Carly Martinetti Joins Medialyst as Founding Strategic Advisor

Hey there,

News I've been sitting on for weeks: Carly Martinetti is joining Medialyst. There are two stories here, and I want to tell you both.

Story one: Carly is now our founding strategic advisor.

If you work in PR you probably already follow her — co-founder of Notably, and one of the best in the craft working today. She's also one of the very few operating at that level who understands what AI actually changes for this work. That combination is rarer than it should be.

Her job here isn't to lend a name to a landing page. She shapes the product: what we build, what we fix, what actually matters to someone who does this work for a living.

I'm a technical founder. I can build almost anything, but I can't always tell a great pitch from a merely plausible one. She can, in about five seconds.

A taste of what that loop already produces: we built a media list together last week, and she killed more than half of it. Then told me why, row by row.

Most of what she caught is fixed and shipped. Some of you already spotted the difference. The rest is in flight. We'll share more next week.

One line worth drawing: we're building the infrastructure every PR team needs, not packaging up one person. Carly's craft — how she reads a story, how she works an angle — stays hers. If you want it pointed at your actual campaigns, that's exactly what she's there for.

So rather than me describing what she's here to do, I asked her to tell you herself. Unedited:

“Elvis Presley is famously known as the "King of Rock 'n' Roll," but I have a sneaking suspicion that Elvis Sun is going to become known as the “King of Agentic PR.” We both believe that PR will always be a fundamentally human-driven profession, but our industry deserves tools that will make our lives easier (when this job itself is incredibly hard to begin with). That’s why I could not be more energized by what we’re building together and for our partnership as a whole.” — Carly Martinetti

Story two: I'm embedding inside Notably.

This is the part I'm most excited about. I'm working inside her agency's day-to-day — real campaigns, real workflows, watching where the product earns its keep and where it falls on its face.

Nothing has taught me faster what to build.

The question we're actually answering together: what does it take for an established agency to adopt an AI like this? Not a demo, not a pilot on one campaign — the whole operation. We're going through her entire day and the agency's workflow end to end, so we know where AI can take real work off a PR team's plate, not in theory but from where the hours actually go.

And some of it is stuff I honestly haven't heard anyone else talk about yet. One example, without giving the game away: how do you actually prove your PR impact on AI search? Everyone talks about it. Nobody has a clean answer. We're working on one.

That's the real project: figuring out what an AI-native PR agency actually looks like — inside a working one, not a think-piece.

(The part I still can't believe: none of this was planned. 90% of it was luck. Somehow there were two founders moving at the same velocity, working the same problem from opposite ends. Both building while raising two little kids. Both with the same founder brain that can't switch off. She's the PR half, I'm the AI half. My word for it is that the universe handed us a gift.)

But for now I'll leave you with the thing I actually believe:

AI is going to make big companies a little more efficient. And it's going to make small teams deadly.

Teams like this one, and teams like yours.

That's the whole reason we're building Medialyst.

— Elvis Sun, Founder at Medialyst.ai

P.S. — reminder: Saturday the new pricing takes effect. Already subscribed? You're grandfathered — nothing to do. On the fence? Subscribe before Friday 11:59pm ET and lock in the grandfathered deal. The product you'd be locking in is the one Carly just signed up to help shape. Upgrade here →