TL;DR
Most press release quotes are interchangeable filler — “we’re pleased to announce,” “this is a game changer” — and reporters delete them on sight. Specificity, not polish, is what makes a quote get used. Here’s how to write one that actually lands. This is the second in a series of blogs on press releases. Find the first one here.
Pull up any press release. Any company, any industry, any decade in the last forty years. Scroll down to the CEO quote and I’ll bet you real money it says something like this: “We’re pleased to announce this exciting new milestone, which reflects our ongoing commitment to innovation and excellence.”
You could lift that sentence out of any release, ever written, about anything. A band. A tech company. A video game launch. A food brand. It would fit perfectly, because it’s perfectly terrible for everybody. And that’s the problem. If a quote works for everybody, it works for nobody.
Today I want to talk about the single most wasted space in any public relations or strategic communications program: the throwaway CEO quote. It’s easy to spot, and honestly, it’s pretty simple to fix.
Why Every Press Release Has the Same Dead Quote
It’s not an accident that we keep landing here. It’s a process problem, and it’s a specific one.
Someone drafts the release. They get to paragraph four, where the quote’s supposed to go. They know the release needs a human voice in it somewhere — they’re right about that. But they’re on deadline. The executive is busy. Legal wants to review it, and legal kills anything interesting. And nobody wants to spend the political capital pushing an executive to say something more interesting than “thrilled.”
So the quote gets written by the comms person, approved by people who are mostly checking it for legal risk, and inserted because the format requires a quote — not because anyone has something valuable to say. That’s the tell.
A throwaway quote exists to satisfy a format requirement. A real quote exists because someone had a point of view and you captured it.
And reporters can tell the difference immediately. They’ve read ten thousand of these things. The second they hit “we’re pleased to announce,” eyes roll and delete happens. Period.
The Anatomy of a Bad Quote
Here are six phrases I want you to delete from your arsenal, permanently:
- “We’re pleased to announce”
- “We’re thrilled to partner with”
- “This reflects our ongoing commitment”
- “This is a game changer”
- “We remain focused on delivering quality and value”
- “This represents an important step in our journey”
Boring. Will not get used. Ever.
Here’s why: none of these has a fact. None has a number. None has an opinion anyone could disagree with. They’re not statements — they’re noise dressed up with quotation marks. And there’s a real cost to that noise. A crappy quote doesn’t just waste space; it creates doubt. It makes the reporter wonder if they should trust the rest of your release, too.
What a Real Quote Sounds Like
A real quote doesn’t need to be polished or perfect. It needs to sound like a person talking — with a specific point of view, a specific way of putting things, and some stakes or tension that gives the news real weight. Let’s look at a few side by side.
Instead of: “We’re pleased to announce this exciting milestone.”
Try: “We’ve been building this quietly for two years because our customers kept asking for the one thing we didn’t have — and now we do.”
Now there’s skin in the game. There’s a timeline, a motivation, an admission that something didn’t exist before. That’s a sentence a reporter can actually use, because it tells the reader something.
Instead of: “This is a game changer for the industry.”
Try: “More of our competitors are still solving the problem we had five years ago. This is us solving a problem we’ll have in two years.”
A little edgier, sure — but reporters love it. They want an opinion, a bit of a gauntlet thrown down. A quote with a point of view isn’t the company just mimicking every other press release; it’s a company saying something.
Instead of: “We believe this will benefit our customers.”
Try: “If this doesn’t save people four hours a week, we haven’t done our job.”
Now you’ve got a number and an accountability standard on paper. That’s not hope. That’s commitment. And commitment is what people want from the companies they buy from.
The pattern across every one of these: specificity. A number, a timeframe, an acknowledged difficulty or trade-off — and a voice that sounds like a real person, not a corporate shell.
The Test — And the Challenge
Before you send a release up the chain for approval, run the quote through two tests.
First: read it out loud. Would this person actually say this in front of their mother? Would they say it over a beer? If your quote can’t survive being spoken out loud in a normal human conversation, it’s not going to survive being read by a reporter. It’ll get skimmed, deleted — and it might take the rest of the release down with it.
Second: could a competitor’s CEO use this exact same sentence about their announcement? If yes, delete it and start over. Your job isn’t a plug-and-play quote anyone could use. Your job is a quote that differentiates you. If it’s interchangeable, it’s not doing its job.
Here’s the reframe that matters most: getting a better quote isn’t about pushing executives to say something risky or off-message. It’s about giving them permission to sound like themselves instead of sounding like a legal disclaimer. Most executives, if you actually ask them, have something real to say. Ask: What was hard about this? What almost didn’t happen? Why does this matter to you personally? Why does it matter to the company, or to a customer?
Those questions get you the nuggets a real quote is built from.
What You Can Do Now
So here’s my challenge for your next press release: before you write a single word of that quote, ask your executive what was hard, what almost didn’t happen, and why it matters. Use plain language — if you can say it in plain language, that’s almost always better than anything drafted cold. And whatever you do, don’t drop in a placeholder. A placeholder becomes the quote, because people get lazy. Put in the quote you actually need people to read.
Kill the throwaway quote. It’s not saving you any time — it’s costing you credibility and diminishing your message.
You can listen to the full episode and catch more from the Everything Speaks podcast at everything-speaks.com.