Stand-out PR for a challenger brand

Forscene was Little Cricket’s first client when we opened our doors back in 2016. The cloud‐based video platform from Forbidden, provides professional post‐production tools in a software as a service (SaaS) package or licensing option for all video industries, including broadcast post‐production, news, and sports.

Forscene (now rebranded as Blackbird) takes advantage of cloud computing to enable the centralisation of material and collaboration in workflows.

The result is the ability to connect from any Web browser and perform the full range of post‐production functions, enabling unique workflows and saving time and money.

Aziz Musa, Forscene CEO and head of marketing at the time explains why this challenger brand chose Little Cricket PR over other technology PR companies in the industry. 

Why is PR important to your organisation?  

As with most organisations, PR is the most effective way of managing external perception of our organisation and products. Whilst there's an inherent difficulty of drawing line of sight between PR activities and lead generation, it is undoubted that the effectiveness of our sales pipeline improves with successful creative and PR. 

What process did you go through to find a PR agency for Forscene – and what were you looking for? 

We interviewed and received pitches from 7 of the top 20 PR agencies in the industry. We had specific creative requirements and whilst in other industries creative is at the heart of PR activities, it appeared to be difficult for us to find a PR agency that could deliver against our requirements. For a challenger brand, doing the same as our competitors is the easiest way to fail. We can't compete on budget. We can't compete on brand awareness. We can't compete on scale, therefore we have to out-smart our competitors. 

What led to your decision to award Little Cricket the contract rather than one of the established industry PR agencies? 

Little Cricket was the only agency that truly understood the unique issues and opportunities facing a challenger brand. They were able to perfectly articulate what we needed, how we should approach our PR and communications strategy and had the right balance of traditional PR and risk-taking activation campaigns that allowed us to make a material difference in our prompted and unprompted awareness. 

Traditional PR is often centred around publications and journalists – how was Little Cricket’s approach different? 

Where as most agencies had a list of hundreds of publications and blanket mail release to them, Little Cricket worked with us to identify the top 20 publications in each vertical. From there they developed personal meaningful relationships with them. This meant we had a much higher take up of every story we released than we had previously.

The results that Little Cricket achieved in just one year speak for themselves

•       10 pieces of original editorial content & 20 news stories were created during this time.

•       Forscene was included in 45 articles, stories and features.

•       In total, over 300 pieces of coverage were generated.

•       This content drove a 45 200% increase in social traffic and a 1236% increase in referrals from LinkedIn alone.

•       PR content generated 17 000 blog and news page views during the contract.

Find out how Little Cricket can help your brand stand out from the crowd