Multi-Award-Winning Campaign to Increase Brand Awareness
Our client F-Secure (now: WithSecure) has traditionally been best known in the consumer market for antivirus software. At the end of 2020, F-Secure shifted its sales focus away from B2C toward enterprise security solutions (B2B). TDUB was tasked with supporting the development of this new sales focus through active media relations.
The challenge was to increase brand awareness of F-Secure as a B2B service provider. Due to the complexity of the topic, cybersecurity is difficult for readers of mass media to access.
The key to success lay in the fact that the general public is highly interested in the economic and social effects of cybercrime, which are increasingly being felt in everyday life. For such coverage, journalists—under time pressure and faced with a complex subject matter—depend on expert support. This is where we were able to step in with a “rapid response” strategy, positioning Rüdiger Trost, Head of Cybersecurity at F-Secure, as an expert.
The “rapid response” strategy is designed to deliver an expert assessment to the press within the shortest possible time—one that enriches the debate and is accessible to a broad audience. To achieve this, the expert must be available to PR consultants at all times to provide statements. Representatives of top-tier media must trust the PR consultant to such an extent that they are willing to accept the assessment—even, if necessary, on a Sunday evening via mobile phone. A decisive factor for the strategy’s success was therefore the establishment of an extremely fast process to generate maximum output with minimal response time. Continuous, around-the-clock media monitoring was also essential.
After the campaign launch, F-Secure’s reach virtually exploded. Time and again, items on the news wires of major agencies such as dpa resulted in well over 100 articles in a single day. One key success metric is the so-called share of voice, which indicates the proportion of F-Secure mentions relative to all mentions of comparable cybersecurity companies in the media. In 2020, the share of voice stood at just under 18%; in 2021, it rose to 49.1%. The absolute number of annual mentions more than doubled.
Within just a few months, Rüdiger Trost became firmly established in journalists’ minds as a go-to cybersecurity expert and was proactively approached by the media. The campaign required no external costs and no media budget. It is highly efficient: once standards and processes are defined, maximum output can be generated with minimal resource investment.
The Rapid Response campaign for F-Secure received seven awards:
- International German PR Award 2023 (DPRG): Media Relations
- Two PR Report Awards 2022: Media Relations; Business-to-Business
- Four German Stevie Gold Awards 2022: Reputation/Brand Management; Corporate Communications; Media Relations; Technology