Sundae was tasked with managing national media relations for Creative England’s annual event CELive. At this event, the not-for-profit announce their CE50 for 2017, companies that they’ve identified as ‘ones to watch’ in their work in the digital creative space. From this list, they selected a shortlist of ten, funded by Creative England, called the Future Leaders – companies that are generating measures for impactful change using tech and digital in seamless synthesis with creativity.
There were an amazing range of companies on the CE50 and in the Future Leaders. Film credits went to Francis Lee for God’s Own Country, and Notes on Blindness from the first blind director – the production company, 104 Films, are also due to release the first film in British Sign Language, and the first feature from an autistic director. There was robotics – mind-control beer pouring robots, and 3D printed prosthetic limbs for amputees. VR played a big part, with Future Leader Evidential, who were of particular interest to media, using the technology to recreate crime scenes, rolling this out in courts across the UK.
We secured a TV slot with the technology section of Sky News, Swipe, which ran as part of their news package several times a day over a week. They ran a profile of Evidential, trying out the tech on screen, and talking about Creative England’s input into the company. We also facilitated interviews for the Guardian Small Business Network with 104 Films and Strange Thoughts, the agency responsible for the mind-controlled beer pouring; they then ran an extended announcement piece for us. The Telegraph spoke to companies including retro-game streaming service Antstream, and ran a print piece on top tips from SMEs to crack the creative sector.
We secured a piece with Creative Review, orchestrating an interview with Evidential which appeared on their home page, and CNET ran a piece around the event itself, after interviewing three of the CE50 companies. We also booked Marketing Week to chair a panel at the event, and they also interviewed Creative England CEO Caroline Norbury MBE.
In total, we created 629,785,097 opportunities to see, across 15 pieces of coverage, a campaign that met its brief of a spread of quality national coverage for an inspirational range of companies.