Trust Digital

Industry Focus: Mobile Device Security

Trust Digital, a mobile device security company based on Washington, DC., noted that that the summer months can be a slow time of year for any media outreach. In request of the client we needed to create a campaign with a less ‘newsy’ focus but also try to capture the severity of mobile device vulnerability.

Dubbed Project Rogue, the PR team created a campaign to purchase 10 mobile devices on eBay and have Trust Digital engineers experiment to hack these devices, demonstrating their susceptibility when lost, stolen or even willingly given-up. The results were staggering. SS|PR offered an exclusive to the Associated Press’s Ted Bridis, knowing that if Ted’s article was written well enough we knew that the prominence of the AP would allow the story to ‘work itself.’ This was also a very successful strategy.

The story resulted in the number one news story on August 31st, 2006, making Yahoo!‘s “Featured” cover item and for hours and listing on Yahoo!‘s “Most Recommended,” “Most Viewed” and “Most E-mailed” stories.

CNN, CBS and Fox News each ran evening segments on their national broadcasts, with CNN’s piece running fully 7 minutes. “Critical Mention,” AP’s monitoring service, reported that 187 local television stations around the U.S. aired the story through 9 p.m., from Portland, Ore.; to Dallas to Orlando. In this morning’s newspapers, the story was on Page 1 in dozens of cities. Collectively, those newspapers represent well more than 2 million readers.