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 17/06/2020
Another two weeks have passed since our last round-up (but who’s counting? Time is a strange concept right now), and the Spark Coverage Cup is once again runneth over. Let’s take a look at the latest hits.
COVID-19 is naturally still dominating the headlines, and for the RSA team, there was an opportunity for a cracking IR (‘issues response’) on the NHS ‘test and trace’ app release. Comments from RSA warning consumers to be extra vigilant during this time of crisis were featured on Yahoo News UK, This is Money and Metro. The team didn’t stop there though, with further pieces appearing on The Register and Infosecurity to name a few. And, rounding off some great results for RSA was top feature coverage on ‘frictionless security’ on Raconteur.
There was big news for Marqeta with the announcement of results from its latest funding round. The team went all out and secured a whopping 14 pick-ups so far, with standout mentions in outlets such as Sifted, a well-respected publication focused on start-ups and backed by Financial Times. And staying with Marqeta for a moment, there was more thought-leadership coverage on the shift to becoming a cashless society in Verdict.
Virtual events are becoming familiar to us all now, so it’s not an easy feat getting journalists to spare their precious time to ‘attend’. But MuleSoft managed to do just that with none other than Computer Weekly, resulting in three excellent write-ups. These included a look at why COVID-19 has put a “spotlight on IT capabilities” and a customer interview with the CIO of the Rail Delivery Group.
For the Ivalua crowd, it was research launch time – picking up some excellent coverage in many procurement publications, such as Supply Chain Digital, and Supply Management, the magazine of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply. The team also used the research as a hook for an IR, securing a great hit in NS Tech, on how a shortage of digital tools is hampering efforts to tackle procurement fraud.
One other launch we worked on recently fell to our life sciences team, with the announcement from the Pistoia Alliance of its latest project on digitalisation in the pharma and R&D world. Coverage was up in the double figures, with hits in Clinical Lab Manager, Pharmaphorum and Lab News.
Sticking with life sciences, for Team Phesi, the focus remained on how real-world data can be used to improve clinical trials in the wake of COVID-19. There were a couple of great thought-leadership pieces secured ‘over the pond’, with an opinion article in Applied Clinical Trials and an in-depth Q&A in Outsourcing Pharma.
Was there ever a time before remote working? It might feel like we’ve all been working from home forever, but for most of us, permanent residence in home offices is new and untested. SoftwareONE has been talking more about this topic – looking at how to keep safe when working from home, as well as maintaining collaboration between employees, with an opinion article placed in Enterprise Management 360 and feature coverage in Information Age.
Finally, on a non-coverage front, there has been more Spark quizzing (Hannah, our quizmaster, is getting increasingly tricky), and there’s been more baking (we are big cake fans). We’ll see you back here in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, if you keep an eye on our Instagram you’ll see the Spark team modelling our recently-acquired facemasks in support of frontline NHS workers and the Laura Hyde Foundation.