What a Difference Good Messaging Makes

Feature article in TechCrunch

Keynote speech at SXSW

Panel participation at NASDAQ Cybersecurity Summit

When Messaging & Positioning Matters Most

The messaging just wasn’t sticking. That was the crux for Ohio-based Panopticon Laboratories, a two-year old startup that had built behavioral analytics and anomaly detection technology to fight hackers and fraudsters from disrupting the economics and player experience of video games. With the sales process stalling, Panopticon Labs turned to ARPR for a project to help refine its corporate and product messaging and positioning, refresh its visual identity and update its website with engaging, SEO-optimized copy that would resonate with its target audience: video game publishers.

Banking on an Industry Analogy

Video games & cybersecurity: Everything about Panopticon Labs intrigued ARPR’s messaging and security teams because no solution like it existed. To begin, ARPR traveled to Ohio to lead a full-day messaging session, speaking with the company’s leadership about what messaging had worked and what hadn’t; what each stakeholder perceived as the messaging challenges and what the brand’s vision was for both the near-term and long-term. During the course of the messaging session, it quickly became apparent that Panopticon Labs’ could potentially benefit by simplifying its product architecture and by utilizing keywords and phrases that were more mainstream, such as cybersecurity instead of fraud analysis.

With these conclusions in hand, and a plethora of information to consume, ARPR constructed a Corporate Messaging Portfolio packed with mission and vision statements; product key messages, and reasons to believe. We evolved Panopticon Labs’ messaging to position them as the first and only cybersecurity company for video game publishers and recommended to engage publishers by showcasing the similarities between today’s threats to video games and yesterday’s attacks on banks. ARPR also revised the brand architecture to offer one product instead of three, which we advised could eliminate some of the confusion that publishers cited during sales calls. ARPR then focused on the website, making recommendations for navigation updates for ease of use, visual updates to stay consistent with brand themes and, most importantly, SEO-optimized web copy.

Video game cybersecurity goes from niche to mainstream

Panopticon Labs was so pleased with ARPR’s messaging work that they hired us as their PR Agency-of-Record. In the 10 months since the initial project concluded, ARPR has utilized Panopticon Labs’ messaging to great success. In fact, the very first time ARPR initiated media outreach utilizing the messaging, the agency secured a contributed article opportunity with Dark Reading, one of the industry’s most coveted media outlets. The new messaging also helped amplify the discussion of video game cybersecurity from niche to borderline mainstream, due to articles in high-profile media such as TechCrunch, VentureBeat, MarketWired, Gamasutra, The Guardian and many others. Speaking opportunities, resulting from SEO, media relations and content marketing efforts, at SXSW, the National Cybersecurity Alliance NASDAQ Cybersecurity Summit and Akamai Games Summit greatly increased Panopticon’s profile. Overall, the messaging was the catalyst for what is now a full new business pipeline that consists of several of the world’s largest video game publishers.