In Industry Analyst Relations

Challenge

InterDigital develops mobile technologies that are at the heart of devices, networks and services worldwide. The company helps solve many of the mobile industry’s most critical and complex technical challenges for the benefit of mobile users globally. It has licenses and strategic relationships with many of the world’s leading wireless companies.

InterDigital is at the heart of two significant opportunities facing the global mobile industry. The development of standards for 5G and the enablement of the internet of things (IoT).

While major opportunities, such as 5G and IoT, are much-hyped and much-discussed topics in the media – identifying unique insight that openly demonstrates technology leadership has become extremely challenging. Furthermore, InterDigital was looking to identify new topics, relevant to the IoT, to feed into its established content marketing production engine to drive sales enablement and lead generation.

Creative

Early discussions between CCgroup PR and InterDigital revealed that the enablement of smart cities would be a significant new opportunity to emerge from the IoT ecosystem. As a major licenser of mobile technologies, InterDigital is passionate about all IoT technology stakeholders committing to open standards to drive interoperability and overcome complexity. This is especially critical when enabling smart city solutions.

To illustrate the critical importance of this standardised approach to smart cities, CCgroup and InterDigital felt that an independent analyst was needed to clearly and credibly prove our claim. We also felt that a highly respected analyst third party, with a proven research methodology, would help generate further traction with traditional media when promoting the findings. CCgroup, therefore, drew up a list of potential analysts well placed to carry out the research.

We collectively took the decision to commission Machina Research, a leading authority on IoT analysis, to calculate the potential dangers of technology fragmentation to smart cities. The intention was to highlight the financial and operational risks associated with fragmentation and complexity and give us a powerful headline from which to lead global promotion.

Results

The resulting Machina white paper estimated that smart cities could waste $341 billion by 2025 on non-standardised IoT deployments – a significant and compelling headline that would underpin the campaign. We formulated a promotional press release in conjunction with InterDigital and devised a media strategy that would provide prominent industry commentators with an opportunity to speak with InterDigital and Machina about the report, in advance of its global launch.

This strategy was highly successful, with blanket coverage being generated across prominent technology media. This included prominent news articles as well as more in-depth opinion pieces. The cut through achieved exceeded all expectations and underlined InterDigital’s reputation as a prominent and respected technology company.

To date, the campaign has delivered more than 15 bespoke, editorially focused articles in magazines read by the key buying audiences responsible for smart city enablement – public CIOs, local councils, regional transport authorities and city planners.  Major publications that have so far carried the news include Computer World, Fierce Wireless, Internet of Business, IoT World News, IoT Tech, Telecoms.com and Total Telecom.

Working with the InterDigital team, the PR-driven content was integrated across earned and owned channels to drive reach and engagement. The campaign has been InterDigital’s most successful to date, delivering:

  • 1,375 paper downloads
  • 780 marketing qualified leads
  • Social engagement on LinkedIn alone developed 921,360 impressions, 3,592 clicks and 754 interactions (likes/comments)
  • Website traffic increase of 54%, new users increase of 53% on the day of launch
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