Case study · Thermal & perimeter security
A six-mile airport fence line, on the cover of the magazine.
FLIR had secured the perimeter of San José International with an end-to-end thermal deployment and almost nobody in the industry knew. Maize got the airport’s signature first, then built seven months of content out of one approved document.
impressions from one cover story, in a title circulating to more than 59,000 readers.
September 2019 — April 2020
The deployment was real. The permission was the hard part.
San José International sits on 1,050 acres inside Silicon Valley, with a six-mile perimeter and fifteen million passengers a year. After an $8.1 million federal grant it chose an all-FLIR perimeter intrusion detection system — 57 thermal analytic cameras, 50 HD bullet cameras, Triton pan-tilt units and Latitude VMS, installed by Ojo Technology.
None of that could be published without the airport’s written approval, and airports do not hand that out. Maize drafted the case study in September 2019 and had a signed approval form from San José on the 24th. Everything that followed for the next seven months came out of that single document.
Get one thing approved. Build everything else out of it.
Enterprise security stories are gated by the end user, which makes the approval the real asset. Once San José signed, the same verified deployment supported a customer case study, an infographic, a blog, a listicle, a vertical web page, a video and a magazine cover.
Secure the end user
Draft the story, run it through the client’s review, then get the airport itself to sign an approval form. Without that signature there is no campaign — and it is the step most vendors skip before wondering why their case studies are anonymous.
Place the flagship first
The story went to the editor-in-chief of Security Today as a cover story, under FLIR executive Daniel Gundlach’s byline, live online on 1 April 2020 and in the April print issue.
Sequence the rest behind it
The owned assets were held and released after the cover story rather than alongside it, so FLIR’s own listicle and vertical pages were not competing with the placement for the same readers in the same week.
Seven months from a first draft to a magazine cover.
The whole campaign is a single chain of dependencies. Each step only becomes possible because the one before it landed.
One approved source, seven published assets.
The cover story is the one that mattered. Everything else exists because it could point at the same signed deployment.
What the chain produced.
- 132,000+ print and online impressions from the cover story, in a title reaching 34,000 system integrators and 25,000 end users.
- 1,026 new users to the case study landing page, and 445 reactions on FLIR’s own LinkedIn post.
- The airport went on the record. San José’s Deputy Director of Operations credited the thermal coverage directly — the kind of line no amount of vendor messaging substitutes for.
- A relationship that started in 2015 and is still running. Teledyne FLIR remains a Maize client in 2026, with a two-phase web content programme and a separate data centre content programme delivered through the summer.
“The additional thermal and infrared camera coverage has greatly enhanced our abilities to detect unauthorized activities around the perimeter of our airfield.”
Bob Lockhart · Deputy Director of Operations, Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport
Your best deployment is probably unpublishable right now.
Not because it isn’t good — because nobody has asked the customer to sign. That is usually the entire blocker. Twenty minutes to work out whose signature you need.
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