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 21/09/2018

We’ve had a spectacular few weeks in terms of coverage at Spark. In fact, it has been so good that, choosing some of the best coverage has been a real struggle, simply as there has been so much of it!. The Financial Times, Forbes, Intelligent CIO and CISO, Computer Weekly, Information Age and Gigabit to name but a few.

So rather than choose one, here are three of the best to start us off. First, a fantastic piece of coverage in Forbes about HCL’s work creating a digital platform for Manchester United, where a compelling pitch and top journalist targeting led to a fantastic read in a core business publication. We then had two amazing pieces of coverage in the Financial Times. Some skilled pitching lead to the inclusion of Viasat in their Future of Connectivity special report in a story about collaboration in the space industry, highlighting the company’s investment in the sector. The other, a fascinating piece about what makes a good stock picker, in which Inalytics played a prominent rolel, headlining the article and being included throughout. It took a lot of organising, but the team’s hard work definitely paid dividends in the resulting piece of coverage.

Alongside the great pieces of national coverage, we also used our knowledge of vertical publications to help our clients stand out. The launch of JDA’s most recent global Consumer Survey report saw the team using their storytelling skills, alongside stats from the research, to secure coverage in customer experience titles Engage Customer and Marketing Week as well as retail publications Retail Times, Retail Tech Innovation Hub and Retail Systems – with 11 pieces of coverage and counting. Not to be outdone, the Ivalua team secured a byline about procurement tech with Supply Chain Digital, one of the client’s key target publications. IT security has always been one of Spark’s specialisms and no Coverage Cup post would be without some great security coverage. First off, the Venafi team did a nice job securing coverage for research on both cyberwar and machine identity in Intelligent CISO, Intelligent CIO and TEISS, among others. Elsewhere, the RSA team worked fast to craft comment, so they could hijack a story about a Nielsen shareholder suing over misleading statements about GDPR readiness, which led to coverage in Infosecurity Magazine. Lastly on the security front, the Bromium team secured coverage in Computer Weekly following the appointment of the company’s first Chief Revenue Officer – a great hit for an appointment announcement!

Summer may be over, but the sun isf still shining coverage wise. For some examples, have a look at some of the coverage highlights on the right.