Fintech and Mobile Tech
Challenge
Educate media on a non-sexy technology, lifting it from relative startup to mainstream status. The new technology would not be introduced to the American public for at least two years, but needed awareness to get resistant banks to opt-in. The banks were the gatekeepers and there was an urgency.
Ironically, while everyone saw it as a pure B2B play – we saw the consumer as a key component – in a counter-intuitive, multi-layered communications-marketing-branding strategy we devised.
Solution
Adhering to our journalistic training, always find the headline: A little-known, but powerful statistic was uncovered. Consumers with very good-to-excellent credit were paying more than $13 billion dollars a year in credit card late fees for being as little as a half a day late in paying bank credit cards.
Positioning C-Sam’s hardware for the Mobile-Phone-As-Wallet not as transactional platform technology, but as an important money-saving convenience that now mattered to consumers’ lives. It also offered the freedom to maintain instantaneous control of finances, banking, ticket purchases, couponing.
Additional Challenge
Chairman, CEO, Sam Pitroda, an international telecommunications pioneer, held dozens of patents and was highly respected within academia and in India, but not a mainstream name in American media.
Solution
Adhering to Davis Communications Group’s Perspective Reasoning, we made the story the star utilizing the shocking late fee statistics. Potent storytelling contributed to an important “personal need” with direct repercussions it would have on the consumer.
Utilizing long-term media relationships, we executed a selective, embargoed media tour and created a behind-the-scenes media bidding war for the story’s exclusivity. We went with Associated Press. It was important to make the deal with a tough, fastidious and knowledgeable tech writer. We worked with editors to discuss the day and time the story would be distributed to newsrooms to gain the greatest exposure and receptivity. We underscored that the C-Sam announcement affected the public at large and should be classified as mainstream rather than a tech story – for widest reach. To ride the media wave, our strategy included that following the AP break, a story would run in a major, mainstream business magazine both online and in print versions; and that C-Sam creator, Sam Pitroda, would be interviewed on a major cable television network.
Coverage
1855 print and online media breaks including mainstream, business, industry – domestically and worldwide. 355 electronic media breaks. Overall views plus 24 million.
With pressure from mainstream consumer, tech and banking industry media, banks opted-in. Mastercard acquired C-Sam.