Channel V Media

I’m the VP of marketing at Bluecore, a multi-channel personalization platform. We’re a SaaS technology firm that helps marketers rapidly achieve e-commerce growth through our platform. Our technology makes it easy for retailers to personalize their campaigns in digital channels like email, website, paid media, and others. I’m responsible for making sure our market knows who we are and what we do, which helps us drive revenue for the company and raise awareness for our market initiatives.

We hired Channel V Media for their PR and marketing strategy services.

Channel V Media is essentially an extension of my marketing team. They help us drive PR and communications strategies to raise awareness for our core offerings. The team also promotes our differentiation through media coverage, story pitches, and award opportunities. They’ve also been involved in our funding announcements. During such processes, they pinpoint what we need to say and how we need to say it in order for us to stand out.

We work with Gretel (President & Co-Founder), who serves as our overall strategist. She helps nail down the way we talk about ourselves and come up with strategies that help us reach our goals every year. On top of that, she helps us map out the coverage and activations that we need to secure to hit those goals. Kieran (EVP) works on our media and PR, while Victoria (Account Director) manages our day-to-day engagements.

My former boss had worked with Channel V Media in the past, and she had recommended them to Bluecore. That was how we started working together.

We’ve invested over $500,000.

We started working together in January 2018, and it’s ongoing.

Channel V Media has delivered and exceeded our goals every single year. We’ve hit more than 100 pieces of coverage per year, ranging from commentary to media interviews in tier one business outlets and retail trades. Reporters have also expressed interest in the stories they tell on our behalf. They seek us out proactively because of the way Channel V Media has portrayed us. From an end customer perspective, we’ve had both new business and current customer conversations referencing how they hear about us through articles, websites, and media outlets.

Channel V Media performs well in terms of sticking to schedule and budget. The fact that they have a dedicated account manager like Victoria helps with that. They have a weekly planning tracker where we cover all the coverage we’ve secured for the year, the case studies we’re working on, and the awards we’re going to submit. I also like that they work with us on deciding what goals matter. Overall, they’re great at mapping out activities on a calendar where we track our pace against our goals for the entire year.

Channel V Media is great at identifying our secret sauce and articulating that in an interesting way for the media. They have compelling storytelling skills, and their recommendations are always fresh and authentic to our brand, which allows us to stand out. They’re great at writing and honing in on themes that turn whatever they write into something that the audience wants to read. The team elevates our story and ties it back to our core values and messaging.

They can improve by communicating earlier if what we’re doing is taking up more time than expected. This will help us ensure we’re not spinning our wheels on things that shouldn’t be focus areas. To be fair, this isn’t a major issue.

Work with your executive team or internal key stakeholders to align with Channel V Media around success metrics. PR isn’t straightforward to measure, so having alignment in terms of success metrics is crucial. Consider their point of view and chart a path forward to achieving those metrics.

I am the Communications Director of Interledger Foundation

Interledger Foundation is a global non profit that stewards open technology standards to enable payment networks to connect, shaping the future of open finance.

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2-5 Employees

We hired Channel V Media as our public relations agency of record to lead our Public Relations and Corporate Communications. Our goals were to reposition how we talk about ourselves in the media, increase awareness of the Interledger Foundation’s mission, publicize the U.S. and international projects our technology is fueling, drive more fintech companies to adopt our payments framework, and position our C-suite as industry thought leaders. CVM made us aware that the messages we needed to put out in the market weren’t coming through in how we were talking dabout ourselves at the time. The scope of this project includes the United States, Mexico, UK and South Africa.

Channel V Media has created significant brand awareness for the Interledger Foundation, not only in the U.S. and UK, but also in t Mexico and South Africa via their international partner agency network. We have seen a 400% increase in media coverage–and the coverage itself is far more relevant (think going from throwaway profile pieces in unknown media outlets to highly relevant topical and project coverage in high-value outlets) We have also seen a direct increase in funding applications from fintech companies due to their work. These two outcomes are the main criteria for judging the effectiveness of public relations.

Channel V Media are incredibly structured and well organized. At the start of the engagement we had a two-hour strategy session, where they came prepared with a custom workshop to create a six-month PR strategy, specifically designed to get media coverage that directly supports our business goals. From there we have a slack channel, a standing weekly call and adhoc calls for strategy meetings or subject matter expert briefings.

Virtual Meeting

Our technology and industry is highly complex and Channel V Media’s team quickly understood our industry and worked with us to craft our messages that make it resonate with the market in a way that we were not able to achieve on our own

No, we are very happy and have expanded our relationship to also include the creation of an annual industry report and multiple regions.

I am the Head of Marketing, USA of GFT

GFT is a global digital transformation company that was founded over 35 years ago in Stuttgart, Germany, and now has a presence in more than 20 markets around the world.

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2-5 Employees

We hired Channel V Media as our agency of record for the U.S. They were brought on to handle our PR, as well as social media content creation for our North America account, our CEO Americas, and our U.S. CRO. Our objectives were to build our company’s presence from the ground up in U.S. media, and establish our CEO and other executives as thought leaders.

We’ve seen a complete 180 turnaround in our U.S. awareness since hiring Channel V Media. Our CEO of the Americas and our brand as a whole was largely unknown before working with CVM, but that’s changed with the consistent cadence of press coverage that they’ve driven for us. They’ve been able to create awareness around every initiative I’ve brought forward to them, but what I appreciate even more than that is their ability to act as an advisor on which topics will get the most exposure in the media and which won’t. One of the most important benchmarks for me is making sure that our CEO of the Americas is happy with how and to what extent GFT is represented in the media. CVM has exceeded expectations on that front over and over again.

