Black Box

There are three problems with most press releases issued by technology companies. The vast majority of these announcements…

With over $1B invested in broadband wireless spectrum, Nextlink deserved the market crown.

But years before, bad press on fixed wireless had soured public opinion. Customers were wary of the technology.

Crawford responded by re-launching Nextlink’s new and improved platform as a reliable, cost-effective alternative to local fiber for broadband apps ranging from wireless backhaul to network redundancy.

Coverage in more than 25 national, trade and wire service outlets turned skeptics into believers.

With today’s boom in bandwidth demand, Nextlink’s spectrum is the mother lode of local broadband connectivity. The company is leveraging its assets to expand in over 80 U.S. metro markets.

In 2007, Wall Street bet that Verizon would win regulatory approval of wholesale rate hikes that would price competitive local broadband providers and telephone companies out of business.

$1 billion XO Communications hired Crawford to stop $100 billion Verizon win what looked like an “inevitable” Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy decision.  What followed was an award-winning PR initiative fueling one of the more surprising and remarkable “come from behind” telecom policy victories of the decade.

The task put to us didn’t appear that promising at the outset.  The battle with Verizon would prove to be the most challenging policy fight Crawford had ever undertaken.  What we faced on Day 1:

1. Verizon wanted the FCC to grant “regulatory forbearance” from federal rules requiring former Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC) to provide wholesale network services to smaller providers at competitive-based rates.  Verizon sought forbearance in six major East Coast markets, for starters.  If they won there, the deregulation of other markets in their service region would inevitably follow.
2. Under the leadership of its Chairman, the FCC appeared predisposed to grant Verizon’s request.  Qwest, another RBOC, had already set a key precedent, winning approval for an identical petition.
3. Even if the FCC opted not to vote on the petition, Verizon could still win. If the deadline for the FCC vote came & went, the petition would be “deemed granted” under a loophole in the law.
4. Under the deregulation-minded Bush Administration, the RBOCs had won a string of major victories undoing the pro-competitive provisions of telecommunications law.  In the eyes of most of the world, approval of Verizon’s forbearance petition would just be one more.
5. Most national media didn’t care.   “Regulatory forbearance” was too arcane a topic.  Because competitors were small, reporters assumed that a Verizon win would affect few customers.
6. Media on the comms beat were focused on what they considered to be bigger news: The FCC chairman’s stated interest in re-regulating the cable industry, a far larger business.
7. Some press seemed predisposed toward Verizon.  When the competitive telecom industry imploded with the dot.coms in 2001, it lost credibility in many journalists’ eyes.  Some saw the demise of competition as inevitable, others as a just comeuppance.
8. XO and other competitive providers had run through several PR agencies, without much success.  Results: 6 media hits in the first 9 months of 2007.
9. Time was short.  The FCC would vote on Verizon’s petition — or allow it to be “deemed granted” — on Dec. 6, just 75 days away.
10. If competitors lost this fight, many would have to shut their doors — The wholesale rate hike would price them out of the market.

The one glimmer of hope: The competitive industry had friends on “the Hill.”  But for Congressional leaders to help us, we had to do a better job of stirring up support for our cause.

Crawford went on the attack.

In a letter to the editor in The Washington Post, we likened the FCC Chairman to a Roman emperor fiddling with cable TV while ignoring consumers’ and businesses’ more critical need for competitive choice in local broadband and telecommunications services.  We didn’t mince words: “An FCC misstep will mean higher charges.”

We reinforced this point by promoting a third party study showing the downstream impact of Verizon’s plans: $2.4 billion in higher consumer phone bills across the six major cities where the RBOC sought forbearance. 

The Wall Street Journal broke the story in New York City and nationwide, “Verizon Rate Ruling May Hit Small Businesses.”  Similar coverage followed in The Newport News Daily Press, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Providence Business News and the Boston Business Journal .  All six markets targeted by Verizon.

We wrote and placed op eds appearing in many of the same papers and more. The score: 50 key media hits.  Editors added their own opposition to Verizon.  Consumer groups piled on.  As media coverage appeared, representatives of the competitive industry quickly circulated copies on the Hill.  Then Congress applied heat.

In early December the FCC delivered a shocker to the industry and to Wall Street pundits who’d predicted yet another RBOC policy win: a unanimous vote against Verizon, defeating this regulatory forbearance bid and preserving competition.

For its work, Crawford won the 2008 PR News Legal PR Award for “Best Media Relations During Litigation or Crisis.”

