Attest is an AI consumer research platform that was founded in 2015 to make it easier and more affordable for brands to conduct consumer research at scale and on a consistent basis.
Its survey software, which is self-serve, enables brands to deploy easy-to-launch surveys that can access over 150 million consumers across over 50 countries. The surveys are highly customizable with editable templates, while survey sample integrity is protected by qualifying questions and question routing features. The results of surveys are displayed in an intuitive research dashboard, with most surveys closing within 24 hours.
Attest’s quantitative market research technology is primarily used by marketing, brand and product teams and its surveys support market analysis, creative and concept testing, brand and competitor tracking and market-to-market comparison. Some of its customers include Netflix, Unilever and Blank Street Coffee.
Attest, a consumer research platform, had previously completed some targeted US marketing activity, yet was now in a new phase of growth where it intended to scale this function dramatically within the American market.
To support this strategic imperative, the research company was looking to partner with a US PR agency to support building and developing strong brand awareness, credibility and reputation amongst its target audiences of marketing and insights professionals at B2C as well as B2B2C organizations. Some of its biggest growth verticals to be focused on in this campaign were also food & beverage and direct-to-consumer (D2C).
It was seeking the agency to secure a mixture of national and regional press, as well as trade media and more niche targeted publications. Important to the brief was also the fact that the Attest marketing team was based in Europe; therefore, it wanted to put in place a long-term relationship with its chosen agency and that the agency could be trusted completely to go off and strategize as well as execute with a high degree of autonomy, due to differences in time zones.
Apart from the overall campaign goal of achieving an industry position as a thought leader in the market research category, success was to be measured by an increase in brand awareness in the US by Attest’s own brand tracker (using its own research platform to collect and analyze the data).
In addition, a centerpiece corporate announcement of a Series C funding round also factored into this brief, with the agency expected to place this story within wider business and technology media outlets.
Beyond this initial program focus and after getting the press office off the ground, the brief shifted further to then create an authentic brand-centric creative campaign that generated cut-through with earned media, around new positioning and messaging.
At the outset of the rollout of Attest’s US press office, a key piece of counsel was for the strategy to focus primarily on the monthly research reports and guides that the consumer research platform produces.
From this starting point, Wise Up PR then created a strategy that mapped out the exact cadence of an entire year’s worth of reports, including which verticals each data report would target and a timeline for media activities.
Shifting to the execution of this strategy, the reports were excellent data-driven pieces of content and Wise Up PR advised that they should take responsibility for turning these insightful reports into more distilled, media-friendly material – in a press release format – to maximize their value to journalists. In addition, our team also instituted a “news-first” approach for each new report, whereby we would add in topical trending research questions ahead of the research being fielded. In this way, we ensured the data would fit into evolving news agendas and made the research as relevant as possible to journalists’ immediate editorial focus.
In addition, one immediate, company-defining milestone that required a carefully orchestrated communications strategy was Attest’s $60 million Series B funding round announcement. The Wise Up PR team has extensive experience in devising and managing funding round announcements and quickly mobilized to deliver a highly targeted, profile-raising media outreach campaign to business and technology journalists.
Outside of the research reports and day one priorities, Wise Up PR divided the press office up into key brand awareness and recognition pillars: (i) an ongoing awards program (ii) thought leadership ideation and placement and (iii) a continuous podcast interviews campaign for the CEO.
Then, after a number of years of a purely press office function, to take the brand to the next level, Attest wanted to move beyond the confines of traditional B2B communications programs to reveal its true personality to potential customers. It tasked Wise Up PR with coming up with a creative B2B communications campaign that not only achieved this goal but was rooted in authenticity for the brand.
To approach this challenge, Wise Up PR’s first step was to conduct a listening tour of Attest’s team. It uncovered a critical insight – how little data still plays in business decisions – and we created the entire “Make Guesswork Illegal” creative campaign from this. From this key datapoint, our team crafted the entire go-live strategy which centered on (i) research to support this insight (ii) press materials including a press release, as well as FAQ (iii) and rapid response media pitching to include our campaign in trending topical stories.
4,007 Articles
Coverage secured in top research, marketing, retail, business and technology publications.
423.6 Million
Estimated audience that viewed the coverage generated.
68
Aggregate Domain Authority (DA) score of the publications which published.
16.3 Billion
Combined audience that are unique monthly visitors (UMVs) to the media outlets that covered Attest stories.
8.1 Million
Coverage that was viewed via social posts accompanying media articles.
132,700
Organic social posts prompted by the launch media placements.
7
Industry recognition garnered via awards campaign for the work completed by Wise Up PR, with accolades secured from leading PR and marketing awards programs.
5 Years
Length of the retained B2B communications campaign delivered by Wise Up PR.
Over a long-term partnership, Wise Up PR firmly established Attest’s reputation with its target audience through a sustained media relations and press office program. In total, 4,007 media articles were generated, across a who’s who of media outlets, including Bloomberg, Forbes, Reuters, Variety, USA Today and important trade titles like Campaign and MarketingWeek. Shifting the brand to a once-off creative B2B PR campaign, ‘Make Guesswork Illegal’ resulted in 156 earned media placements, amongst the likes of Business Insider and Yahoo! Finance.
