INK Takes Home the Silver, Technology/Business Award for Best Campaign
Never underestimate the power of the trades. That was the mantra of INK inc PR when they pitted client Avamar Technologies, a tiny company that produces disk-based back-up and recovery storage systems, against industry giants like Veritas and IBM.
With the majority of the storage trade press in favor of tape-backed storage systems, INK sparked an intense debate that was battled on the pages of top trade publications:disk vs. tape. Closely monitoring the formats, jargon, key players and news cycles of these publications, INK positioned Avamar's main disk-based products offered by larger companies. Because of INK's careful, media-savvy research, Axion was featured all over the trades, in pubs like eWeek (three times),Information Week, Enterprise Systems (four times, IT World, Network World, CIO Insights.com,Storage Magazine (five times) and others.
With Axion's trade coverage snowballing, INK pushed Avamar into the mainstream arena by responding to news events rather than hyping products to skeptical national business reporters. For example, during hurricane Katrina and Rita, INK pitched Avamar's "Data Evacuation" solution, and offered Avamar's executives as experts on data disaster backup and recovery. The strategy led to placements in The Wall Street Journal, NPR, BusinessWeek.com, CNBC and others. But their best hit was still to come in the trades. INK researched and courted the perfect reporter at Searchstorage.com and landed a feature about a hospital in New York that chose Axion after becoming frustrated with the shortcomings of Veritas's storage product. The best part: Searchstorage.com is read by Avamar's primary target audience of storage-minded CTOs. What's more, Avamar's revenue and customer base increased by over 300 percent after the article was published.
