"LP&P has been a critical partner, providing excellent counsel and tangible results across virtually every segment of the media, including grand slams in the key IT trades, the storage press and two prestigious industry awards. We look forward to continuing this great relationship and building on an already solid foundation."
Susan Frankle, Director, Marketing Communications, CentrePath, Inc.

Case Studies

CentrePath
Tangible results in a very short time

The Challenge:

CentrePath, Inc., a leading provider of intelligent data path management solutions for optical and storage networks, has valuable technology and an extremely satisfied customer base including some of the largest IT departments in the world. For the past five years, the company has delivered outstanding customer service with a track record of greater than 99.999% service availability for their managed services offerings.

With this impressive track record and technology foundation, CentrePath decided to place more of an emphasis on marketing communications in the summer of 2005 and engaged with LP&P to promote these results to build ongoing visibility for the company.

The LP&P Difference: 

CentrePath and LP&P worked collaboratively in August 2005 to define the company’s introduction to external audiences and develop an overall launch plan. LP&P suggested packaging various news elements together such as funding, customer and personnel news to create a strong story as the foundation from which to grow. With this pitch package in place, LP&P was able to pre-brief various news outlets to educate a number of reporters on CentrePath’s value proposition including venture capital, local, storage and IT trade press. This strategy was very successful resulting in 13 briefings and 14 unique pieces of coverage for the company in September. Two of the stories that ran in Mass High Tech and Mass Storage News respectively, were feature stories that profiled the company and included photos of CentrePath’s Network Control Center and company executives. In addition, this strategy helped to introduce CentrePath to the IT trade editors and condition them for upcoming product news.

Following the company launch, LP&P worked with CentrePath to prepare for a significant product launch in October that involved two phases: pre-briefings prior to the announcement and follow-on briefings at a major industry event, Storage Networking World (SNW), in October. LP&P counseled CentrePath to secure customer references for the product introduction, which was critical for securing high-profile coverage in the tier-one IT trades. LP&P also helped the company define its product messaging.

Once this messaging was established and customer references were secured for the launch, CentrePath and LP&P worked to pre-brief IT trade editors securing eight briefings. In addition, LP&P secured four briefings on the days immediately following the announcement and seven briefings at SNW two weeks following the announcement. This tiered campaign resulted in 15 unique pieces of coverage with high-profile stories in eWeek, Information Week and Computerworld.

In addition to executing the two launches, LP&P has been very active in uncovering additional opportunities for executive and corporate visibility for CentrePath. These activities include securing briefings with editors at industry events such as Storage Decisions, drafting award submissions for the company and its customers, pitching executive bylines articles to establish thought-leadership and pursuing “Rapid Responses” with key media writing about CentrePath’s market.

By working with CentrePath on award submissions, LP&P has secured two highly-coveted awards for CentrePath: the SNW Best Practices in Storage Award and the InfoWorld 100 Award. In addition, LP&P has secured two executive bylines on key topics critical to CentrePath’s business: “Managing Multiple Data Centers – The Value of Data Path Management” for SNW Online and “Best Practices for Managing a Private Optical Network” for CommsDesign. With the “Rapid Response” program, LP&P was able to secure a briefing with a key optical editor, resulting in a nomination to submit for another highly-coveted award in the optical space, Light Reading’s Leading Lights Award.

The Results: 

Within three months of partnering with LP&P, CentrePath directly benefited from strategic counsel and extremely strong execution with news, events, awards and bylines, generating visibility in its key audience segments in the IT, storage and optical press with 40 total stories to date – an average of 13 clips per month. The company’s executives have expressed that they have never worked with an agency that has yielded such rapid results in terms of generating strong visibility and buzz for the company.