Thanks to the likes of Dropcam, Nest, Ring, and Arlo, home security cameras are as commonplace as throw pillows around the house. Easy to install, instantly connected to mobile, constantly protecting your home and able to alert you to trouble no matter where you are in the world – in the span of about 5 years, home video security went from ADT to DIY.Â

But, frankly (and thankfully) not that much happens in the home. Sure, you may have the occasional package stolen around the holidays, you may be able to catch a funny moment when your family member was living the motto “dance like no one is watching,” and you may even catch the rare intruder. Statistically speaking, though, we need security in our cars far more than in our homes. From crashes, to break ins, to insane drivers you just want to catch and share – we see more during any given daily commute than we do in our homes all year.

Enter the Owl Car Cam. The brainchild of Andy Hodge, whose career launching “first ever” products included the iPod, Microsoft Hololens, and Dropcam, the Owl Car Cam set out to take the cloud-connected, easy-to-install, always-protecting home security camera and make it travel at 70 miles per hour.

“Wait a minute,” we hear you say in your most skeptical voice.”Dash cameras have been around forever. They’re practically government issued in Russia. You can buy one for $20 on Amazon.”

Congratulations, you just encapsulated Clarity’s challenge: How do you get the world to take a second look at car security as a space ripe for innovation, rather than a “solved problem”. To meet that challenge, the Clarity team embarked on an ambitious program that combined a steady drumbeat of product announcements, in-person meetings with hundreds of tech, auto, and security journalists, an aggressive review program, and a nationwide local media campaign to highlight Owl success stories.

Here were just some of the results:

How do you Airbnb a remote yurt in Mongolia that moves multiple times a year, has no street address, and and is only accessible after a 3 day trek via reindeer? No, this isn’t some horrific future SAT question – this was an actual challenge posed by Airbnb as they searched for the next great adventure travel experience. Thankfully, what3words was the only tech startup in the world capable of answering that challenge. Using their global addressing system that divides earth into 57 trillion 3m x 3m squares, each with its own 3 word address, what3words unlocked an entirely new adventure travel experience for millions of Airbnb users practically overnight.

Now comes Clarity’s (arguably) more difficult challenge: how do you get travel writers, whose technology coverage doesn’t go much deeper than “10 best Action Cameras for your next vacation”, to care about the deeply technical problem of creating a new, geocoded, addressing system?

While we’d love to say we dropped a bunch of reporters in the woods of Mongolia with food, water, and a compass (we’ll do that next time), our strategy for this campaign came down to good, old-fashioned storytelling and a hefty dose of grit.

We saw the Airbnb news not just as an opportunity to tell the story of remote global addressing, but also the explosion of adventure travel across Airbnb, the need for sustainable tourism, and how what3words helped preserve these people’s traditional ways of life. As a result, we garnered attention across travel media, both in the US and internationally.

More than that, we took the Airbnb news as a chance to meet with some of the world’s top technology press in different verticals critical to the what3words mission: automotive, smart cities, industrial logistics, and more.

When Even.com raised a significant Series B from some stellar VC’s, they knew they had news and engaged with Clarity, but they really didn’t want to tell that story. They wanted press to focus on their mission, not their backers; about the company’s actual successes in supporting their users, not convincing VC’s to support their company. Frankly, we think funding stories are as dry as dirt to boot. If we had a dollar for every “startup X raises $$$$ in funding” headline we’ve read over the years, we would just go ahead and start our own venture fund.

Turns out, Even’s (at the time) 6 month long partnership with Walmart had also created one of the most successful employee benefits ever offered by the largest employer in the US.

So, where most firms would happily blast out a copy and paste funding press release, we took the opportunity in a different direction. We worked closely with Even and Walmart’s PR teams to craft a story that used the funding as a “hook”, but focused on the human stories of Walmart associates using Even and the data that proved both companies were onto something big.

Once upon a time Looker, now valued at over $1.6 Billion with offices in New York, London, and San Francisco (just like us – minus the $1.6 Billion), was a tiny stealth startup out of Santa Cruz with the incredibly geeky dream of teaching the world to speak a new query language: LookML.

