Rapt: Google-style algorithmic firepower for display advertising - 1 year

Rapt is a company whose solution provides optimized, dynamic pricing for products, manufacturing components, even display advertising. Atomic followed two prior agencies that had experienced difficulty telling Rapt's previously complicated story and generating volume or quality media and blog coverage about the brand. The objective of the assignment was to raise Rapt's profile and perceived value in support of sales and business development.

ComContext analysis showed little coverage for optimized pricing technologies, exacerbated by most customers' unwillingness to comment on their use of this type of solution for setting end of life pricing, negotiate with vendors and other topics potentially sensitive to their own customers, business partners and vendors. The one category receiving a great amount of attention was online advertising, with search ads receiving the lion's share of coverage, followed by news and commentary from Google and Yahoo!

Deeper analytic review of these topics shed light on the key themes, outlets and blogs, and individual voices driving the majority of useful dialog along with many of their individual positions on hot topics. Using this knowledge as a foundation, the Atomic team built a dead simple strategy which focused the advertising and ad business space to consolidate the Rapt story on one front, which could be then generalized to others.

We reworked Rapt's formerly complex and scientific descriptive language around a comparison to Google and Yahoo! so that people could instantly understand what Rapt does in lay person's terms and to create alignment with the two brands driving the vast majority of coverage and dialog in the space.

Lastly, we did careful prep work with Rapt's two primary spokespeople, Tom Chavez, CEO and Ben Crain, VP business development and offered them up as expert commentators to media and bloggers known to be following Google and Yahoo! developments, various other topics surfaced by ComContext and brand new ones created by the communications team to advance the dialog to the next logical stories.

The results were explosive. Rapt's coverage volume increased dramatically, the company was covered regularly and prominently by the top business, ad business and tech trades important and the company's spokespeople became frequent guest commenters on Google and Yahoo! news. Rapt added numerous key customers during the year of the campaign, and was purchased by Microsoft in 2008 for an undisclosed sum.