Against PR agency harassment

A year ago, I took several days to manually unsubscribe from every newsletter drowning my inbox in capital letters, exclamation points, and consumerist emptiness pushed to its absolute extreme by brands with no ideas, no projects, and no mercy. Brands that pay the worst PR agencies, the ones that make the wolf lie down with the lamb, and fire off ugly emails at journalists for whom this is absolutely not the subject at hand.

A year later, my inbox looks like a museum of marketing horrors. Zacapa rum celebrates its 50th anniversary (good for them). Winter aperitif hour courtesy of Glenmorangie (this should be breaking news, isn’t). An invitation to a Brazilian cachaça night for Gaya (great, let me dig out my Ronaldo jersey, the real one). SodaStream unveils its limited Spirit Gold edition (what? A sparkling water machine in limited gold edition, my life makes sense now). Easter 2026 from six hundred chocolate houses (a teaser sent nine months ahead of the date). The opening of the Marina Baie des Anges Hotel (reality TV vibes, exactly my style). And the cherry on the bagel: Club Lulu x Munch, New York’s best bagel moves in at Club Lulu (🤮).

I unsubscribed, I keep unsubscribing, and yet it’s as if I’d tried to slap a “no junk mail” sticker with two radioactive symbols on my mailbox: I keep receiving these emails every day, every hour, notably from the agencies Zmirnov and Pascal Venot, the sector’s two biggest offenders. I looked up the definition of harassment on Le Petit Robert dictionary: to subject someone relentlessly to repeated small attacks, to swift and incessant assaults. Here, they are.

You’d have to be a full-blown alcoholic, an absolute influencer, and/or completely deprived of any physical experience of life to want to take an interest in these dossiers. They’re so untargeted, so uninteresting. They put brands on such a ridiculous pedestal that it becomes comic. It’s Trumpism adapted to communications (the art of repeating the same thing in capital letters and hoping it becomes true). And these brands, like camp counselors for giant playrooms, can’t think of what else to invent to grab attention and, like an overly made-up teenager, simply can’t pull it off anymore. Are we witnessing the swan song of a triumphant capitalism?

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Constance Dovergne, editor at ELLE and funder of the newsletter Carte Blanche, receives about 400 agency emails a day, not counting the calls that follow seconds after sending. “A dozen calls or messages from the same press officers wanting to know if I’ve had a chance to look at the email they sent twelve seconds earlier.” She compares it to the North Pacific garbage patch, often thinking about “how I could have spent those thousands of hours lost sorting useless emails instead (getting my driver’s license, finding a cure for AIDS)”. K.*, a journalist for a famous daily French newspaper, describes the same kind of avalanche: “Once you’re in their files, they contact you for anything and everything. You might as well piss into a violin, you’ll still get the emails or even the calls.” She adds that “you can clearly tell you’re just on a mailing list and they don’t read the press, because when you mention one of their venues, they ask you to send them the article, since they’re not subscribers.”

Christine Doublet, former publishing director at Le Fooding and funder of Skip the Line, still gets calls on her personal cellphone “around once a week even though I have now left my job about four months ago,” some concerning “the wonderful world of imported avocados.” Alicia Dorey, an independent journalist, receives “on average 3 to 8 PR phone calls a day, plus calls doubled up with a text and a WhatsApp message,” and diplomatically notes that “PR people are under heavy pressure from their clients, but it’s counterproductive because you end up feeling besieged, and not always for good reason”. K. admits as much herself: “It clearly reflects the pressure being put on press officers within the big agencies. They have to justify everything they do.” So Pascal Venot or Zmirnov grinds down its own side too.