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 17/09/2021
As we head into the autumn, the chatter of the Olympics, the Euros, and Love Island that has dominated our Zoom small talk over the last few months has come to an end. However, chillier days and longer nights have not stopped the Spark team from securing some great coverage for our clients.
Leading the way are our cybersecurity teams, bagging some impressive national coverage on the BBC, The Independent, and FOX Business. First up, the CIISec team worked against the clock to quickly spot and respond to a journalist request, resulting in some great feature coverage on BBC News regarding the increase of phone and text scams over the last year. Meanwhile the Imperva team’s news hijacking skills came to the fore, securing coverage in The Independent in response to the UK’s plans to scrap EU data protection rules. Last but not least, the HP team did a fantastic job picking up coverage on FOX Business, highlighting how ransomware groups are attacking hospitals and healthcare systems.
Elsewhere, the Viasat team bagged feature coverage on cyber vulnerabilities and threats in the space sector on The Register. The cybersecurity theme continued with HCL as the team achieved coverage on TEISS for an opinion piece on the need to prepare organisations to be more resilient to cyber threats.
Away from cybersecurity, the Ivalua team has been hard at work pitching some new research, showing that European suppliers are failing to enforce responsible labour standards. It found that over three quarters of suppliers do not currently have plans in place to eliminate modern slavery, child labour, or minimum wage pay. This resulted in coverage on Supply Management, Sustainability Magazine, London Loves Business, and Spend Matters amongst others.
Hybrid working has also been a common theme at Spark this week. For NetDocuments, we saw some quality coverage come through on diginomica for a customer story highlighting how its move to the cloud has enabled its employees to remain productive during the pandemic. Trusted Reviews also covered Poly’s latest product news, featuring a wireless headset that is helping to keep workers productive both at home and in the office.
Finally, our life sciences teams have also been busy pitching some fascinating thought-leadership pieces (all great reads!), gaining some impressive coverage in the pharma press. In Technology Networks, the Elsevier team secured a byline on how the life sciences industry can unlock the value of AI – a great hit considering this publication reaches nearly one million readers every month! There’s no rest for the Elsevier team this week, as they also placed another two opinion pieces: the first was in PHARMAfield, looking at how AI precision medicine is helping to discover new treatments for children with brain tumours; and the second was in The Engineer, discussing how engineers must be equipped with the right tools to tackle corrosion.
That’s all from us for now, but make sure to check out our blog to see what else we’ve been up to at Spark.