Communications and marketing strategy for incredible brands.
I live in New York, ordering bagels with a British accent for over ten years.
Mission Mars: Fourth Horizon is an developer training program with physical and social activations, and out-of-this-world creative.
SolarWinds IT Trends Index enters its third, and most ambitious year to date.
Helping Cisco Security take the fight to Huawei's home turf, during its biggest conference of the year.
Extra-terrestrial developer engagement
Mission Mars: Fourth Horizon is an developer training program with physical and social activations, and out-of-this-world creative.
The brief
Mundane. Painstaking. Slow. That’s the way most developers would have described previous training events. Very rarely does a technical training session elevate itself to being a thrilling, or even desirable, afternoon out of the office. That is until Microsoft asked my team to create a more engaging experience. Turning humdrum training sessions into dynamic and engaging events required next-level creative and a smart, scalable delivery.We did it by capturing developers' hearts, as well as educating their minds. Instead of inviting them to a software seminar, we issued them with a challenge: Rescue a lost mission to Mars, using only your code.
Execution
We created Mission Mars: Fourth Horizon – an interactive escape-the-room-style adventure that enlists developers to reconnect with Martian astronauts using Microsoft tools and technologies.Building on as the social agency of record for Windows Developer, my team cooked up something special: A technical training they could beat, and a story they could engage with.We themed the entire experience, from invite emails and landing pages to in-room signage, swag and presenter outfits. Crucially, the technical exercises themselves were themed, weaving a narrative while teaching participants about Microsoft's latest IoT, cloud and mobile frameworks.As the sessions progress, participants learn about a shadowy government agency which has secretly colonized Mars. They're given classified video briefings by experts, and aided by in-room assistants from the Microsoft Developer Evangelism (DX) team.While deeply engaging, this made the sessions beautifully simple to execute. The Microsoft DX team could throw a session together in minutes if necessary, using only a laptop, a PowerPoint file and a projector. Video briefings meant the events practically ran themselves, leaving the DX team free to assist participants and guide their learning
Results
After a pilot event in San Francisco, Mission Mars: Fourth Horizon went global. Over the next year, Microsoft completed 59 workshops in 31 countries. That's more than one a week on average. In total, more than 5,000 developers experienced Mission Mars: Fourth Horizon. We grew the series to three chapters, covering different technologies and ranging from half day to full weekend events.The series achieved some of the highest SAT scores in Microsoft training history and caused such buzz that the team was invited by NASA to run a special session at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. How's that for out of this world performance?
Visualizing the future of the IT industry
SolarWinds IT Trends Index enters its third, and most ambitious year to date.
The brief
Each year, for the past three years, we've helped SolarWinds predict the future of their industry. Taking research which would previously have been consigned to a PDF or worse, a printed report, we create data visualizations to predict the future of the IT industry. This year, we kicked things up a notch with a mandate to use SolarWinds' new branding, we crafted a more engaging, narrative-driven experience.
Execution
No mere infographic, the SolarWinds IT Trends Index is a deeply interactive piece of content with datasets spanning seven countries and three industry sectors. It's an asset that is deeply woven into the company's media relations calendar and forms the backbone of its social content for a whole month of the year.Working with SolarWinds' in-house design team, we crafted a scalable site which works nicely within brand guidelines, and pushes the brand forward into new types of visualization and data design.All this, and the previous version is still available. A much more transactional tool, the legacy editions of the IT Trends Index still attract good amounts of traffic, and have become an asset for the company's spokespeople with analyzing trends and previous predictions.
Results
"You nailed it""IT’S SO GOOD IT DESERVES AN ALL CAPS SHOUT OUT!!!Way to go, guys! Looks fantastic!""It's exactly what we wanted"
Those were just a handful of reactions from SolarWinds' comms, marketing and design teams. As the first interactive marketing asset to use SolarWinds' new identity it was highly scrutinized, but we pulled it off gracefully, evolving that identity where needed in the process. As for technical performance, the new site is converting readers to SolarWinds' other marketing assets at higher rates than ever, and boosting search visibility too. We're already looking forward to next year.
PROJECT DETAILS
Client
SolarWinds
Sector
IT Security
Role
Creative Director
Disrupting competitors with social
Helping Cisco Security take the fight to Huawei's home turf, during its biggest conference of the year.
