Five key drivers of great media coverage

We had a fantastic year for client coverage in 2022, with our weekly Coverage Cup votes becoming a real battle royale. Join us as we recap some of our best pieces from the last 12 months (we could have shared a lot more 😊) and list out five of the key drivers that help us secure great coverage.

1) Headline-driven statistics

Research and FOI campaigns were a source of top coverage in 2022. Ivalua’s stats revealing Brexit was the biggest disruptor to supply chains appeared in Bloomberg Supply Lines. Marqeta’s research predicting the shape of payments in 2030 featured in BBC News Online. And Vectra’s threat intelligence data on machine-on-machine cyberwarfare was picked up by The Financial Times.

Sagacity’s consumer research on the cost-of-living crisis achieved multiple national hits, with The Express covering how utility suppliers’ poor use of data damages customer relationships. And another consumer-focused campaign from Quadient used an FOI to UK Police forces to gather data on the problem of parcel theft ahead of the festive season. The stats were picked up in The Daily Telegraph’s as well as a number of trade titles.

2) Creative pitching

Creativity in media pitching is key. The Spark team always looks for opportunities to put a creative spin on our clients’ key messages to stand out from the crowd. Whether it’s a unique analogy or a hook into a current trending topic, bringing pitches to life with recognisable scenarios helps to catch the eye of busy journalists. For example, Couchbase was featured extensively in Forbes by talking about why software development is not like building with LEGO, despite what many people say. And the HP Wolf Security team demonstrated that malware is available to buy for the “price of a pint” on the Dark Web, picking up coverage in The New Statesman.

3) Strong journalist relationships

A fundamental part of PR is media relations. We strive to build and maintain strong journalist relationships to get an insight into what journalists are interested in and how we can best work with them. A great example of this was following a catch-up lunch with a Guardian journalist, our life science team discovered our contact was planning to write about collagen. The team quickly worked with our client, Phesi, to collate data on collagen clinical development and share with the journalist to inform their upcoming article. The result was a superb write up in The Observer, weaving together insights from Phesi alongside other industry experts.

4) Getting ahead with forward features

Despite today’s very fluid news cycle, many publications still plan forward features far ahead. National newspaper supplements are typically mapped out months before publication. At Spark, we leverage our media relationships from right across the agency to ensure we know what features are on the horizon that are relevant to our clients, and pitch timely and relevant content to journalists. This results in some great pieces of coverage. For example, Toca CEO Mat Rule was quoted in a cloud computing supplement in The Times/Raconteur, on how in-house IT teams can drive the move to cloud. And Mike McLellan of Secureworks was enlisted as a cybersecurity expert in a Sky News article on how consumers can stay safe and avoid scams while shopping online.

5) News hijacking

At the other end of the scale from forward features is news hijacking of breaking stories. Speed is of the essence. Either by having quotes and soundbites ready to pitch, or quickly drafting new comments, we are ready to give journalists valuable insights and opinion on stories as they are happening. This worked well for the Venafi team when it was able to offer a writer of a cybersecurity story for The Independent comments on the danger of using ‘rogue’ freelancers from North Korea, and how to spot them. And after the ONS reported that homeworking in the UK has more than doubled since 2019, the Poly team hijacked the news story and secured coverage in both Computing and Computer Weekly.

As you can see, 2022 was a successful year here at Spark, and we’ve started 2023 as we mean to go on. We’ve already had some great national pieces, and several of our clients’ B2B tech predictions have appeared in a number of features. Keep an eye on our Coverage Cup blogs for all the latest.