Now in its seventh year, our relationship with this recognized global leader has taken us in many directions.

As the agency of record for North American trade and social PR, we have worked extensively with the in-house team, providing guidance, feedback, industry expertise, and content ranging from press releases to executive thought leadership series. Our work together has been extraordinarily productive, generating up to 80 percent of the company’s annual media coverage. Not bad, considering that Crawford is one of four agencies used worldwide by this client.

The relationship goes far beyond media. The client benefits from our deep knowledge of tech and telecom, and our expertise in a range of areas — finance, marketing, thought leadership and other domains — to meet any communications need or resolve any challenge.

Highlighting the diverse capabilities the client has come to rely on, Crawford has:

• Drafted Chairman’s Letters for Annual Reports
• Edited and consulted on a CEO book
• Provided strategic PR counsel on company acquisitions
• Conducted competitive analysis of opponents’ marketing, messaging and PR
• Developed and implemented unique Thought Leadership programs for senior management
• Orchestrated campaigns on consumer sentiment surveys
• Advised on website strategy, SEO, and social outreach
• Produced marketing collateral including strategic point of view papers, case studies and product literature
• Created customer letters for the company’s direct response marketing group

In the best client/agency relationships, flexibility matters. Clients need to know that their communications professionals can rise to any occasion and always beat expectations.

Crawford turns up the heat, winning both initial and repeat national coverage for WorldPay in the Washington Post, Financial Times, CNN, Bloomberg, plus multiple hits in trade and vertical press. Ultimately, WorldPay is acquired for £2.025 billion.

Problem: Zero name recognition.

Crawford’s solution: “Tomorrow we’re launching the first competitive telecom service in your city in over a century – want an advance on that story?”

Media take the bit and run with it, generating broad local coverage in print and broadcast, helping drive sales. Trade and national media coverage builds broad awareness. At its peak, KMC sells network assets to CenturyTel and others, contributing to the foundation of today’s lucrative fiber optic network services.

Voila – the birth of convergent billing.

Geneva needs to build on its European base and asks Crawford to launch them in North America. We debut the company with multiple analyst briefings and interviews resulting in significant, months-long media coverage and analyst reporting. Within a year, Geneva is purchased by a large North American BSS company for $690 million – 35 times Geneva’s annual sales at the time of the acquisition.

We couldn’t think of a better moment in history to do so.

On 9.19.01, Crawford launches the EVIVE BioAccess system for affordable, failsafe security, with a portion of sales proceeds to be donated to the American Red Cross. EVIVE is covered in national, trade and broadcast media. Highlight: NBC interview with EVIVE CEO inside a shuttered Reagan National Airport.

At the time, some months before the Telecom Act, CAPS and CLECs were small, relatively obscure players with aggregate revenue of $400 million. In all, there were about a dozen publicly-traded CAPS and CLECs, the best known being MFS and Teleport, with smaller players such as ACSI, Brooks Fiber and KMC Telecom trailing along behind.Their media presence was strictly trade press. ALTS’ Heather Gold wanted national recognition. We said, “sure thing – when do we start?”

From there it was all up side. With the purchase of Nortel DMS 100 switches and then DSL switches, CLECs made it clear that all those metro fiber rings they’d built could handle a lot more than just access. First came local voice, then long distance, then DSL – the first fully integrated local and long haul voice, data, Internet and soon managed services providers in the business.

ALTS’ job was to provide regulatory air cover for the CLEC industry, to ensure they and their customers benefited from the level playing field in local telecom that lawmakers had in mind when they passed the Telecom Act and opened the market to competition for the first time in nearly a century.

It wasn’t easy. The Bells fought such competitive inroads to their monopoly at every turn – denying payment of access charges levied by CLECs, refusing to provide unbundled network elements and collocation space as required by law, and even challenging the legality of the Telecom Act before the Supreme Court. The Bells resorted to dirty tricks, too, like cutting off a customer’s service after they’d opted for a CLEC – but before the CLEC service was cut over. ALTS fought every one of these battles and more before state and federal regulators, and in the courts, and nearly always won. Crawford PR made sure that the struggle to guarantee competition in local telecom won plenty of media time – bringing pressure to help ensure a favorable policy decision.

During the five years we worked with ALTS, Crawford secured repeated coverage in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, all the wire services – Bloomberg, AP, Dow Jones – the Los Angeles Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, San Jose Mercury News, Washington Times, US News & World Report, Investors Business Daily, Smart Money, National Journal, Legal Times, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg TV, National Public Radio, and of course, all the key telecom trades – Communications Daily, Telecommunications Reports, Telephony, tele.com, Inter@ctive Week, Data Communications, Information Week, InfoWorld, Network World, Intelligent Network News, Xchange and PHONE+.

How we knew we’d arrived: Before we started, the Wall Street Journal’s annual telecom supplement carried not a single word on competitors. The next year, the supplement was dedicated to the CLECs.

In addition to its role as regulatory pit bull, ALTS also played an important part in developing the business of the CLEC industry, holding two annual conventions where members could meet with customers and vendors. Crawford managed PR for all events, wrote keynote addresses, produced videos and even handled voice-over staging speaker introductions.

Along the way, we aided business development in our own right, offering free media counseling to CLECs just getting started.

By the Fall of 1999, the FCC reported that the CLEC sector numbered some 1,200 players – the apex of the competitive local industry. Or was it?

