It’s almost a year since I sold my 50% stake in Wolfstar and decided to become an independent communications consultant and trainer. The time seems to have flown by, but it can’t of been that long ago as tonight’s SABRE Awards in Brussels reminds me.
Wolfstar has been shortlisted for a Gold SABRE Award for its work as the global lead PR agency on the launch of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play phone, a campaign which very much happened while I was still running Wolfstar. The team did a great job to successfully launch the Xperia Play at Mobile World Telecom in Barcelona in February 2011.
Details of the phone had been extensively leaked before the launch and there was huge buzz and expectation about the much anticipated ‘PlayStation’ phone. That meant the main challenge of the launch wasn’t generating coverage – there was almost too much of that – but instead it was focused on ensuring accurate and quality coverage, to combat some of the many rumours circulating on tech blogs. This was before Sony acquired all of Sony Ericsson to create Sony Mobile, so it meant that messaging had to be carefully planned between the then two separate companies.
The team worked with several of Sony Ericsson’s other agencies to create a range of creative content that was then published on a custom-built social media newsroom that had been optimised to publish content in ‘real-time’. This meant that as journalists live blogged as the actual launch was taking place the team was using the newsroom to constantly provide new official content for them to use.
UPDATE: Just spotted that there is now a mini-case study on the new WolfstarPR site. Good luck to everyone, especially Will, Clare and Anthony who did most of the hard work.
Congrats on the anniversary 🙂