Get Your Band National Media Coverage With Pendulum Pitching

I'm kicking off a series of posts about successful approaches to music marketing with some insights from Adisa Banjoko, a marketing professional based in the Bay Area who I first met while blogging at ProHipHop. Adisa has employed an approach he calls "Pendulum Pitching" with great success both before and after the Internet kicked in.

Adisa Banjoko is Founder and Director of the Hip Hop Chess Federation and Marketing Director for Naked Suits. In addition to marketing both those projects, he has an extensive history of marketing Bay Area hip hop artists.

Adisa developed the concept of Pendulum Pitching before the Internet was widely available and has continued to employ this approach with great success ever since. The basic concept involves pitching local media which then supports pitching national media. Sometimes local stories are picked up on their own but usually they require additional work to go national.

While this aspect of Pendulum Pitching is well understood by any competent marketer, Adisa then uses the national coverage to go back to local media outlets who previously passed generating additional local coverage which helps create further national coverage.

This back and forth led to his use of the term Pendulum and also includes regional coverage in the mix. Prior to the Web, Adisa focused on print, tv and radio. He still pitches to all those outlets and now includes blogs and news sites.

What Adisa often found was that artists would come to him seeking national coverage in publications like Vibe and Rolling Stone. But when he pitched to national outlets, he found that they started off by calling local contacts and checking local media to see if there was attention at that level. If local press was not evident, then national outlets passed. Now they use Google to check in and local and/or niche blogs often do the trick. So Adisa helped artists refocus by gaining local coverage that then supported national coverage.

For example, during the early days of the Bay Area Hyphy movement, Adisa helped The Team, a rap group also connected to the energy drink Hyphy Juice, achieve national press for both an album release and for their beverage in such key publications as Vibe, Complex and XXL as well as on major hip hop websites.

He has also used Pendulum Pitching to get wide ranging coverage for the Hip Hop Chess Federation and is currently employing this approach for Naked Suits.

You can connect with Adisa Banjoko via Twitter @beyondurban.

If you've got a music marketing tip with some examples that you'd like to share, whether you're a musician doing your own marketing or a music marketer, please contact me at the email below.

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance: World Dance News is his primary web project. To suggest websites and related topics for review, please contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.