Neos engaged Clarity to increase awareness of the Neos brand and maximise sales of their flagship product, the Neos SmartCam, during Amazon’s Easter Deals Week (April 8th to 14th).

The key objective was to sell, sell, sell by educating audiences about the new smart camera with superb features at a great RRP.

Clarity needed to execute a campaign that go beyond traditional press office activities. To cut through the noise around the Easter sales period, the team needed to reach consumers across the channels they were on during the course of their daily lives.

As Instagram is increasingly the go-to channel for consumer marketing, Clarity activated a micro-influencer campaign in partnership with TRIBE, who represents influencers with follow counts from 1,000-10,000.

To generate genuine and authentic activity, Clarity and TRIBE put out a call to action for influencers across Neos’ target audiences (parenting, pet owners, general 25-55 consumer) to submit proposals incorporating the Neos SmartCam into their ‘lifestyle.’

The campaign drew 25 entries from lifestyle, pet and parenting influencers, and over the course of the campaign, Neos experienced a 900% uplift in sales

 

When most people think of exciting exciting, disruptive tech, the last place that comes to mind is the staid world of banking. Resistant to change since cavemen chiseled the first deposit slip, the banking industry’s reputation of glacial innovation is well earned. Of course, this was borne out of some necessity: in years past, one of the scariest words a bank customer could hear (besides “overdrawn”) was “disruption”. Banks were meant to be secure, stable, trusted, and unchanging.

 

Of course, that all changed during the global financial crisis. Consumer confidence in their banks crashed almost as hard as stock markets. At the same time, smartphones were slowly taking over the world and reinventing industries left and right. Over time, these factors led to the rise of the “Challenger Banks”: startups armed with the technology, ability, and desire to work directly with their customers to build the bank of the future.

 

The UK served as the global hotbed for these challenger banks and, in 2015, one in particular captured the hearts and minds of young brits: Monzo. Initially launched as a grassroots movement and crowdfunding campaign, in 4 short years Monzo grew to over 2 million customers in the UK, adding 200,000 each month (the fastest growing bank in the country – challenger or established) and a valuation well over £3 Billion. Even in the land of Unicorns, Monzo’s meteoric rise read like an unbelievable fairytale.

 

In 2019, firmly established as a household name in the UK, Monzo turned its attention to the United States. While the consumer profile looked similar to their rabid fanbase at home, this “New World” represented a return to square one for Monzo. Faced with the challenge of how to best introduce itself to American press and consumers, Monzo turned to Clarity San Francisco.

From there, Monzo’s senior leadership worked closely with Clarity to establish a press strategy and messaging fully tailored to the US market. Despite their reputation overseas, Clarity understood that stateside media would not simply roll out the red carpet for Monzo’s arrival on American shores. After all, the US banking industry has shown itself particularly adept to fending off challengers in the past, and press are not unaware of the battle ahead for Monzo.

To combat this skepticism, Clarity developed a strategy for Monzo that included in-person meetings for Monzo CEO Tom Blomfield with press across the spectrum from the Wall Street Journal, to TechCrunch, to Reuters. For each briefing, messaging was closely researched and tailored to speak to the benefits of Monzo while understanding the nuances of each publication and the difficult questions the team would likely face.

As a result, the briefings (and resulting coverage) could not have been more positive on the future prospects for Monzo in the US.

 

Here were (just some) of the results:

 

Hired is an online recruitment marketplace that matches top tech talent with innovative tech organisations. Already an established proposition in the U.S., Hired was looking to grow its footprint in the UK and build brand awareness amongst tech talent prospects, hiring managers and C-level executives.

Clarity was tasked with raising awareness around Hired’s upcoming annual ‘State of Salaries’ report, which highlighted  trends in salary levels and skills across the UK’s software sector. The company also enlisted Clarity to refine their messaging and conduct media outreach in the U.K. around the U.S.-centric ‘State of Wage Inequality’ report to reinforce the company’s commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion within the tech sector.

Clarity embarked on hard-hitting media relations campaign leveraging refined corporate messaging developed to resonate across technology and business audiences. Leading on both the ‘State of Salaries’ and ‘State of Wage Inequality’ reports, Clarity extracted key findings from Hired’s proprietary data and outlined the key messaging for UK media outreach. Proactive media relations campaigns ensued to maximise potential for coverage, and help penetrate Hired’s key messaging amongst business and tech audiences.

Clarity’s efforts have paid serious dividends in launching Hired into the UK market and supporting its marketing objectives across the pond.

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.

We also leveraged the Airbnb news 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.

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.