Case study · Surveillance storage
A component the industry used and could not name.
Seagate’s drives sat inside surveillance systems all over the world, specified by integrators who thought of them as a line item. Twenty-three months later SkyHawk had four industry awards and a body of trade press published under its own executives’ names.
editorial placements across the security trade press, of which twenty were roundtable responses ghostwritten for Seagate executives.
August 2018 — June 2020
Everyone in the industry used their product. Almost nobody could name it.
Seagate had scale, engineering credibility and no voice in the security trades. When something did get written about surveillance storage, it was written about somebody else. The company was a component supplier in a market that buys on relationships and specifications, and it had neither the bylines nor the award record that would put SkyHawk on an integrator’s shortlist.
The brief Maize was given in August 2018 was share of voice: increase SkyHawk’s awareness, exposure and credibility in the surveillance market, and get in front of the people who actually decide what goes in a rack — the associations, the trade editors, the ecosystem partners, and the integrators and installers doing the specifying.
Borrow the executives’ names. Publish on a schedule. Enter everything.
A component supplier cannot buy its way into credibility in a trade press this small. It has to be published in it, repeatedly, under the names of people who work there. Maize was contracted for two editorial pieces and two blogs a month and ran that cadence for twenty-three months.
Ghostwrite the executives
Jessica Burton and Jason Bonoan became the bylines. Twenty of the 46 placements were roundtable responses in SecurityInformed, where editors put the same question to every vendor and print the answers side by side. Showing up every single time is the whole play.
Build the argument once, sell it everywhere
A smart cities research and messaging framework became a white paper, a sponsored campaign on SecurityInfoWatch, an SIA byline and a Security Technology Executive cover story. One piece of thinking, four appearances, one quarter.
Submit for everything
Four award wins in three years, each one a second news cycle for a product that had already launched. The 2018 win came from a Niagara Falls hotel whose surveillance drives kept failing — a deployment story, not a spec sheet.
A failing hotel camera system becomes an industry award.
The strongest submission Maize wrote for SkyHawk was not about the drive. It was about a high-end hotel in Niagara Falls whose surveillance storage kept failing, leaving security staff unable to pull footage for police reports, and the integrator who fixed it with SkyHawk 8TB.
Four wins, four submissions written by Maize. None of them were about a launch.
Seven of the forty-six.
A selection, arranged by the move that produced it. Every one carries a Seagate executive’s name.
One of those bylines — the AxxonSoft collaboration — landed on SecurityInfoWatch’s ten most-read stories of 2020, six months after the engagement had already ended.
What twenty-three months of it produced.
- Four award wins in three years. SSI Security Solutions in 2018 for the 8TB, Security Today’s Govies and New Product of the Year in 2019 for the AI 14TB, and a second Govies at Platinum level in 2020 for the AI 16TB.
- Four speaking slots secured, one delivered. Monty Forehand’s PSA TEC 2019 session on data regulation drew 29 registrants, including executives from Johnson Controls and Securadyne. The other three fell to a client decision, a postponement and the cancellation of PSA TEC 2020 — securing the slot was the part Maize controlled.
- 120+ leads from a single media buy. One sponsored paper campaign on SecurityInfoWatch in January 2019, built around a Maize-written smart cities white paper.
- A discounted exhibit at PSA TEC 2019. Maize recommended the show and negotiated the rate. Seagate exhibited.
- Twenty-four blogs, four white papers, six infographics and two co-branded solution briefs with Avigilon, Verint and Honeywell — the content engine underneath everything above.
- The work outlived the contract. In December 2020, six months after the engagement closed, a Maize-written Seagate byline appeared on SecurityInfoWatch’s list of the ten most-read stories of the year.
Four wins, four Maize-written submissions
Every badge, a second news cycleYour category has the same twelve publications.
If you make something the industry uses but cannot name, that is a fixable problem. Twenty minutes is enough to tell you whether it is fixable for you.
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