During the telecom bust of 2000-2001, most of the “class of ‘99” disappeared. ALTS itself eventually merged with another telecom association. But today, thanks to the pioneering work of ALTS, competition is as strong as ever.

As in any industry – e.g., automotive, radio, electric utility – the first blush of growth was followed by consolidation and the establishment of stronger players in it for the long haul. Today’s competitive local telecom marketplace features the names of large, successful enterprises such as XO Communications and AboveNet. Look at their management teams and you’ll find the names of many of the same leaders who were on hand when the industry debuted. Crawford is proud to have helped build the framework enabling the success of today’s competitive telecom giants – and to continue supporting their regulatory and market agendas today.

$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.

An OSS company approached Crawford with that very idea. The mission: Launch the vendor as a key player supporting utilities’ “Smart Grid” initiatives. “Sounds great,” we said. “We know OSS cold – What’s ‘Smart Grid’?”

What’s Smart Grid?

For those who are as unfamiliar with Smart Grid as we were that long ago day. . .Smart Grid is an industry initiative to move toward automated management of power delivery. The goal: optimize use of precious energy resources, increase efficiency and reduce costs for utility and consumer alike.

The problem: Smart Grid isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Among the chief challenges: Utility back office systems need a total overhaul to accommodate Smart Grid requirements like automated service fulfillment and trouble ticketing — tasks that are common fare for telecom operations but alien to energy companies.

Market Analysis: Lessons from Competitors

So. . .we needed to build a story line that showed how the client’s solution would bring utilities’ back offices into the 21st century to meet Smart Grid objectives. Obvious, right? Well, if so, we wondered, wouldn’t the client’s top competitors already be doing just that?  As it turned out, nope.

A glance at competitors’ story lines revealed a messaging short-circuit. Many assumed that utilities would automatically understand that BSS/OSS solutions designed for the telco space can also work in the energy sector. This group of vendors blew right by any discussion of a utility’s unique back office requirements for driving Smart Grid business objectives. Another competitor’s messaging was so technically opaque that only a software engineer could inch his way through it.

We saw competitors’ missteps as an opportunity for our client to take the lead. “Why not just match the client’s solution to the utility sector’s Smart Grid business objectives –  in simple English?” we asked ourselves, then the client.  And with their blessing, that’s exactly what we set out to do next.

A little research showed most utilities’ Smart Grid business objectives to be:

1. In the near term, quickly meeting regulatory requirements.
2. Preventing costly brown-outs and blackouts.
3. Reducing capex on new plant.
4. Profiting from new revenue sources, e.g., selling “green” products.
5. Being in the best competitive position as the market opens up.
6. Leveraging Smart Grid to increase shareholder value.

Focusing on what mattered most to the customer, and how the client’s solution could help, Crawford then began crafting and pitching story ideas, bylines and guest blogs to energy media.

Journalists liked what they heard. Instead of just another vendor sales job — or a technical snow job — now they were hearing something that showed an understanding of their readers’ business needs. What followed: Key placements in prominent energy trades including UtiliPoints Issue Alert, Public Utility Fortnightly, Electric Light & Power Magazine, Smart Grid Today, Intelligent Utility Daily and GreenTech Media.

Armed with this media coverage, the client had the proof points they needed to make utility execs snap to attention. Today they’re winning business in a growing new market sector that over time could well become as big as or larger than the communications space.  We like to think that a little Smart PR helped them on their way.

Cramer had a great angle. Their target market — telecommunications companies — wanted to differentiate with convergent services, but as new technologies became more complex so did the process of tracking the underlying network inventory essential to creating and delivering the services.  Carriers needed help.

Cramer had the perfect solution: An inventory management product that mapped all network assets and ensured fast, accurate service provisioning and fulfillment, regardless of service complexity.

Most importantly, Cramer had high profile customers that had benefited from Cramer’s inventory management solution. In developing Cramer’s communications strategy, we saw the value of many traditional activities, but the most priceless assets in Cramer’s PR arsenal were its customers. Together we decided that the PR campaign would focus on the voice of the customer at every opportunity.

Cramer’s PR program covered all the bases – analysts, story advances and exclusives, and a steady stream of awards, including Billing and OSS World’s Best Product, Best Company, and Best Customer Deployment awards.

But customers made the biggest splash.

In announcements, case studies, joint presentations and interviews, Bell Canada, BT, Cablecom, Fastweb, Japan Telecom, KPN, Slovak Telecom, Telefónica de España, Telmex, T-Mobile Vodafone, VSNL and others hailed Cramer’s positive impact in their businesses:

• Bell Canada credited Cramer’s inventory management platform as a key driver of over $1 billion in savings as the carrier switched to an all-IP network.

• In just six months, Cramer helped AT&T recover more than $20 million worth of unused plug-ins in the SONET network.

• KPN eliminated a 50 percent error rate in its international network by switching from a legacy operations system to Cramer.

• Using Cramer, Telmex boosted its market share in the corporate enterprise market through the ability to provide better service level agreements, quality of service guarantees, faster provisioning, and an expanding array of services.

Every new telling of the story triggered a domino effect in media coverage and new sales. Reaching over $100 million in revenue, Cramer caught the eye of leading IT companies that saw the value of adding Cramer’s unique solution to their portfolio. Ultimately, Amdocs bought Cramer for US$370M.

When the deal closed, Connected Planet credited Cramer’s PR machine for “a very healthy acquisition price.” We applaud Cramer’s commitment to leveraging the value outstanding relationships with high profile customers.