Meanwhile, the wider press office function contributed greatly to ongoing brand recognition and careful curation of the company’s reputation. For significant corporate announcements, like Attest’s $60 million Series B funding announcement, articles and interviews were placed in the likes of TechCrunch, Axios and Fortune to bring wider awareness to its brand for a pivotal business momentum story (with 151 placements). The awards program secured five industry accolades, including the Financial Times FT 1000: Europe’s fastest growing companies and the MarTech 50 awarded by Business Cloud.
Wise Up PR’s quality of work for this program was recognized within the PR and marketing industry, with our agency awarded seven industry accolades, including The Bulldog Awards, MarCom Awards, The Stevie® Awards, The Hermes Creative Awards and The Communicator Awards.
Taken all together, the earned media coverage is estimated to have had 423.6 million views, while crucially, spiking Attest’s own brand tracker significantly, showing tight alignment to the core objectives of the brief.
“We really view Wise Up PR’s team as an extension of our own. From the beginning, their team has provided a great mix of strategic PR counsel, supported by the delivery of consistently high visibility media coverage around all the great research Attest is producing. The quality of the media relations results speaks volumes of their work.”
Best Use Of Research 2024
PR Campaign Of The Year 2024
Platinum Award, Strategic PR Campaigns 2024
Best Media Relations Strategy 2024
Distinction Award For Public Relations Campaign 2024
Platinum Award, Strategic Communications 2024
PR Campaign Of The Year 2023
Looking For A Specialist Research PR Agency?
Journalists are more time-pressed than ever before; you can’t expect them to wade through pages and pages of a report and then publish a story. Instead, you need to work how they work. You need to create a digestible press release that summarizes the report’s findings, its leading datapoints and also weave a coherent and clear narrative beyond the numbers. The headline of your press release is also critical. It needs to have a clear news hook, based on your data; without it, your report is likely to be ignored.
Statistics tell only one side of a research report and journalists are often looking for your spokespeople to tell the story beyond mere numbers and percentages. They are seeking the “why” behind your data and looking to understand what the research tells their readers about an industry, a topic and a trend. As a research company creating media-facing reports, your spokespeople need to be ready and able to be interviewed by journalists. The best spokespeople for data companies speak about the research, but also provide soundbites that summarize the findings neatly and in a way that an audience can easily understand.
Media loves big events and anniversaries. These are “moments” journalists will cover (based on their beat, previous coverage topics and other factors). If you can produce relevant, interesting and unique data reports, you become useful to journalists covering your chosen topic as they will often rely on reputable datapoints within their stories. Uniqueness is the keyword here. If you think your research is indistinguishable from other data companies, the media will likely think the same. In addition, anniversaries offer a natural moment for the media to revisit a topic, such as a one-year anniversary.
If you’re beginning to build out a regular output of research reports, think beyond your current year. The best research reports have become yearly media relations campaigns for many brands. Some even do monthly or quarterly data reports (especially within sectors like energy, where market data moves fast). Each report should have a clear thematic focus and, if done yearly, measure year-on-year changes, as well as new trends emerging. By establishing a clear cadence of report releases, journalists will come to trust and expect your reports in their inbox, thus creating a genuine relationship with important editorial contacts.
A listening tour is the foundation of any creative PR campaign. Book in a number of Subject Matter Expert (SME) sessions, including with the organization’s Founder or CEO. SMEs like this have unparalleled insight and historical understanding of how the company came to be. Best practice includes providing an agenda ahead of each call to each SME to ensure they know why the call is taking place and also help them to prepare their thoughts. A list of prescriptive questions should be avoided. When staffing the sessions, let the conversation go where it goes instead of managing the clock. Often, we’ve found in the last ten minutes of such sessions, this is where the real campaign gold is uncovered that is authentic to the brand itself, as happened in the case of the Make Guesswork Illegal campaign.
A B2B marketing campaign will struggle to generate high-profile media coverage unless it operates in certain verticals (like martech) or is backed by a celebrity or fantastic creative. Instead, many B2B marketing campaigns seek media coverage after the creative or the storyline has been created. Journalists won’t care about a marketing campaign; they see it for what it really is - a marketing campaign. Instead, you need to provide them with something useful and data can be a way to do that. In addition, the research should be tied to something highly topical and trending within media coverage, or, even better, something you believe will be trending soon. In the case of Attest, we tied research to the then-up-and-coming topic of greedflation and released the research and marketing campaign at the same time to maximum effect, securing mainstream media coverage for this campaign.
You’ve created a theme, pillar content, and even a campaign strapline. Have you sense checked that the thread holding your entire campaign is reflected in every launch asset, such as video, images, and podcasts? If not, you’ll need to double up on work to ensure the theme is reflected across these assets; otherwise, your entire campaign will be disjointed across its various touchpoints. It seems like an obvious thing to have under control, but PR campaign planning and management is a huge undertaking and sometimes something as fundamental as this can become forgotten.
Campaigns are moving at a quicker pace than ever when done reactively. However, when proactively planning, your schedule is likely to be 3-6 months from start to execution. Due to this, reporting assets like tracking documents for planning, asset creation and management of a content library are essential to success. While it is exciting to brainstorm a video storyboard, what keeps the entire campaign running is core tracking documents to ensure everyone is aligned and can also, on the most basic level, easily find what they need related to this campaign.
