Who Benefits From Coffee’s Enduring Newsworthiness?

“This Company Wants to Pay You to Travel and Drink Coffee”, reads the headline in Vice. “Love drinking coffee and traveling the world? Starbucks has the perfect job role for you”, exclaims the Independent. These stories appeared several months apart, and are somehow about two different coffee job postings.

What’s going on here? The pitch is simple: Coffee brands announce “dream job” postings, usually involving travel and/or free coffee. News outlets publish stories based on the press releases. Those pieces are then shared on social media, garnering free advertising for the brands (and clicks for the publications). 

These marketing campaigns, also known as “earned media”, are not new, and are certainly not unique to coffee. But there sure do seem to be a lot of them lately—and not just about stunt job listings.

Take this “story” about Doritos releasing limited-edition coffee-flavoured tortilla chips. It garnered a huge amount of international  coverage, despite the fact that the “release” consisted of a giveaway of just 300 bags in Australia. The companies involved don’t have to be big brands, either: A Scottish dairy received mass media attention for selling “the U.K.’s most expensive coffee”, which was really just a free latte if you pledged £272 to its crowdfunding campaign.

The success of these “news” stories may seem like evidence of readers’ ongoing interest in coffee. But I’d argue that these pieces reveal more about the shifting strategies brands are using to connect with consumers as attention becomes a scarcer resource—and about the health of a struggling media ecosystem that is all too content to pander to easy clicks.

‘A Lot of Brand Exposure for No Money’

Traditionally, brands rely on a mix of paid (social ads, television commercials), owned (a company blog, social media profiles), and earned media to get the word out. A fourth option, shared media—encompassing social media interactions, like comments and reposts—has been added recently. 

In their book, “Advertising Media Planning: A Brand Management Approach”, Larry D. Kelley, Donald W. Jugenheimer, and Kim Bartel Sheehan describe the benefits of earned media in particular, which “has become a quest for many brands, since the benefit of earned media is a lot of brand exposure for no money”. Well, not no money: A company’s marketing team, or an external PR company, has to create and disseminate press releases, or contact journalists to place a story. But after that—assuming the story is picked up—there aren’t a lot of ongoing costs.

While it is harder to quantify the return on investment compared to, say, paid social media ads, earned media can still be very beneficial. As a 2019 survey from the communications and PR company Cision found, a whopping 92% of consumers trusted earned media.

“The point of earned media is to create organic exposure without paying for the exposure”, says Spencer Ross, associate professor of marketing at UMass Lowell’s Manning School of Business. “PR has been around for a while, but in an attention economy where consumer attention is treated as a scarce resource, something has to break through the bombardment of marketing messaging. The simplest way to do this is to create something that’s novel”.

The latest such earned media ploy in coffee is Starbucks’ “global coffee creator” job search. The company seeks to hire two “coffee-obsessed storytellers to travel the world and capture the craft that goes into every cup of Starbucks coffee”, according to its website. The job posting has since been covered by The Independent, food and beverage outlets like QSR Magazine and Nation’s Restaurant News, as well as local Fox and ABC affiliates and several coffee trade websites.

Notably, applicants need to upload a TikTok video using a specific hashtag, thereby producing extra user-generated content and shared media for Starbucks. As of this writing, the company’s TikTok post on the subject has garnered more than 15 million views in less than a week, and the hashtag has accrued some 250 videos.

Everybody Loves Coffee

Maybe it’s not a surprise that these stories do so well—coffee is just inherently newsworthy. Or at least it sure gets mentioned in the news a lot. One repeated example is coffee-related health studies. Every time a new study comes out with evidence, however flimsy, linking coffee to increased risk of heart disease, lower risk of Alzheimer’s, or even a longer lifespan, you can bet that news outlets will report on it. (As someone who writes a weekly coffee news roundup for Fresh Cup Magazine, I am as guilty as anyone of covering these types of stories.)

Just this week, media outlets jumped on a study that associated drinking two to four cups of coffee per day with healthier aging and longer life. The New York Times, CNN, the New York Post, ABC News, and dozens of others wrote about the study, which soberly reviewed the available data and came with many, many caveats (as such studies usually do). 