We weren’t done.  In 2008, When Qwest tried to expand its first forbearance win to other markets in the West, Crawford stepped in and helped defeat that, too.

Before Crawford launched Cramer in the U.S., the company was a $12M U.K.-based startup in the operations support systems (OSS) space.

Challenge: Debut a tiny unknown player, then go head-to-head with the U.S.’s largest entrenched OSS player during one of the most difficult moments in telecom industry history — the tech bust of 2001.  It was a time when large U.S. communications companies cut IT spending and smaller competitive players vanished altogether.

Cramer had a contrarian business strategy: Make a strong impression in the U.S. market while other OSS competitors stepped back and nursed their wounds.  Cramer’s long term goal: Knock the incumbent off its throne, then take Cramer public or sell it for big bucks.

Cramer had a great story.  Their target clients — telecommunications companies — faced a major problem: As new convergent services became complex, so did the process of tracking the network inventory essential to creating and delivering new offerings.  High order fallout rates fueled customer dissatisfaction, rising attrition, and lost revenue.  Cramer’s value proposition was that the inventory is the network: If a network asset doesn’t show up in the inventory, a carrier can’t sell it.

Cramer had the perfect solution: A truly unique inventory management product that mapped all network assets and ensured fast, accurate service provisioning and fulfillment, regardless of service complexity.  Cramer provided the full picture of network inventory, continuously updated.  Equally important from the carrier’s viewpoint, Cramer’s product was a “technology agnostic” COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) solution that readily integrated with legacy systems long in place within back offices.  There was no need for telecom companies to jettison older systems in which they’d invested $billions.  Cramer could work with what they had, making older OSS more effective and efficient.

Crawford decided on a three-part PR strategy: Draw industry analysts to our side, consistently win the industry’s most prestigious awards, and leverage these accolades into strong press coverage where Cramer controlled the debate.

We set the launch date for mid-May at SuperComm, then the telecom sector’s largest trade show.  In advance of the launch, Crawford targeted the leading industry analysts for briefings with Cramer’s executives: OSS Observer, The Yankee Group, Gartner and IDC.  We advanced the launch announcement to key trades and national press.  We helped draft the nomination form for the “Best New Inventory Management Product” honor awarded annually by Billing and OSS World Magazine. When the show opened, Cramer garnered 17 major hits — positive analyst reviews, extensive trade coverage, and a front page business section hit in their U.S. office’s hometown newspaper, The Washington Post.  Two weeks later, when Billing World convened its trade show, Cramer won the award for “Best New Inventory Management Product.”

In the months and years that followed, Crawford continued this strategy: analyst briefings, story advances and exclusives, and a stream of successful awards nominations (best product, best company, best customer deployment). The plan worked so well in North America that Cramer asked Crawford to take over EMEA PR.

Cramer loved new ideas, too.  One, master-minded by IT marketing consultant Rick Berzle, worked particularly well: holding “OSS Leadership Forums” hosted by a prominent analyst for 10 invitation-only clients and prospects and selected members of the media.  Each forum was a pure think tank session where customers, even those who competed with one another, freely aired their problems and discussed solutions.  No selling allowed — just networking.  It didn’t matter that Cramer was the smallest company at the table — the ability to pull together the industry’s leading minds showed Cramer was “big” in a more important way: vision.  Cramer’s OSS Leadership Forums proved so popular that they always went into overtime, and participants kept the conversation going long after the fact.

With analyst support, awards, leadership forums and non-stop media coverage, a funny thing happened.  Cramer took the cover and the lead in industry trend stories.  The market leader — with 7X Cramer’s revenue — was relegated to the position of commenting on what Cramer was doing.

Reaching over $100M in revenue by 2006, Cramer caught the eye of leading IT companies that saw the value of adding a comprehensive service delivery and fulfillment solution to their portfolio.  When Cramer’s senior executives met with these companies, they could almost hear the wheels grinding in other IT leaders’ minds: “Why didn’t we buy Cramer when it was tiny?”

In March 2006, Cramer debuted its last product release and six new IT partners at press conferences in New York and London.  We all knew what this event was: a beauty pageant for potential buyers.  Three months later, Amdocs bought Cramer for US$370M.

Telephony credited Cramer’s PR machine for this coup and “a very healthy acquisition price.” No surprise. Crawford had done it before for the U.K.’s Geneva Technologies, using PR to help fuel their acquisition for $690M.