Channel V Media accommodates the communication methods that best suit our team. For priority media requests and opportunities, for example, they communicate with us via messaging app to ensure an immediate response. Someone from the team is always available to us around the clock, which is helpful for a global company that is often working across multiple time zones. We are in constant communication with each other throughout the week, and carve out additional time for a weekly check in every Friday during which time they update me on everything they’re working on, and what’s coming up.

I started my search by speaking to 20 different media agencies. From there, I narrowed it down to five based on their caliber of accomplishments including client history, media network and relationships, and track record of high-quality press coverage. What ultimately gave Channel V Media the upper hand was that they not only checked off all of these boxes, but they also proved that they could deliver on my goals for GFT as a brand and for our CEO of the Americas. It was also clear to me that of the top agencies I narrowed it down to, Channel V Media was the only one that had actually done research on our company and reflected it in their proposal. Kieran and Gretel’s knowledge about both the media industry and the B2B technology space have been evident to me since the first time I spoke with them. Kieran’s experience in the finance world is extremely important to us as a publicly listed company, and Gretel has years of knowledge of the press and the media landscape, and how things will be received. We’ve also had a good rapport in all of our interactions since day one. I’ve never felt like we’re just another client account for Channel V Media because they make it clear that they share our goals and long term vision, and are adamant about bringing them to life.

As our relationship has evolved, Channel V Media has adjusted their team structure to make sure that the right person is always working on the initiative(s) that will generate the biggest impact. I’m glad that at this point in our relationship, we’ve gotten into a good rhythm where I know who is responsible for overseeing what, and I feel confident that they’re the best individual for the job.

I am the Head of PR and Social Media of Sopra Banking Software

Banking software

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2-5 Employees

We hired Channel V Media as our U.S. public relations agency of record to lead our corporate communications strategy in the U.S. As a Paris-based company, we wanted to expand our media presence beyond Europe and into the U.S. We were looking specifically to PR to grow the presence of our brand and technology stateside and empower the voices of our leaders.

At a high level, if you do a Google search for SBS we’re much more prominent in the news than we’ve ever been–specifically in U.S media as well as financial, banking and auto trade media. And this only continues to grow the more we work with CVM. With CVM, we’ve grown the U.S. presence of our SBS executives, including our CEO Eric B. and Head of Asset & Consumer Finance James P., and have expanded their breadth of expertise in the media. They’re now considered industry experts by U.S. media, and we’re increasingly seeing media proactively reach out for their expertise on financial, banking and auto finance topics. They’re also regularly providing their unique POV on industry topics through thought leadership articles. From an internal perspective, our senior leadership team is very happy with the results from the team and the way our brand presence has grown in the U.S. In fact, we’ve been so impressed with them that we’ve expanded our work together beyond the U.S., to other English-speaking countries. We continue to put the trust of our brand in them–they know how to tell our story.

I’d consider CVM our second brain. They are there to keep us on track, but also work autonomously where they’re not looking to us to move forward on initiatives. They have a very structured way of running accounts, which we really appreciate. We have weekly calls, where we discuss what happened the week prior and what’s on deck for the coming weeks. We also use this time to brainstorm together. These calls bring the human touch to our partnership, and have helped us to build a strong partnership. As a large organization, we’ve introduced the team to many people over the past two years for a variety of initiatives. Once we make initial introductions, the team will own the relationship from there for the current initiative and future ones. They have truly become an extension of our team.

Consistency. From the moment we started working together nearly two years ago there hasn’t been a time where we didn’t have consistent momentum. The team is always bringing us ideas and creating stories to get us in the media, even when we don’t have a specific piece of news to share. And when we do have news, they’re always able to make it tell a bigger story about who SBS is–even if it's a smaller piece of news. They’re not reliant on our team to constantly offer them news and story ideas, instead they’re proactively bringing opportunities to us. Our press coverage is reflective of CVM’s impactful storytelling and creative ideas.

There aren’t any that I can think of. We really enjoy working with them.

I am the VP of Marketing of Infragistics

Infragistics provides the world’s largest enterprises with tools and solutions to accelerate application design and development and foster team collaboration.

Referral

2-5 Employees

We hired Channel V Media as our public relations agency of record to lead our corporate communications strategy. Our goals were to grow awareness of Infragistics and our products, and raise the profile of our CEO and Founder. We also tapped CVM to launch our newest product, Slingshot, into the market and generate inbound leads through features in business, technology and trade outlets.

Channel V Media has created more brand awareness for our company and all of our products. We monitor our competitors’ press and we are much more well-known by the media. Our CEO is also getting a lot of recognition in the market and we are seeing many opportunities come through this awareness.

We have weekly meetings with the team to share updates from both sides, and we also use the time to brainstorm ideas and plan. We have a spreadsheet that tells us what’s going on that specific week, as well as a 3-month timeline that offers a detailed look into everything the team is working on for the upcoming months.

The way they work brings creativity and uniqueness to our brands. They write and create material that’s on brand and we can use what they produce not only for PR, but also for our marketing materials. They've really built our CEO as a brand in his own right and highlighted his unique philosophy in the media.

No, we just love working with them. We want to find more ways to work together.