By "quid pro quo" I wasn't suggesting that Pangram's PR people's podcast placement was pay-for-play, just that they traded access for your positioning of their tech and their exec in your content marketing efforts.

That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.

It is less annoying, at least to me. I can read a semi-promotional post. I just bounce right off LLM writing

Yeah, fair -- and definitely not: I am earnestly just a fan of what they built (and I also think it's really important as a way of getting a check against rampant LLM use).