Armed with a great product, $2m in seed funding and about 20 small(ish) customers, Looker wanted to make a big impact out of the gate. Unfortunately, telling reporters in 2013 that you’ve created a new product that will simplify and democratize business intelligence was akin to a 10 year old Elon Musk saying he will land on Mars someday – “sure you will, kid.”

Looker needed a strategy that fought for credibility and took nothing for granted. No one was going to instantly recognize their value, and $2m in funding just wasn’t going to be enough to win the day. The Clarity team developed a strategy that focused heavily on the credibility of the company’s founder, Lloyd Tabb, and the problems that existed in business intelligence, rather than a dry laundry list of Looker’s benefits.

We didn’t take the easy route, but we knew we needed to elevate the message in order to get Looker the attention it deserved. We invested heavily in media training to craft the right message and sat Lloyd down with reporters from the most technical B2B publications in the world to make sure our message was battle-tested.

As a result, the launch of Looker generated significant demand for the previously-unknown upstart that would later take over the BI world. Clarity continued our work with Looker for a number of subsequent announcements and played a critical early role in establishing the solid base for future growth.

Often quoted in Silicon Valley circles is Facebook’s famous mantra “Move Fast and Break Things”. The unofficial motto of startups, it encapsulates not only a willingness to disrupt the status quo, but also a necessity to constantly be iterating, improving, and not worrying about the consequences until absolutely necessary. So what happens when you want to bring that same mindset to the world of Wall Street where innovation runs head-long into decades of necessary security and regulatory procedures? What happens when you have an innovative service, app, or platform that can only receive an update every 4-6 months? “Move fast and break things” won’t fly in that environment, so OpenFin set out to create a new world where  companies could “move fast and break nothing”, launching the first OS created specifically for Capital Markets.

The challenge for Clarity was two-fold: at first glance, OpenFin is both “too techie” to appeal to finance press and “too financie” (a new word we just made up) to appeal to tech press. The company needed a messaging and communications strategy that spoke to the complexity of the problem and the sophistication of their solution in terms that were accessible to each audience without sacrificing their credibility by oversimplifying in any given direction.

Clarity worked closely with the OpenFin team to establish muti-faceted messaging that could adapt to any audience and remains at the core of the company’s product marketing. We then embarked on a communications campaign that mixed OpenFin-owned events, industry speaking roles, contributed content, and product/company announcements with stellar results both in the finance and tech worlds:

Cutting through the noise during the stretch from Black Friday to Cyber Monday is almost as challenging and stressful as actually shopping during that weekend. But, when Loquate challenged the Clarity London team to do just that, we didn’t flinch. Over the course of 2 months leading into Black Friday, Clarity and Loquate developed what would be known as the award-winning “Golden Quarter” campaign. Understanding that media outlets would be cranking out retail analysis articles fast and furious during this weekend, Clarity turned Loquate into *the* go-to resource for any media outlet looking for shopping data and expert analysis.

In addition to creating a series of stories based on PCA’s real-time ecommerce data, the PCA Predict team actually spent Black Friday at the Clarity London offices, which were converted into a non-stop News Room, serving up live data to hundreds of journalists as Black Friday and Cyber Monday evolved.

To say that the Golden Quarter campaign was a success would be an understatement. The fantastic results the team achieved were recognised at group-level and several customers got in touch to request our bespoke data reports, which has supported our sales and customer delivery teams in strengthening key relationships. Not only did we generate wall-to-wall media coverage in the most influential media outlets in the country, but we also saw a 29% increase in new business between October and January when compared to the year before.

Already working with Clarity’s London office, HYPERVSN came to Clarity in NY with the specific goal of maximizing their participation at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2019.

HYPERVSN would be launching two new products at the show, and they had high expectations for garnering media attention at the show. They wanted to generate a considerable quantity of tier-one coverage, conduct 50+ on-site interviews and secure at least one appearance on a major network television morning show.

Clarity NY worked closely with their UK colleagues in the planning stages, learning from experiences with the flagship HYPERVSN product at the IFA show in Berlin. With the extra insights, the NY team was able to develop strategies that would build on the prior successes.