The brief
In recent years Huawei has taken over $2 billion of Cisco’s business in key local markets. Huawei is landing some body blows, but Cisco isn't out of the fight just yet. To counter Huawei's incursion onto their heartland of network security Cisco needed something new, and powerful, to compete against Huawei's annual conference in Shanghai.
Execution
Fuelled by insights that showed Huawei was nibbling at Cisco's search visibility, as well as media share, my team developed a global compete program, leveraging our PR relationship as Cisco's agency of record, and bolstering it with integrated social, paid search and web design capacity.Our activity was timed to coincide with Huawei's Connect conference with aggressive countermeasures against Huawei's expected talking points. The conference organizers tipped their hand by publishing detailed agendas, allowing us to pre-brief against them using Cisco spokespeople. We followed up with targeted messaging across social, aimed squarely at attendees and key media audiences and completed the 360-degree assault with an SEM campaign, pushed live seconds after Huawei made their announcements, capturing audience interest on their own search terms, and diverting it to Cisco alternatives.Every part of the campaign was orchestrated to de-position Huawei's major announcements, hijack search traffic and provide blanket distribution of alternative messaging for the duration of the conference.
Results
The campaign's landing page was the most visited across the entire Cisco Newsroom Network for the duration of the campaign, peaking during Huawei's conference, but maintaining a healthy long tail afterwards. Despite extremely narrow targeting, the search and social campaign achieved more than 7 million impressions, each one representing a set of eyeballs considering Cisco, rather than Huawei, at a critical time in their product lifecycle.All that, and it was spectacularly good value, too. All our social and search activity was conducted through A/B tests, delivering cost-per-click values well below Cisco standard benchmarks.This approach is now considered the gold standard for cross-platform compete programs inside Cisco and has been packaged into a playbook for other teams to emulate.
PROJECT DETAILS
Client
Cisco
Sector
Cybersecurity
Role
Integrated Strategist
Who's this James guy then?
Strategy
Brand
Customer acquisition
Content marketing
Earned media
Executive visibility
Social media
Content
Copywriting & editing
Planning & integration
Briefing & commissioning
Management & operations
Everything else
Consulting
Workshops & training
Speaking
Roots in writing
I started my career in journalism. Not by writing, but by running. It was 1998, I was 16 years old and I had just bagged a job as a copy runner at a newspaper office. Reporters could still smoke cigarettes in the office, only one computer had an email account and while the digital publishing revolution was ramping up, there was still good money to be made carrying notes, transparencies, and cups of tea around the office by hand.I learned about publishing workflows by watching the masters do it at breakneck speed, and without an internet connection. By age 17 I knew the difference between leading, tracking and kerning, and had become hooked on the thrill of a newsroom marching to the beat of a printing press.Inspired and undeterred by the late nights and early mornings, I left the newspaper to study Multi-Media Journalism at Bournemouth University. I learned to apply structure to my writing, the legal intricacies of court reporting (which I dodged for the remainder of my writing career) and the torturous art of note-taking in shorthand.From here, it was a short hop to online publishing, magazine and newspaper journalism. I smashed together my early experiences in print with a passion for tech and gadgetry. I wrote for business, technology and lifestyle titles, and popped up as a talking head on TV and radio shows almost every week.I loved every second of it, but in 2007 a new opportunity emerged.
Moving to marketing
Content Marketing was the latest buzzword in business. I joined a fledgling agency as its first full-time employee and embarked on a true startup adventure. We were one of the UK's very first agencies specializing in content for brands across web pages and social posts. Later we expanded to video, web development and influencer work, always building on journalistic principles: Know your audience, tell them original stories and keep them hooked by any means necessary.When the company was acquired by a PR firm I had the opportunity to see media relations from the other side of the fence, and learned how valuable the very top of the marketing funnel could be.I learned to understand messaging and narrative, built programs that spanned the full breadth of the marcomms stack and even dusted off my press card to play journalist during media trainings.I moved to New York in 2015, and since then I've pitched, won and partnered with clients including Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Intuit, Mercedes Benz, Vodafone, Telefonica, Lenovo, ZTE and Finnair.And next, who knows? Since you're reading this, maybe we should talk about that.
Industry Experience
FinTech & Financial Services
eCommerce & Online Marketplaces
Software development & AI
Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals
Cybersecurity and SecOps
Non-Profit
Glittering awards
PRovoke Digital Agency Of The Year 2023
PR Week Best In B2B
PR Week Dashboard 25 - AI Edition
Propel 100