Every once in a while, an earned media campaign works exactly the way you hope it will and then some. That happened with the jersey patch announcement between Washington State University and the Colville Confederated Tribes, a partnership that turned into the largest sponsorship deal in WSU Athletics history, and one of the more rewarding earned media wins we’ve had a hand in.
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The Announcement
The partnership itself was the story. A jersey patch deal of this scale, and specifically one built around a partnership with the Colville Tribes, isn’t just another athletics sponsorship line item. It’s historic for the university, and it’s the kind of announcement that has real news value on its own, without needing to be dressed up.
That’s the first lesson worth pulling out of this: when the underlying story is genuinely significant, the job isn’t to manufacture buzz. It’s to get out of the way and make sure the right people see it.
Why It Traveled
Earned media works when a story is easy for an outlet to say yes to. This one checked every box: a genuine historic first, a compelling cultural and community angle, a major athletics program, and a clean, ready-to-run piece that didn’t require a newsroom to build something from scratch.
That last part matters more than people give it credit for. A lot of earned media pitches die because they ask a reporter or producer to do extra work. This one didn’t. It was packaged in a way that made it simple for outlets to pick up and run as-is.
The CBS Sports Moment
The clearest proof of that came when CBS Sports ran our piece directly, not a rewrite, not a mention buried in a roundup, the actual piece, as the piece. For a story that started as a university athletics announcement to end up running on a platform with CBS Sports’ reach is the kind of outcome every earned media campaign is chasing and few actually land.
That’s the difference between a press release that gets acknowledged and a story that gets picked up and run. One is publicity. The other is earned media doing what it’s supposed to do, spreading because it’s genuinely worth spreading, not because anyone paid for placement.
The Takeaway
Big, authentic stories still travel on their own if you package them right and get them in front of the right outlets. No amount of paid promotion replicates a national outlet deciding your story is worth running as its own content. That’s the outcome earned media is built to produce, and it’s exactly what happened here.
If you’re sitting on an announcement that has real news value and isn’t sure how to get it in front of the outlets that would actually run it, that’s a conversation worth having.
