We commented on a story that wasn't about us, and it worked

We commented on a story that wasn't about us, and it worked
The temptation is to insert your brand only where it obviously fits. We went somewhere it didn't. The setup: a payments client during a week dominated by a major airline's IT meltdown — nothing to do with payments, on its face.
The angle was the adjacent expertise. Our CTO could speak credibly about the systemic fragility behind the outage — legacy systems, single points of failure — without once mentioning our product. The relevance was the insight, not the brand.
The pitch was pure value, zero promotion: "Our CTO can explain why these cascading outages keep happening — happy to be a background source, no product angle." Reporters covering a chaotic story badly need someone who can explain the mechanism.
Result: 12 quote placements across business and tech outlets in 72 hours, 26 referring domains, and our CTO landed on three journalists' permanent source lists for future systems stories. The brand got a single dignified mention in each bio line.
A tech reporter wrote: "You were the only source who explained the why instead of just describing the chaos."
Lesson: Your best newsjack might be a story your product doesn't touch. If your people can credibly explain the mechanism behind the headline, you don't need the topic to be about you.