The world is changing with the speed of tech. And The Next Web Conference has its fingers firmly on its pulse. For over a decade, Europe’s leading tech festival draws thousands of tech enthusiasts, companies, investors and startups to Amsterdam every year. After the COVID lockdowns, The Next Web was ready to scale up in 2022. Freshly acquired by the Financial Times, they were looking to expand the reach of their flagship conference. The communications objectives were as ambitious as the TNW team: to grow brand awareness and raise the profile of TNW in the industry; to increase media attendance and participation; to increase coverage of speakers and partners before and during the event; and to build relationships with partners and expand the startup and investor reach.

After the COVID lockdowns, The Next Web was ready to scale up in 2022. Freshly acquired by the Financial Times, they were looking to expand the reach of their flagship conference. The communications objectives were as ambitious as the TNW team: to grow brand awareness and raise the profile of TNW in the industry; to increase media attendance and participation; to increase coverage of speakers and partners before and during the event; and to build relationships with partners and expand the startup and investor reach.

The runway was tight – a mere two months before the opening keynote and nothing in place. Clarity Amsterdam doubled down and delivered.

The client not only loved the results, but the whole Clarity experience. The Next Web will continue to work with us to make 2023 an even bigger success. Clarity will keep working with TNW to further position them as a global brand, with media partnerships, event and comms support and other activities for their thriving tech community.

For Women’s History Month, Clarity worked with Mirza to create a multi-pronged campaign highlighting the motherhood penalty women across the US face. The campaign launched at a pivotal time in the United States, with four times as many women as men leaving the workforce in order to care for their families. The women who remained in their professional roles were faced with the grappling reality of losing critical childcare resources (school, daycare, caregiving services), balancing motherhood, and caregiving alongside their full-time positions. 

Clarity worked closely with Mirza’s co-founders to develop a white paper and proprietary research around the Motherhood Penalty to understand the awareness of the penalty among a key demographic – working women. The results were astounding. While not every woman surveyed understood the Motherhood Penalty, an overwhelming 73% of women said that they thought having a child would hold them back in their careers.  

After analyzing the results, we crafted a comprehensive, multi-faceted communications strategy that tied the research to Mirza’s market fit for consumers.  Our overarching messaging highlighted the dire need for systemic change but also acknowledged that in the interim, Mirza can help. 

We told the story through the release of a white paper entitled,  ‘Rolling the Dice,’ that lived on Mirza’s website, positioning Mirza as thought leaders whilst driving awareness of their new tool for consumers and employers. The research and report were structured in a way that we could scale it to be an annual study, demonstrating the evolution of the Motherhood Penalty over time.

Clarity surveyed moms and moms-to-be finding that 1 in 5 are rarely asked how they are doing, so we  partnered with Postpartum Support Int’l to donate $1 for every person who pledged to ask mom how she is. The campaign spoke directly to our target audience by supporting an issue many of them experienced first hand. An NBC journalist on maternity leave even shared it on her personal Instagram account. 

From inclusion in Mother’s and Father’s Day Gift Guides to Best Bathroom Scale round ups, we delivered a consistent cadence of positive press reviews in publications we know our audience reads to highlight how the products could work for them.

Clarity conducted a deep dive to understand the user requirements and brand / product appetite, which allowed us to construct a blended approach of paid search, Shopping, and paid social to promote at a category & individual product level. We leveraged granular shopping feed management to maximise Shopping performance and made recommendations to improve CRO including  landing page updates, pricing reviews and competitor analysis.

Clarity’s approach was to construct  test approach to determine the most successful strategy and one that would inform campaigns. We ran 1-week test phases across creative, brand messaging, and targeting and leveraged the learnings from each test phase to underpin optimisation throughout the wider project.

Pinewood Atlanta Studios (now Trilith Studios) is world famous for its long legacy of churning out blockbuster hits through collaborations with the likes of Disney, Marvel, Sony and Warner Bros. In 2019, the company was poised for not just a rebrand but a reimagining, branding the company to Trilith Studios and reinventing the company as not just a production studio but a new live/work model encompassing a fully integrated production armed with its own IP as well as a walkable residential community for a new generation of creatives, entrepreneurs and storytellers – not something that had been done at this scale.

With a timing of June 2020 to unveil the new brand, Clarity began placing a series of agenda-setting features in industry trades and business, tech and real estate media introducing this new expansive live/work studio environment for creatives, while retaining the Studio’s impressive stature as a movie-making hub rivaling the biggest in the world.

Then, with the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020, production is halted across the industry and Trilith faced both a need to align on best practices and protocols to restart filming, without losing momentum of the business while the rebrand was pushed off. 

Clarity responded quickly, aggressively promoting CEO, Frank Patterson as an authority on the effects of the pandemic on production, pointing to the studio’s own stringent COVID protocols as a gold standard for the industry, announcing state of the art testing protocols and plans to reopen and restart movie and TV production, cementing their position as an industry leader and giving them tremendous visibility and credibility ahead of the delayed rebrand, which took place in October 2020.