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 21/06/2024

With Euro 2024 well underway, we have been celebrating a hat-trick of client coverage with Financial Times. Our CYPHER Learning team kicked us off by placing some insightful stats in a story outlining how companies are upskilling their workforce for AI, virtual reality and other emerging tech capabilities. We then scored two letters in the print and online FT letters pages. Firstly, Quadient explained how the HMRC needs to improve the digital customer experience for tax payers. Meanwhile Ivalua shared insight on the impact of the “Orange juice squeeze”. Recent incidences of poor weather and disease means demand for alternative fruits has spiked, and Ivalua made the point that manufacturers need good inventory visibility if they want to fulfil this shifting demand.

Meanwhile Quadient’s FoI research caught the eye of the team behind BBC TV programme Rip Off Britain. A BBC News Online story promoting the show spotlighted Quadient’s data showing parcel theft reports to UK police have skyrocketed more than 500% since 2019. This underlines the longer-term value of our research and data work, with this story having originally been sourced six months ago.

We’ve also been making waves with some interesting cybersecurity stories. Firstly, The Chartered Institute of Information Security’s (CIISec) research into the dark web landed in The Daily Mirror, warning about the "Dark Web LinkedIn" underground marketplace for unethical hacking services. And in a Raconteur supplement on safeguarding SaaS in highly regulated industries, SaaScada emphasised the challenges of having data scattered across multiple divisions and servers worldwide.

We also had a couple of bylined articles published in Business Reporter. CYPHER provided thought-provoking commentary, positioning AI as a "friend” for businesses cultivating a positive tech culture. Secondly, Imperva discussed the blurred legal lines surrounding web scraping and how it’s become harder for businesses to protect themselves against this threat.

Our Ivalua team hit both the supply chain and financial services verticals with news of a partnership with Visa. The story about supply chain financing appeared in the likes of Procurement Magazine, Fintech Finance, Finextra and Financial IT.

In pharma, Fierce Biotech turned its spotlight on a Phesi data analysis uncovering the rapid expansion of oncology clinical trial sites. Meanwhile, Pistoia Alliance was a guest on European Pharmaceutical Review’s podcast, discussing progress towards implementation of FAIR data principles in the pharmaceutical industry. Finally, Elsevier introduced ‘SciBite Chat’, a new GAI-powered search tool for Life Sciences R&D. The “ChatGPT for researchers” earned coverage in Information Today Europe and Bio IT World, and an interview in Drug Discovery & Development.

Check out the links on the right to read more on this week’s coverage.