer’s mind never appears on the report, because it was never the thing being sold.
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02
The scorecard was written by the seller.
Impressions. Share of voice. Clip count. Every one of them can climb all quarter while your pipeline sits still. You were handed a measuring tape by the person being measured.
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03
The pitch is senior. The delivery is junior.
You bought the room. You got a coordinator with a media list. In deep tech that gap is fatal — the person explaining your architecture to a journalist learned it from a briefing doc last Tuesday.
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04
They chase the outlet that will say yes.
Twelve placements is easy to show in a deck. The one analyst who decides whether your category exists is slow, difficult, and produces a single line in a report nobody forwards you. Guess which one gets worked.
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05
Nobody in the chain has ever had to sell your product.
Never carried a number. Never sat through a procurement review. Never watched a deal die because the buyer’s boss had never heard of you. They are optimising for a story. You are trying to survive an evaluation.
You didn’t get fooled. You got sold the only thing on the shelf.
Don’t take our word for it
Three questions. Ask your agency this week.
You don’t need us to tell you whether your PR is working. You need ninety seconds and three questions. If the answers land badly, that’s not our opinion — it’s your data.
Question one · the one that matters
“Who are our prospective customers — and who are the people that influence them most?”
If they can’t answer, stop there. That’s the biggest tell there is: they’re pitching into a market they never mapped, which means every placement so far has been aimed at whoever would take the call.
And if they can answer — ask the follow-up. Then why isn’t a single one of those people quoted in our coverage?
Question two
“Which of last quarter’s placements has our sales team used in a live deal?”
If nobody can name one, the coverage never left the report. Media that can’t be put in front of a buyer is media that only ever reached you.
Question three
“Who did we reach that we couldn’t have reached ourselves?”
If the answer is a trade title that publishes anyone with a press release, you paid a retainer for access you already had. The value of an agency is the door you can’t open alone.
What we do instead
The deliverable isn’t coverage. It’s a validated position.
Coverage is how a position gets built, and how it gets proved. On its own it’s a receipt for attention you already had. We start from the people your buyer already believes, earn them in an order where each one makes the next easier, and build every piece so it can survive contact with a real evaluation.
Pursue whoever will publish. Announce the news. Report the impressions. The coverage is the end of the process — it gets celebrated on a Friday, filed on a Monday, and never opens a door again.
Start from the analysts, outlets, regulators and industry voices your buyers already trust. Earn them in sequence. Build every piece to be used — in the deck, in the procurement review, in what a buyer’s boss finds when they search you at 11pm.
The definition
What Deep Tech PR actually is.
Deep Tech PR · definition
The practice of building third-party belief in a technology the market does not yet understand — so that when a buyer finally evaluates you, the validation is already in place.
That is not the same thing as media relations for technical companies, and the difference decides whether the money works. Deep tech PR is judged on whose belief you earned. General tech PR is judged on how much you were mentioned.
- Deciding which credible voices validate you, and in what order
- Translating technical substance into terms a buyer, regulator or analyst can act on
- Producing coverage that functions as evidence inside a purchase decision
- Defining your category before a competitor defines it for you
- Earning the small number of named people whose opinion the market copies
- Announcement distribution
- Volume of placements
- Coverage in outlets your buyer doesn’t read
- Impressions, AVE and share-of-voice reporting
- Awards nobody in your market has heard of
Why the standard approach fails here specifically.
Your category may not exist yet
General PR works by slotting you into a story that already runs. In deep tech there’s often no slot — which is why you get covered as a curiosity rather than as a purchase option.
The buyer’s risk is technical and personal
They’re not deciding whether your tech is interesting. They’re deciding whether recommending it will end badly for them. A mention doesn’t reduce that. Verifiable evidence does.
The deciders are people, not a readership
A handful of named analysts, regulators, standards bodies and practitioners set what a market believes. Reach is irrelevant if none of them are in it.
Proof
Three doors. None of them a press release.
Gartner analysts succeed when they can guide clients before anyone gets blindsided. We gave them a sustained cadence of briefings — use cases, ROI data, sector differentiation. They defined a new category and named our client the leader.
Shell’s innovation champions had ambition but couldn’t quantify outcomes for leadership. We built a documented proof-of-concept on the world’s largest FLNG platform — ROI, operational impact, ready to circulate. The champion became a hero. Shell signed a global MSA.
Apple needed to prove iPads could displace ruggedized devices in the field — a story they couldn’t tell alone. We co-built campaigns across four sectors. The program beat every objective; Apple named our client their best B2B co-marketing team.
Give them the win. They give you the market.
Where the coverage ended up
Everyone else’s case studies end at the clipping. Ours end here.
“Northern Pixels was instrumental in shaping our foundational marketing strategy and catapulting us onto the global stage, firmly establishing our position as an emerging category leader.”
