SamsonPR - Thought Leadership Campaign of the Year

Company: SamsonPR
Company Description: SamsonPR is a San Francisco-based B2B technology communications agency, who's passion is working with bleeding-edge, disruptive technologies. The SamsonPR approach is focused on creating top-tier visibility, and leveraging our top-tier media relationships to tell brands' stories. We build powerful communications programs that deliver results and tie back to brands' business objectives.
Nomination Category: Corporate Communications, Investor Relations, & Public Relations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications or PR Campaign of the Year - Thought Leadership

Nomination Title: SamsonPR: Turning an Amazon Vet and President of Ecommerce Startup into a Retail and Ecommerce Thought Leader

Specify the date on which this campaign or program was launched: July, 2020

In early 2020, Pacvue experienced some extremely fast growth. Their early approach was very product-focused and customer-centric, leading to an awesome product with happy clients - but almost no greater awareness of the brand. Additionally, the Pacvue external messaging and brand positioning needed some fine-tuning as it had not been a focus for the team at that point.

Pacvue’s President and Co-Founder, Melissa Burdick, was a high-powered business leader in the ecommerce industry, having spent 10 years at Amazon building out their CPG and Advertising business units. However, much like the Pacvue brand, she wasn’t well known in the sector, despite her amazing accomplishments and knowledge of the space.

Finally, Pacvue’s product had gone through years of development and reached a stage of consistent success with current clients, so the time was right to approach top brands and retailers as potential customers. By positioning Pacvue as the leading retail eCommerce advertising platform, PR would serve to increase brand recognition among potential clients - before the Pacvue sales team pitched them.

With ecommerce accelerating as COVID hit in 2020, the timing was perfect to create awareness externally. SamsonPR was engaged to position the brand, drive awareness through high-profile media placements, and create a thought leadership program to position Melissa as an industry leader in ecommerce. The end goal: get Pacvue and Melissa to be considered as leading influencers in their sector, with media proactively coming to Melissa as a source for data and insights on stories related to Amazon and ecommerce.

When developing the PR campaign for Pacvue and Melissa, we started with the highest-level strategy: position Melissa as a leading retail advertising and ecommerce expert and position Pacvue as a leading retail advertising platform. From there, we worked backwards, creating a more generalized 6-month timeline and a more tactical 3-month plan.

We also set about building a data program and a content pipeline to supplement media pitching. Pacvue has access to tons of data around what advertisers are doing on Amazon.com, and we wanted to consistently leverage that data to provide reporters with great insight into the world of ecommerce advertising. Additionally, publicising Melissa Burdick personally and leveraging her insight into the ecommerce ad industry to create interesting content was crucial to our program.

For the data program, we worked with Pacvue’s internal team to make sure there was a clear pipeline from their data analysts directly to us. Pacvue has created multiple quarter-specific (last one was Q1 2021) data reports on Amazon advertising as part of this program. For content, we set up a series of meetings with Melissa, where we picked her brain on anything related to Amazon and ecommerce.

Finally, we fine-tuned their external messaging and brand positioning so we could hit the ground running and drive media placement as quickly as possible.

To make sure that we were doing our job effectively, we set up an array of quarterly KPIs with the Pacvue team. We also set up a weekly PR sync with Melissa.

We’ve gotten amazing results for Pacvue on the fronts of thought leadership and brand recognition. Melissa has had great success as a talking head on Bloomberg Technology Live - she’s been on the program four separate times, using her industry insight to make predictions about Amazon, talk about Amazon’s quarterly results, and talk about the rise of ecommerce throughout 2020 and 2021. Further, we’ve ghostwritten multiple thought leadership articles for Melissa about the state of the retail industry, placed on websites such as ChainStoreAge and DigitalCommerce360.

Our goal to get Melissa as top-of-mind when reporters are considering eCommerce and Amazon has been incredibly successful. Melissa has been quoted in many articles as an industry expert, including in Forbes multiple times, Business Insider multiple times, Bloomberg, Emarketer, DigiDay, AdAge, and other leading publications.

Our data program has also proven to be very successful. Pacvue’s advertising data has been used in some of the stories referenced above, and their Amazon.com Quarterly CPC reports have been published in industry trade publications such as Enterprise Times, Marketing Land, and Retail Touchpoints.

After less than a year of campaigning, Melissa’s profile has risen immensely, and Pacvue has expanded from just integrating with Amazon, to now integrating with every major retailer - Walmart, Target, Instacart, and many more. Melissa has been accepted onto the Forbes Council, spoken on multiple podcasts, and spoken at ecommerce conferences.

We've included a large number of article links as evidence for press wins.

You can find evidence as to the success of our thought leadership campaign for Melissa Burdick in the multiple Bloomberg Live interviews included in links, as well as her participation in ecommerce podcasts, events, and acceptance onto the Forbes Council. Thank you!