By Risa Kleen, Account Executive, Austin
DigitalGlobe is a leading global provider of commercial high-resolution earth imagery products and services. DigitalGlobe’s target audience ranges from government agencies to commercial companies to the global consumer, and some of the most important uses of DigitalGlobe’s satellite imagery are in areas of conflict or civil unrest where governments, military, and first responders need up to date, timely information about situations on the ground. DigitalGlobe is very well-known for providing satellite imagery to Google Maps, Bing and the U.S. government, but the company is less known for providing the analysis that turns images into answers. Therefore, the Edelman team was tasked with showing the value of DigitalGlobe’s expert analysts to potential customers.
When DigitalGlobe launched a microsite providing a showcase of DigitalGlobe’s efforts monitoring extremism in Africa using predictive analytics, our team saw an opportunity to highlight DigitalGlobe’s analytics capabilities with media unfamiliar with these capabilities. Edelman reached out to Neal Ungerleider at Fast Company following the Africa microsite launch to gauge their interest in discussing how DigitalGlobe uses predictive analytics to track terrorist groups in Africa, including Boko Haram and the Lord's Resistance Army. Ungerleider was interested in speaking with a DigitalGlobe analyst to learn more about the capabilities, but also requested to supplement the article with several satellite images.
Our team formerly provided satellite imagery to media free of charge, but DigitalGlobe recently changed its policy to distribute all imagery to media through Getty with a fee of about $300. The change to the image policy was severely impacting our relationship with media that was used to receiving free imagery and had little budget to pay for images, so to help resolve the issue our team requested to add a caveat that would allow media to have free imagery if they interviewed a DigitalGlobe executive for a feature story instead of simply providing small credit to DigitalGlobe below the image. DigitalGlobe agreed to the caveat, enabling our team to provide Ungerleider with several satellite images of DigitalGlobe’s efforts monitoring Africa and move forward with the interview.
Prior to the interview, our team prepped our spokesperson, Andre Kearns, to ensure he was comfortable with DigitalGlobe’s corporate messaging that demonstrates how the company is setting itself apart by taking the vast amounts of satellite data the company collects and analyzing it with a team of geospatial analysts to predict change and behavior.
Edelman staffed a successful interview between Ungerleider and Kearns, and the resulting article was a huge success. It explained how DigitalGlobe “is best known as the company which provides much of Google Earth's satellite imagery. It also has a healthy business keeping global militaries and intelligence agencies appraised of what's happening on the ground.” The article also explains how DigitalGlobe plans to “add energy companies, utility providers, insurance agencies, and others to its client mix” by showcasing how it’s putting its predictive technology to use by “predicting theft from Nigerian oil pipelines and predicting violence from Boko Haram and other organizations.”
Additionally, the article sparked interest in DigitalGlobe’s predictive analytics capabilities from several other reporters and the Edelman team was able to secure additional hits in Venture Beat, Denver Post, Denver Business Journal and Geospatial Intelligence Forum. The full Fast Company article can be found here.
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