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 21/05/2021

It’s been a great few weeks for the Spark team. We’re celebrating moving up to 16th in this year’s PR Week UK Technology Agency Rankings, and we’ve even been able to get together in person. We’ve also had some great coverage for our clients, with 21 of the best pieces nominated for the Coverage Cup! So, let’s take a look.

First up, we had some fantastic coverage on the BBC for Marqeta, featuring its fraud research and an adorable yet heart breaking puppy video. The survey of 2,000 consumers found there had been a 31% increase in online shopping fraud victims since 2020, including a number of puppy scammers on the loose! Sticking with creative campaigns, Quadient saw results from a Freedom of Information request investigating the explosion of nuisance calls and scam texts featured in Insurance Post, contact-centres, and Finextra.

Next, months of hard work for both the Spark team and HP Wolf Security, paid off in style. The launch of HP Wolf Security (with a video starring Mr Robot himself, Christian Slater), was featured in 32 publications to date, with results still coming in. Hits include Betanews, ZDNet and ITPro.

Computer Weekly remains the most respected and well-read tech publication, so we were pleased to see Spark clients featured in its hallowed pages several times in recent weeks. Pieces include CIISec’s launch of the ‘Institute of Cyber Digital Investigations Professionals’ which will help security professional become accredited, and an interview with Imperva on its ‘bad bot’ report, which exposed how ‘helpful’ bots that schedule vaccine appointments could actually hurt vaccine roll outs.

There was some great thought-leadership coverage in Manufacturing Management for Ivalua, with a piece on improving supplier visibility. And there was further coverage for Ivalua with a feature in Logistics Manager, looking at why organisations should digitise procurement to improve supply chain visibility.

The Pistoia Alliance, one of our life science clients, secured inclusion in a feature in business publication, Raconteur / The Times, on how AI is transforming healthcare. Rounding off a good couple of weeks for the Alliance was coverage for some new stats it published in a number of publications, including Drug Target Review. The team helped the Alliance to craft quickfire polls around hot topics like the ‘Lab of the Future’, which were then conducted virtually at its recent European conference. There was also a nice hit for the Elsevier team on another (very) hot topic, the quantum computing race, within a feature on IDG Connect. This was based on a recent study Elsevier published on emerging research trends in the field.

Last but not least, we even had some coverage for Spark! PR Week picked up on the news of our appointment to manage Sagacity’s PR programme. There will be another Coverage Cup along soon, but for now you can see more of our coverage on the list opposite.