A Scottsdale company is making a habit of bringing dormant media brands back to life. Featured.com, the Arizona-based platform that revived Help a Reporter Out (HARO) a year ago, has relaunched a second well-known name in public relations: Connectively.
Connectively is a journalist request platform, a place where PR professionals and subject-matter experts find reporters’ requests for sources and respond to them to be featured in the media. Featured relaunched it this week as a standalone product, a second revived brand sitting alongside HARO in the company’s portfolio.
The relaunch doubles as a migration. Featured is moving the platform its customers already use over to Connectively at connectively.us, with only the name, logo, and web address changing. The product underneath stays the same. The Scottsdale company has spent four and a half years building that system, which now connects a subject-matter expert with a publisher roughly every six seconds, supports 100,000 users, and helps 2,500 publishers fill content gaps with expert commentary.
Why Featured is betting on Connectively
Connectively first came to market as “HARO in a platform,” the searchable counterpart to HARO’s long-running email service. Featured acquired both brands a year ago, then rebuilt HARO from a discontinued newsletter into what it now calls a leading journalist request service in the industry. The company is betting the same untapped value sits inside Connectively, a name the PR world recognizes attached to a product Featured already owns.
“We’ve spent the last four and a half years building a platform that connects subject matter experts with publishers, and that experience deserves to be preserved as Featured evolves into the AI co-pilot for PR,” said Brett Farmiloe, Featured’s founder and CEO. “Connectively is the right home for it — a brand we already own, with real equity left to activate, and a clear path forward of its own.”
Built for speed, not the inbox
For the founders, PR professionals, and communication teams who use it, Connectively’s draw comes down to speed. Traditional email-based services send requests in batches a few times a day, so an opportunity can sit unseen until the next send goes out. Connectively puts reporter requests in a live feed the moment they are approved, and lets users search and filter them to find the ones that fit their expertise. The platform also helps members commission expert content for their own blogs, pitch bylined articles to publishers, find podcasts to guest on, and identify the journalists who cover their space.
What’s next for Featured: AI co-pilot for PR
The revival is part of a larger ambition for the Scottsdale AI company. Spinning the existing platform out under the Connectively name clears the way for Featured to relaunch on June 2 as an AI co-pilot for PR, a single interface for finding and acting on media opportunities across journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking engagements, and AI visibility, with AI handling much of the discovery and matching that once took hours.
“There’s no reason category-defining applied AI can’t be built in Arizona, and we’d rather build it here than anywhere else,” Farmiloe said.
With Connectively, Featured now operates three media brands from its Scottsdale base, alongside HARO and the soon-to-relaunch Featured. The platform is live at connectively.us.