“Now that study gets all the exposure because of the headlines”, Ross says. “Consumers are naturally sharing that headline, but it’s also one that roasters and cafes might leverage in their marketing content”. Coffee, after all, can now officially be described as “healthy”, and wellness-focused coffee brands are becoming more common.

Ross compares this coverage cycle to the Starbucks job posting: “It’s an interesting ‘job hire’, but the novelty breaks through the informational clutter in an attention-scarce media environment and gets the target audience talking about it without needing to pay for the exposure”.

You can see the appeal from the media’s point of view as well: Coffee is very popular across all age groups. Most of us drink it every day, and the number of coffee consumers keeps increasing.

That makes it a slam-dunk subject for an industry that is just as hungry for engagement as the brands it purports to cover.

Gift Horses and Mouths

It’s not news that journalism is struggling, though that might be putting it mildly. The industry is rife with layoffs, mergers and acquisitions by private equity firms, underpaid and overworked reporters, and constant pressure from management to increase clicks and revenue. That 2019 Cision report found over a third of journalists around the world publish more than seven articles per week, while another third said that revenue was the most important focus of their news organisation.

These changing dynamics have been in play ever since newspaper readership and advertising revenue peaked in the early 2000s and began to fall thereafter. The rise of social media and the tech platforms’ capture of ad revenue—not to mention the disastrous, Facebook-driven pivot to video strategy that led to lawsuits against the company and hundreds of lost journalism jobs—have hastened the industry’s precipitous decline.

For a journalist on deadline or with a quota to fill, an easy “look at this Starbucks coffee job” story is very attractive. It has brand recognition and a fun, novel angle. Plus, the company already did most of the work; you just need to tweak the language, add some photos, and off you go.

Reporter Dave Infante has covered a similar phenomenon in the beer industry through his excellent newsletter, Fingers. A few years ago, brands like Bud Light and Michelob Ultra advertised roles like “Chief Meme Officer” and “Chief Exploration Officer” that were less legitimate job postings and more earned media plays.

Infante notes that the trend in the beverage alcohol industry seems to have played itself out, but less because of increased discernment from the media and rather because of the diminishing returns such job postings generated for brands.

For Infante, these types of stories don’t reflect well on the media either. “Overall, I think it’s an indictment of our over-consolidated, highly corporatised, reflexively ‘brand-friendly’ media ecosystem that brands were able to shit out super-limited runs of obvious gimmick garbage, blast it out through a PR firm, and watch the ‘earned media’ roll in”, he says.

In his reporting on this trend, Infante also pointed out the discrepancy between the C-suite-referencing titles like “Chief Meme Officer” and the distinct lack of anything approaching executive-level remuneration or benefits. Peet’s “Chief Cold Brew Officer” job from 2023 featured a similarly grandiose title, and somehow even more paltry pay: Whoever won the job (I called it a glorified internship in my Fresh Cup article) would receive … $200 a week in Peet’s rewards points. But hey, at least Peet’s received “incredibly strong results garnering placements in Food & Wine, theSkimm, and more, catapulting the brand into cultural relevancy”, according to a case study by the campaign’s PR agency.

Win-Win-Lose

In an era of opaque social media algorithms that reward virality, and a fragmented media ecosystem driven by a constant need for clicks, it makes sense that outlets and editors would look for low-hanging fruit like stunt job postings from large coffee brands. It also makes sense that brands would try and leverage that desperation to garner some free publicity.

Ultimately, the coffee brands and media outlets are more similar entities than we’d like to think. Both operate within an attention-scarce environment and are increasingly hungry for clicks and engagement. And like their media counterparts, coffee brands are now often run by private equity firms eager to attract eyeballs and pull in revenue. 

Within this context, for many publications, it’s no longer about reporting on the coffee industry with any real depth or scrutiny. That’s despite the fact that there is plenty in coffee that is genuinely urgent and newsworthy, from climate change impacting harvests to supply chain inequality and worker exploitation.

Those stories are still being told, at least by outlets that have the resources for on-the-ground reporting. However, they risk becoming completely overshadowed by PR fluff as the media ecosystem continues to degrade.