To break through the considerable “noise” at CES, Clarity proposed HYPERVSN secure a celebrity spokesperson whose notoriety would guarantee on-site media attention. Multiple options were explored, and Criss Angel, whose renown as an illusionist is symbiotic with HYPERVSN’s holographic technology, was ultimately selected for the campaign.

With the celebrity on board, Clarity began its ambitious and far-reaching media outreach, securing interest from key target outlets including lifestyle, advertising, virtual and augmented reality, business and general technology publications.

At CES, two of the Clarity team provided onsite support, facilitating interviews with prominent outlets including CNET, Marketplace, GQ, Fortune, Forbes,  The Verge, Wired, Digital Trends, USA Today, TechCrunch, Mashable, CBS Interactive, VentureBeat and CNN.

Following the event, Clarity secured an additional opportunity with the Today Show, and the HYPERVSN device was prominently displayed throughout the aired segment.

AI-based product authentication technology provider Entrupy was a veritable unknown when they enlisted Clarity to officially launch the company as they closed their series A funding round. The founding team of technologists and mathematicians looked to us to build their profile from the ground up and achieve objectives including:

• Educate the market on the problem (counterfeiting) and establish Entrupy as the only scalable, objective solution
• Raise awareness of the company among global media, marketplaces and secondary resellers
• Establish a reputation for innovation in machine learning and its application for societal issues
• Position for expansion into new markets and product lines
• Drive business growth worldwide

Clarity worked closely with the company to develop messages that conveyed the complex technical solution and its value proposition in a manner that can be understood by retail and mainstream audiences as well as those in technology circles. We crafted positioning that was equally relevant to a single pawn shop owner and a multinational marketplace and executed on a communications plan that incorporated media and industry relations, content development, event participation and industry recognition/awards.

Cheq enlisted Clarity to help position the company’s technology for preemptive brand protection. Clarity helped to create an ownable narrative under the banner of “Autonomous Brand Safety,” with messaging and proof points that support CHEQ’s differentiated approach.

With the aid of a team of advertising experts, Clarity unleashed an aggressive content marketing campaign to advocate for the  idea behind the narrative and support it with data.

The team also helped to develop an advertising program that turned former NBA all-star Dikembe Motombo into CHEQ’s “Chief Block Officer”

Led by one of the most energetic, engaging, and hardest hustling young startup CEO’s in the world, Vincent Nallathamby, a small team of engineers out of Paris embarked on a mission tech giants long ago abandoned: unlocking the true potential of the Bluetooth protocol.

Few people think about it when pairing their phones to earbuds or a home speaker system, but Bluetooth is an incredibly powerful piece of software that can be used for so much more than “connect device A to device B”. Back in 2016, Vincent and the team at Tempow took this misunderstood piece of tech under their wing and built the Tempow Audio Protocol (TAP) with the initial application of allowing one phone create a surround sound system with any number of speakers from any 3rd party brand.

This test case proved incredibly fruitful when they caught the eye of Motorola and became one of the showstopping features for the Moto X4, unveiled at IFA 2017.

These days, we take face recognition for granted, as it does everything from unlocking your phone to helping police find missing persons. Not that long ago, however, mass adoption of face recognition was still locked in the realm of science fiction. Unlocking the potential of this nascent technology was the challenge faced (ahem) by Face.com when they launched back in 2008 with a small team based in Tel Aviv. Another challenge, this time for Clarity: like most great sci-fi technologies, teaching computers how to identify any human, anywhere seemed just as likely to spawn Skynet as the iPhone X.

The team needed a strategy that put a friendly face (ahem again) on a deeply technical product that had just as many potential pitfalls as benefits. Working with Face from the moment they launched to their acquisition by Facebook in 2012, the Bay Area Clarity team developed a strategy that highlighted both the consumer and developer-friendly sides of the company. Primarily, they provided API resources to software developers, large and small, including a variety of programming tools centered on face recognition and face detection. A significant part of our role with Face.com was building out their developer network, from small independent app developers to large multi-national partners such as Intel.

