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 21/10/20
Autumn is now well and truly upon us, but there’s no relaxing in this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness for the Spark team. We are just as focused on pulling in the coverage – with the weekly Zoom given extra zeal by the chance to claim the trophy in person if you can time the vote with a socially distanced office visit.
One winner over the past couple of weeks was the NetDocuments team, with some great customer coverage in Computer Weekly. As a result of a previously published interview, Brian McKenna, part of the presenting line-up on Computer Weekly’s Downtime Uptime podcast, spoke at length on how Saffery Champness has benefited from using a SaaS document management solution. On the subject of NetDocuments, the team has also picked up some excellent feature coverage, including in Silicon UK on the reality of the paperless office, and in Lawyer Monthly on secure remote working.
Another win was awarded to Marqeta for coverage of its new research report investigating the impact of COVID-19 on banking in well-respected title, Financial News. In a busy couple of weeks for Marqeta, the team also secured coverage of the news of Mastercard’s investment in the company in several places, including Finextra.
A big part of our remit for clients often involves building the profiles of key spokespeople, and a couple of our teams have had some great wins in that vein recently. This included a profile in IDG Connect of 4sl’s CEO, Barnaby Mote, and a Q&A in TechRadar Pro with Venafi’s VP of Security Strategy, Kevin Bocek.
As ever, thought-leadership content was another route to some great hits for several of our clients. Venafi wrote about trends impacting machine identities for ITProPortal, Dynatrace took on the need for better software experiences for Technology Magazine, Compuware covered mainframe transformation for Information Age, and RSA had a #HowTo piece in Infosecurity Magazine.
Our life science and engineering teams have also been busy. First up was a thought-leadership piece for Elsevier on selecting safe materials, in Manufacturing Chemist. The latest news from The Pistoia Alliance on the launch of its Innovation Seed Fund for biotech picked up some great hits, including in R&D World and European Pharmaceutical Manufacturer. Finally, The Pistoia Alliance also had great opinion coverage in Applied Clinical Trials, on virtual studies, and on post-COVID-19 R&D collaboration in quarterly journal Drug Discovery World.
We’ll be back soon with another Coverage Cup round-up. In the meantime, check out our blog to read about what else we’ve been up to at Spark, including our recent podcast playlist.