A doggone great lead: “Call it a display of Howly Muttrimony sealed with a sniff,” wrote Kyle Henley, senior account executive at Denver’s Cohn Marketing, about a dog wedding at a local shopping center (staged as a benefit for an animal rescue group).

Says Henley, “I had one radio producer tell me, ‘I hate covering dog stuff, but your release was so well-written and snappy that I had to call for an interview.’” The pitch helped win coverage in the local Denver media, and after it was picked up by The Associated Press, in newspapers and on TV stations nationwide.

iPod whiplash: Madge Miller, an account supervisor at MWW Group’s San Francisco office, had to pitch a Sun Microsystems engineer who had created a new (but hard to explain) technique for searching for music online. Here’s what Miller wrote, to follow the e-mail subject line, “The Man Who Will End iPod Whiplash”: 

“Tired of your playlists and unwilling to sort through the thousands of songs stored on your MP3 player, you turn on shuffle and find the perfect song to suit your mood—jazzy, nice and soothing, but peppy. Suddenly hard clashing noise from the far reaches of your music collection blares through the ear buds, jerking you out of your pleasant thoughts and sending you scrambling to find the next song. This is iPod whiplash.”

That subject line and lead graf won placement in one of Fortune’s technology blogs.

Devilishly clever: Cara Chancellor and Jeremy Katzman, account executives at O’Connell & Goldberg in Hollywood, Fla., needed to create an attention-getting pitch for a hospital involved in spinal therapy. Given the media buzz about women lugging around ever-larger designer handbags, Chancellor and Katzman helped the hospital to pull together data on avoiding back and neck pain caused by fashionable purses.

“Wearing Prada Can Be the Devil for Your Spine,” was the subject line for the pitch—a play on the name of the hit fashionista book and movie, The Devil Wears Prada. The pitch, says Chancellor, “prompted a producer at our local NBC affiliate to call literally within 30 seconds of opening the e-mail in order to ask for an exclusive and to reserve the story for May sweeps.”

Like, a tewtally cool pitch: This pitch’s subject line got recipients to read on. “Mtg 8/2 Flip flops to Heels,” wrote Melody Callaway, a senior account exec (and recent college grad) at Volume Public Relations in Centennial, Colo. She followed this inscrutable subject line with this lead:

“W.U.? Well, I suppose that’s not the correct way to introduce myself, but in terms of Gen Y that’s our cordial greeting … My generation is entering into the work force and we’re overwhelmed by the extreme gap which exists between our generation and our baby boomer bosses … I have the PERFECT resource for you to contact who can help me and the 200,000 other recent graduates with easing this transition from sweats and flip flops to suits and heels. This corporate trainer teaches graduates entering Fortune 500 companies tips like how not to greet co-workers with ‘What’s Up’ and leave with ‘Peace Out.’”

The pitch helped land the corporate trainer ink in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—and Callaway says some journalists even responded using the same Gen Y lingo.

Write like the journalists do: A feature-style lead tells the reporter that they can get creative with your pitch.

Billy Warden, an account director at Capstrat in Raleigh, N.C., pitched a Chapel Hill, N.C. retirement community with an active and modern sensibility:

“Once a top executive, Donald Gardner hit bottom during his first dinner at a retirement community. ‘I saw a few people using canes and I thought ‘Oh my God. Is this it?’ remembers the former corporate vice president from Stamford, Conn. Now he says, ‘Retiring is the best move I ever made.’”

That pitch lead won the client, The Cedars of Chapel Hill retirement community, a half-page article in The Wall Street Journal.

Pitch noir: Charged with pitching an engineering client to a trade pub, Capstrat’s Warden could have stuck to a pedestrian approach. Instead, in an attempt to get a story about the firm’s knowledge of the working environment for surveyors, Warden came up with this:

“The lone surveyor stared down the barrel of a gun.  While on a job, he had innocently stepped around a city corner and into the middle of a dope deal.  Now, instead of working, he was trying to talk his way out of injury or death.”

The story—about Stewart Engineering’s safety training for its urban surveyors—ran in Point of Beginning, a top surveying trade pub.

Pop culture pitch: It never hurts to tap into the zeitgeist when you’re trying to get a journalist to read a pitch. Maggie Schmerin, account exec at Hellerman Baretz Communications in Washington D.C., tied a pitch for a law firm’s human resources blog to the popular sitcom The Office.

“Outing a gay employee, forcing a female employee to act out a lesbian love scene as part of sexual harassment training and mass e-mailing romantic pictures to the entire company—such are the antics of Michael Scott, regional manager of Dundler Mifflin, the fictional paper company that serves as the setting for NBC’s hit show, The Office. If Michael was your boss what would you do in these uncomfortable situations? If you said, ‘Sue for millions,’ you’d have a good case, according to Ford & Harrison employment attorney Julie Elgar’s new blog, That’s What She Said.”

The pop pitch helped the law firm land mentions in The Wall Street Journal’s law blog, USA Today’s Pop Candy column and BusinessWeek.

Liked your story about … Tyler Barnett, owner of Barnett Ellman in Los Angeles, sent the MRR editor a lavish compliment about one of her previous writing projects—which, being a typical journalist, she lapped up with delight. Barnett then explained that he uses an opening compliment—a thoughtful and timely one, not a gusher—as a way to start a discussion about a pitch.

“Journalists want to know their work is being read by someone, somewhere,” says Barnett. “We are all working hard, and can always use a nice compliment to brighten the day.