We helped Face.com grow their developer community from an initial node of several hundred people to a community of more than 45,000 active members, through a combination of media outreach, direct messaging, newsletters, events, Hackathons and speaking opportunities.  Face.com grew to be the premier provider of consumer face recognition and detection on the Web.

Whether it was launching direct to consumer products like Photo Finder (to find photos of yourself on Facebook), highlighting odd and attention-grabbing consumer applications from Face users, or putting on amazing parties featuring the vocal stylings of Randi Zuckerberg – Clarity also developed strategies designed to demystify this extremely mysterious tech.

Eleven James, a luxury watch rental subscription service, brought on Clarity PR for the relaunch of its platform and the debut of its curated collections. Already on the industry radar, Eleven James need Clarity to reinvigorate the brand messaging and show how the company had evolved since its last media push.

In a heavily media-relations focused campaign, Clarity utilized all angles of the launch to appeal to a wide audience. To maximize coverage, Clarity integrated the brand story with the business story, which allowed us to penetrate business, fashion/style, luxury, and watch trade publications. Additionally, Clarity arranged briefings between Eleven James’ executives and top-tier targets.

VRBex, a US-regulated cryptocurrency financial services brand, enlisted Clarity to build its reputation as a company bringing credibility, transparency and trust to the crypto space. The campaign needed to increase brand visibility beyond the sphere of crypto, with reaching potential partners and investors being a key objective.

Prior to the launch of VRBex, Clarity rolled out a program grounded in thought leadership, developing and placing VRBex-bylined articles that presented unique points of view in stark contrast to existing narratives in the space. To further build credibility, the team positioned Founder and CEO Gene Grant as the most knowledgeable resource on the regulation of crypto and security tokens through briefings with high-profile trade media and influencers.

At the time of launch and pre-sale, Clarity leveraged the newly-elevated profile for an aggressive media relations campaign, for which the ability to provide industry insights and offer substantive commentary on breaking news stories served to amplify results.

Visto came to Clarity following bold changes within the company that was still, at the time, known as Collective. With the knowledge that transparency in digital advertising would soon be an industry rallying cry, CEO Kerry Bianchi steered the company in a new direction and turned the 11-year-old ad network media business into a forward-thinking technology company committed to bringing simplicity, transparency, and efficiency to digital marketing.

Clarity worked in partnership with the internal marketing team to completely redefine the company and develop new messaging that would reflect the value proposition of their platform, the Visto™ Enterprise Ad Hub.

Both before and after introducing the vendor-neutral platform to the ad and marketing tech community, Clarity played a vital role as trusted advisor, providing counsel on both internal and external communications following the rebrand.

Clarity executed a highly content-driven campaign for the company while also putting the dynamic CEO in the spotlight. Through bylined articles, reports, white papers and speaking engagements, we successfully established the company as one leading the charge of transparency in programmatic advertising.

Video creation platform Wochit had been working with Spark in the US and Clarity in the UK. After three months, they migrated 100% of the work to Clarity. With a tiny, overextended marketing team. Wochit wanted a true partner that would help them prioritize efforts in order to yield the greatest results with the least lift on their end. Their goals were:

• Establish with external audiences who the company is and how they’re differentiated from the main competitor
• Solidify the company’s positioning in a way that could withstand the growing complexities of and players in the market
• Grow the number of content partners and platform users around the world, with a particular interest in Asian markets
• Increase visibility for the CEO, who was historically under the radar
• Pull them out of their “shy and modest” habits and make their successes known

After a deep dive into the company and its strengths in the competitive,context Clarity helped to refine Wochit’s messaging to better highlight its differentiators and appeal to its primary customers. Initial positioning centered on the concepts of “journalistic storytelling” and “short-form social video,” and we focused on establishing Wochit as a partner who give expert guidance to media companies on how they can leverage video to engage with audiences across owned and syndicated channels.
Tactics included preparation of quarterly reports, the Social Performance Index, which provided insights on video production and consumption trends gleaned from thousands of videos from hundreds of Wochit users. We also aided in preparation of eBooks and other educational materials. For the CEO, we instituted an aggressive thought leadership program, publishing numerous bylined articles with target publications and providing rapid-response commentary on issues relevant to video and publishing..