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 25/03/2024

It’s been a bumper few weeks of client coverage, including two hits with BBC News Online’s Technology of Business section. CIISec featured alongside the father of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in a story about proposals to group consumer data under one umbrella, with CIISec warning about the need to educate consumers about the security risks the move could bring. Ivalua also appeared on BBC News Online as part of a story about digital product passports. While the passports are being introduced mainly to drive sustainability and enable products to be recycled, Ivalua also advised how the scheme can help cut the problem of counterfeit parts for critical infrastructure projects.

It’s also been great to see the team’s media relations activity paying off. Building a new relationship with a City AM journalist led to coverage in a feature on International Women’s Day for two clients. Panaseer’s Lead Data Scientist outlined how businesses can’t be inclusive if they don’t cater to different communication styles, while Daisy’s COO outlined why more female perspectives are needed in the tech industry.

We’ve also had great results from news hijacking. The Quadient team secured coverage in The i with comment on how the Royal Mail’s potential switch to delivering letters three days a week could impact small businesses. The team also hijacked a Royal Mail price increase announcement, with comment appearing in Parcel and Postal Technology International. Elsewhere, Dynatrace’s comment on funding being doubled for the Alan Turing Institute in the Spring Budget was covered by Computing and Business Cloud.

Research projects have driven a wave of coverage too. First up, the Imperva team secured inclusion in Infosecurity Magazine and Tech Radar Pro with a new report on “The State of API Security in 2024”. And a CIISec study warning that cyber workers are turning to cyber crime on the dark web to make ends meet was picked up by security and IT titles including The Cyber Wire podcast and Computer Weekly. We also broke into charity titles Civil Society and Charity Times with Sagacity’s “Missing Billions: Charity Edition” research finding that UK charities leak almost £6bn revenue annually because of problems with the accuracy, visibility and application of data.

It’s also been a big week for product news. The Couchbase team landed pieces in ERP Today, The Register, Blocks and Files, and IT Reseller amongst others for the launch of vector search within its Database-as-a-Service product. Meanwhile, the news that HP is launching business PCs equipped with firmware to protect them against quantum computer attacks was featured in Tech Radar Pro and Verdict.

On the Life Sciences front, we’ve been busy pitching news of an Elsevier partnership with Iktos, enabling AI-powered early drug discovery. The team secured coverage in the US, central Europe and UK, including stories in Science Business and Drug Discovery World. The Life Sciences team also secured writeups for a case study featuring PacBio and Radboud University in titles including Outsourcing Pharma and Digital Health.

Check out the links on the right to read the above coverage and more.