Eric BergeronFounder & CEO, OptoSecurity
“Mark and his team significantly boosted our brand awareness, trust and credibility. We became the leading enterprise solution in our category.”
Alvaro PomboFounder & CEO, TrueContext
The mandate
What the engagement covers.
A founder-led deep tech PR and media trust mandate. Run by the people who sold you on it — not handed down to a coordinator.
- A trust map of your sector — the named analysts, outlets, associations and individuals your buyers already believe, and where you’re absent
- Analyst relations and a sustained briefing cadence
- Earned media, sequenced so each win makes the next one easier
- Category definition — before a competitor defines it for you
- Regulator, association and industry-body credibility
- Champion and advocate development inside target enterprises
- Executive visibility — speaking, commentary, bylines that a buyer will actually encounter
- Every asset built so your sales team can put it in front of a buyer
PR is where trust starts. It isn’t where it ends.
What it costs
No junior handoff. The founder who made this argument is the one who runs the mandate.
We take a small number of mandates at a time. When we’re at capacity, we’ll tell you straight away.
Who’s making this argument
You should know who’s saying all this.
Mark MJ Scott
Founder & President, Northern Pixels
- Three founding exits — acquired by Toyota, Battery Ventures and AppDirect
- 60+ Global 500 brand engagements
- 100+ innovation programs across defence, energy, aerospace, security, manufacturing, health…
- Canadian Space Agency · Rolls-Royce Aerospace · Canadian Quantum Innovation Zone
- Named Apple’s best B2B co-marketing partner
- a16z Speedrun GTM advisor
Most people selling you deep tech PR have spent their careers in agencies. I’ve spent mine inside startups — as the marketing leader who still had to make the number after the coverage ran.
That changes what you optimise for. When you’re the one sitting in the pipeline review, you stop caring how many outlets picked up the announcement and start caring whether a single analyst will take the briefing that decides your category. You learn that one line in the right report outperforms twenty placements in the wrong ones — and that the reason agencies rarely go get that line is that it’s slow, unglamorous, and impossible to put in a monthly activity report.
I’m not against PR. I’m against paying for applause and calling it progress. If the coverage isn’t building something a buyer can lean on when they’re deciding whether you’re a safe choice, it isn’t PR. It’s noise with an invoice attached.
Common questions
Deep Tech PR, answered plainly.
What is deep tech PR?
Deep tech PR is the practice of building third-party belief in a technology the market does not yet understand, so that validation is already in place when a buyer evaluates it. Its objective is credibility with the small number of named analysts, regulators, practitioners and industry bodies who decide a category — not volume of media placements.
How is deep tech PR different from regular tech PR?
Regular tech PR assumes the category already exists and the buyer already understands the product, so the job is share of voice. In deep tech neither is true. The category may not exist yet, the buyer can’t evaluate the claim unaided, and the purchase carries technical and career risk. That makes the job translation and evidence rather than announcement volume.
Why doesn’t traditional PR work for deep tech startups?
Because it optimises for the outlet most likely to publish rather than the voice most likely to be trusted. A deep tech buyer’s shortlist is assembled from analysts, standards bodies, practitioners and peers — not from trade coverage. Placements in outlets those people don’t read can’t reduce the risk they’re worried about.
What should a deep tech startup measure instead of media placements?
Three things. Which named validators now describe your category the way you need it described. What an enterprise buyer finds when they research you independently. And how much of your coverage your sales team has actually used inside a live deal. Impressions, share of voice and clip count can all rise while none of those move.
When should a deep tech startup start PR?
Once you have one defensible proof point a third party can verify — a deployment, a pilot result, a peer-reviewed finding, a regulatory milestone. Before that there’s nothing for a credible voice to stand behind, and early coverage without substance is harder to correct than no coverage at all.
How much does deep tech PR cost?
Specialist deep tech PR retainers typically run between $10,000 and $20,000 per month. Northern Pixels runs a founder-led deep tech PR and media trust mandate at $15,000 per month.
Do we need analyst relations if we’re pre-revenue?
Usually yes, and earlier than founders expect. Analysts form a view of an emerging category well before most vendors in it have meaningful revenue, and that view is sticky. Being absent while the category is defined is more expensive than being early.
Can a PR agency create a category for us?
No agency creates a category. Categories get created when enough trusted parties independently describe a market the same way. What can be done deliberately is choosing which parties, in what sequence, and giving each one a reason to adopt the description.
Start a conversation
About to sign a PR retainer? Spend thirty minutes first.
We’ll tell you which voices actually decide your category, what it will take to win them, and whether you need us to go do it. No deck. No price ambush. If your current agency is doing the job, we’ll say so.
Or email Mark directly: mark@northernpixels.com