Firefly films, edits, and publishes 5 videos for global client in under 24 hours

CenturyLink is the third largest telecommunications company in the United States and is recognised as a leader in the network, cloud infrastructure and hosted IT services market by technology industry analyst firms.

CenturyLink has worked with Firefly since 2012 for ongoing EMEA PR, including trade shows. When it came to Cloud Expo Europe 2015, CenturyLink turned to Firefly to boost its presence at the show.

Insight

Cloud Expo Europe is the largest dedicated cloud event in the world, featuring two days of conference and exhibition at ExCel London. CenturyLink was a platinum sponsor of the 2015 event, and had a presence through a stand and speaker slots.

Firefly was enlisted to assist with CenturyLink’s PR activities, including analyst and media briefings, social media – and video. Videos are an increasingly popular form of communication in PR, and can be used across both marketing channels.

Firefly’s challenge was to film, edit, attain corporate sign off in the US, and publish five videos with CenturyLink spokespeople and partners before the event had passed and the content became dated.

Plan

Firefly created a set timeline for interviews and logistics in order to ensure the videos could be published on time. Interview questions were pre-planned, timeslots for each interviewee arranged, and all equipment organised to ensure no time was lost in organisation.

Firefly also briefed the CenturyLink Corporate team in the US to ensure they knew the videos would be coming to them on the morning of Cloud Expo Europe their time (UK evening) to ensure they were ready to approve or suggest edits to the content.

Deliver

Firefly representatives attended Cloud Expo Europe and filmed interviews with CenturyLink spokespeople and three partner companies: Dell, Intermedia and NetApp. Firefly pre-planned questions before the event to ensure things ran smoothly, and ensured all the necessary equipment was on hand so timescales weren’t put out by disorganisation.

Following the final 3pm interview, Firefly returned to the office with the goal of editing and producing five succinct, polished interview videos by 8pm.

All the videos were quickly approved and uploaded for the second day of Cloud Expo. CenturyLink was the only exhibitor to turnaround video material during the event.

The videos were promoted across social media by staff, event organisers and partners alike; CenturyLink employs a social sharing platform to mobilise employees to help amplify content.

Evaluate

Following the five videos being published and sent out on Twitter, the CenturyLink EMEA Twitter handle achieved a more than tenfold increase of impressions in the two days of Cloud Expo Europe.

Video performance is also evaluated via Hootsuite’s evaluation tools and through the company’s sales analytics software and social amplification platform.

Importantly, the cloud expo served as an engaging and innovative complement to Firefly’s other output around Cloud Expo Europe, including coverage as a result of analyst briefings, media interviews and further social media, to ensure the campaign was well integrated and that CenturyLink could achieve the maximum results possible from the show.