Spark Coverage Cup
Media relations is at the heart of a successful campaign and our team take great pride in beating their colleagues to win the weekly Spark Coverage Cup vote.
The winning piece of coverage isn’t just about circulation or credibility. A great business national or broadcast piece doesn’t always beat trade coverage – outcomes are key. How effectively was the client’s message communicated? What was the engagement like? Did it result in leads?
While earned coverage is now only part of what we do, the impact of what we deliver is often why clients choose to work with us in the first place. It’s why 80% of our clients come through referral and why some of our clients have stayed with us for over ten years.
Below are some of our previous highlights:
Coverage Cup 01/05/2020
As we move into the second month of lockdown, we’re all now feeling a bit more settled into our new routines. The Spark team is also still managing to get some cracking pieces of coverage for our clients, in between baking banana bread and embracing our inner Kirstie Allsopp. Let’s take a look at what’s been making the news – from the prospect of Skynet style AI, to digital banking to customer experience!
A hot contender for the Coverage Cup this week was the Dynatrace team, with feature coverage on the front page of the ‘AI for Business’ Raconteur report in The Times. The piece looked at whether ‘general’ AI, which Bernd Greifeneder, founder and CTO at Dynatrace refers to as “HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Skynet in the Terminator series”, is something service providers should be trying to achieve.
Another one in the running for the cup was an Information Age feature, which included not one but two of our clients, Couchbase and Dynatrace! This was a result of the teams speedily putting together comment and pitching it to the journalist. The final article includes their advice on how to break down siloes within companies to enable them to succeed in digital transformation projects.
For the Mulesoft team it was a stellar week, securing podcast coverage with TechHQ talking about the endless possibilities there are with connectivity and APIs. The team also secured coverage in a Computer Weekly feature, talking about the perils of legacy applications and the need for integration.
Over on the life sciences side, The Pistoia Alliance team had a big hit with opinion article coverage in Technology Networks, looking at the important of user experience in lab technology. Then the Elsevier team has been pitching a new initiative with ExactCure reviewing 20 approved drugs to develop new COVID-19 therapies, featured in Scientific Computing World, Research Information and Pharmaceutical Technology.
Also, with coverage related to COVID-19, the Marqeta team has been pitching a media alert on how the crisis will accelerate banking modernisation. This looked at how people are opting for digital payment methods and using FinTech apps, and the team secured podcast coverage in IBS Intelligence and coverage in Verdict.
For the Quadient team, an interview following an FOI looking into nuisance calls and texts resulted in coverage on how insurers can create long term customer relationships in Insurance Business. Elsewhere, the Blue Yonder team were on a roll appearing in The Grocer and Essential Retail, amongst others, following the company’s partnership with Sainsbury’s to provide a self-learning AI supply chain platform to the UK supermarket chain.
As we are all starting to miss the office and the banter that comes with it, we are trying to keep socialising virtually! So far, we’ve done a quiz which was a huge hit and featured some great team names from Catatonic to Quentin Quarantino. We have now also started getting together for daily morning coffee breaks to catch up and make us all feel a bit more normal (if that’s possible)!