Challenge.
As if the world of security isn’t already full of enough noise, the Lumina team faced a slew of challenges surrounding the successful launch of Thycotic’s 2016 State of PAM Report:
Results Needed to be “HUGE”: Having come out of multiple successful campaigns with the client and the fact that Thycotic spent funds to have others partner with them on the co-branding of the report, expectations for media results for the PAM report were set very high.
Getting Ahead of Black Hat: With timing of the launch taking place in July, the team faced the challenge of getting in front of journalists and overshadowing the slew of pitches that would engulf security journalist’s inboxes ahead of major security conference, Black Hat.
Making Content Already in the Public Domain Newsworthy: The team had planned to execute big results by taking an exclusivity approach with journalists to get some major media hits in the pipeline; however, plans of this were soon halted as the team discovered that other members of the Thycotic team that were out of the loop on the PR approach had went ahead of the launch date and published the full PAM Report on the Thycotic site and other locations for lead gen purposes.
After plans for an exclusive approach were shut down by the aforementioned reasons, the team quickly shifted gears. While advising the client to keep the release date where it was (a few weeks out) rather than rushing to publish (even though the PAM report was technically live), the team instead let any and all top security reporters know that they had some very newsworthy findings surrounding results of more than 500 respondents which detailed the true state of privileged account credentials and security access at organizations around the globe. The Lumina team then gave all reporters access to the full report and final press release “ahead of its release that would officially be announced on July 20th.” This report allowed there to remain a level of having reporters feel they were in the know on something that was not yet “officially” announced and offered some fresh stats on what is being seen within the industry. The Lumina team also allowed reporters to publish their pieces ahead of the announcement – so first come first serve on who got their stories out prior.
Time was carved out by executives for pre-briefings and the Lumina team also worked with some of the more prominent security publications to secure contributed pieces that would come from the experts of Thycotic and were published once the announcement went live (with some coming out ahead of time).
Coverage included placements in publications such as CIO Magazine, SC Magazine, ITBusinessEdge, Security Week and the Wall Street Journal. *Full coverage results can be found below.
Needless to say the client was extremely content with the outcome and is still seeing additional interest and traction coming through as a result of the exposure that the report had received.