Machine health uses IOT and AI to predict and prevent industrial machine failures and improve machine performance. Augury wanted to drive demand, establish Machine Health as a new product category and become a unicorn.

In Jan 2020, most leads came from in-person events. Augury had little demand gen, brand awareness or video content, did not rank for category keywords and was only covered by trade press. MadeVivid founder Ciara Byrne was hired as head of content strategy to build Augury’s content function and program and run PR.

KEY RESULTS

• Brand Awareness: Augury's press coverage, website traffic from organic search and blog users all more than doubled in 2021.  Social traffic jumped 75%. In Oct 2021, Augury became a unicorn.

• Machine Health Category: Usage of the machine health term tripled in 2021, the Machine Health explainer video was viewed 130,000 times and the flagship Changeover video series was launched to showcase the impact of machine health on manufacturers, supply chains and consumers.

• Demand Generation: New webinars, white papers and reports drove thousands of conversions and influenced tens of millions of dollars in opportunities.

• Content Function: Built an in-house content team, a stable of freelancers and agencies, implemented a content development process and calendar and added tools like Brandfolder, Highspot and Buzzsumo. 

Pivotal teaches its agile software development methodology to developers at some of the world's largest enterprises from Volkswagen to Citibank. Many more companies run their applications on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform.  

As journalist-in-residence, MadeVivid founder Ciara Byrne wrote feature stories for Pivotal's BuiltToAdapt publication, hosted video and on-stage interviews with Pivotal clients and Pivotal CEO Rob Mee, edited practice papers by Pivotal technology leaders and consulted on the Built To Adapt Benchmark.

Explaining the PROGNOSIS Study

Roche Diagnostics developed a new blood test to predict which pregnant women would develop a serious pregnancy complication called preeclampsia. Preeclampsia affects 8.5 million women globally, accounts for 15% of preterm deliveries and 42% of maternal deaths. 
The PROGNOSIS clinical study published by the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the test could predict better than existing methods which women would not develop preeclampsia 

Roche wanted press coverage for PROGNOSIS in business and consumer media. This required translating a highly technical product and study into narratives relevant to a non-medical audience. We produced press releases, media fact sheets, an infographic and video content and created multiple storylines and pitches for different media sectors. The PROGNOSIS study was covered in publications from the Daily Mail to Parents.com. In the two weeks following the release of the study, four out of five of the most shared articles on preeclampsia were about Roche’s test.

O' Reilly Media's publications and conferences has educated a generation of technologists and entrepreneurs. Companies often work with O' Reilly to create free, sponsored eBooks. GitHub wanted an ebook on software development workflows for data scientists, an area in which there were few established best practices. MadeVivid founder Ciara Byrne interviewed a dozen O' Reilly authors, data science consultants and data scientists at companies like AirBnB, GitHub and Scotiabank to create the final ebook.

Ciara also wrote the O' Reilly ebooks Fast Data Use cases for Telecommunications (sponsored by in memory database vendor VoltDB) and Integration and the path to becoming a Digital Business (sponsored by integration tool vendor Tibco). 

Wonderbly (previously known as LostMyName) makes personalised books for kids.The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home was the story of a child lost in space. MadeVivid suggested that the company send the new book into space as part of NASA's story time from space program where astronauts read children's books with scientific themes. 

Wonderbly launched a competition where one lucky seven-year-old won the prize of sending his personalised book to the International Space station and having it read by astronaut Tim Peake. The competition was covered by many publications from the Guardian to Space.com. 

Brisk was a startup making productivity tools for salespeople. MadeVivid worked with Brisk for nine months creating marketing plans, messaging, a new website and a series of blog posts based on interviews with sales leaders, as well as generating feature story ideas and ghostwriting guest posts which appeared in Time magazine, Entrepreneur and The Next Web. 

One nation under a groove

TV programs and video games have always used music to communicate information and heighten emotion so why can't tech companies have theme tunes? Music is a stealth bonding and branding tool. A theme tune can be used as part of company rituals like meetings or events, to intro branded content like podcasts or to welcome company speakers on stage.  

MadeVivid created this theme tune for a software vendor with a confident but low-key brand. It's an original piece of music expressing the idea of iteration by starting with sparse instrumentation and gradually adding additional layers and textures.

From machine learning to the culture of software

MadeVivid founder Ciara Byrne is a techie turned tech journalist. Her work has appeared in Fast Company, Forbes, MIT Technology Review, VentureBeat and many other publications. Several of her articles have been the most upvoted article on Ycombinator's Hacker News. A complete portfolio of Ciara's journalism is available here.