News

Blockchain has become a buzzword over the past year, with more and more major companies discovering what it is and how they can use this new technology to their benefit. Our team has always encouraged clients to experiment with new and innovative technology, which is why we’re proud to announce the team are working with Heritage, a project created within A³, the Silicon Valley outpost of Airbus.

When the A³ team approached us with the Heritage project, a blockchain-enabled donation platform, we were more than excited! Our team members have investments in cryptocurrency like Ethereum and Bitcoin, as we sincerely believe blockchain has the potential to impact the world through decentralization, smart-contracts, security and transparency. Heritage is just the beginning of the ways blockchain can be used for social good.

The Heritage project is focused on assisting charities and nonprofits onboarding blockchain to allow for a more secure, efficient, and transparent donation process. Dynamo was brought on to support the Heritage team with media relations, event support, and partnership development. The account is being managed by Dynamo’s San Francisco team, which has experience leading projects related to robotics, wearables, AI and has a keen interest in blockchain technology.

Naresh Shah, COO of A³, commented: “We’re looking forward to working with Dynamo as A³ enters this new space. We rely on great partnerships and Dynamo’s expertise in emerging industries will be a great asset as we continue to push boundaries in the blockchain industry and tech industry overall.”

What excites us about Heritage is the potential it has to make an impact. Our team believes in the potential of blockchain technology, and we are eager to apply our expertise in guiding the project to success.

The team will also help support Heritage on collaborations with other projects within the blockchain space as they continue to develop the donation platform. We’re very excited about the great work the Heritage team is doing and look forward to continuing to support as they use this nascent technology for good!

We are so excited to announce that we’re now working with British bag and accessories brand, KNOMO, to lead the business’ ongoing media relations going into 2017. Designed to cater to the workers of the future who are increasingly carrying out their day jobs on the move, KNOMO has pioneered a stylish ecosystem of bags and accessories that perfectly blends technology and fashion.

Kicking off with the announcement of KNOMO’s £3 million funding round, Dynamo will be continuing media relations for consumer and fashion audiences, with a digital and technology focus. Here’s what Howard Harrison, the CEO at KNOMO, had to say:

“Dynamo, with their proven experience in the consumer sector and technology expertise were the clear choice as we came to select an agency. Their team, as an extension of our own, will help us to take KNOMO to the next level of awareness in fashion and consumer tech industries.”

The KNOMO team will be led by Erin Rigby, Senior Account Manager here at Dynamo. She added, “KNOMO is leading the way in creating accessories for the workers of the future. They are not only making an impact here in London but across the pond in the US now. We’re pleased to be working with KNOMO at such an exciting time for them”.

Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming KNOMO features!

It’s always a pleasure to be back in Texas, particularly when there’s a tech event to attend, so we were thrilled to attend SXSW with our client Makeblock this year.

Austin has, for the last few years, been emerging as a solid favorite for start ups in the tech industry, and it isn’t difficult to see why. Low taxes and cost of living, a Silicon Valley culture, and a very open and friendly community make it a haven for tech lovers. (I’m personally a huge fan of Austin hospitality, and I’m already looking forward to my next fish taco fix!).

Having the huge draw of SXSW brings Austin to the forefront of the music, film, and tech industries during the month of March, with SXSW Interactive offering attendees the chance to see some of the most exciting innovations in robotics, design, IoT and more.

The first day of SXSW Interactive played host to the ‘Create’ exhibition, and of course featured a keynote by none other than Barack Obama, who called on leaders in tech to join him to “start coming up with new platforms, new ideas across disciplines, and across skill sets to solve some of the big problems we’re facing today.”

Interactive Experiences

One big takeaway from Interactive was the importance of, well… takeaways. Companies such as Sparkfun had a station where people could create and personalize their own scrolling LED lanyards, which were hugely popular. Our very own Makeblock offered people the chance to have their doodles and sketches burnt with a lasered onto wood blocks, and another stand had an entire booth with furniture that you could color in and draw all over. Needless to say, I spent a little too much time on that one during my breaks, and came back with a neckerchief covered in my garish scribbles.

PR relevance, not trendiness

This got me thinking – what experiences or takeaways should we be providing to people that delivers more than a simple USB or business card? Much like a lot of current VR campaigns, companies can often miss the mark by shoehorning a trend into what they deliver, as opposed to it being intrinsic to their brand. Basic stationery from an advanced technology company, a keychain from a robotics manufacturer, a tote bag from a mobile game – what is the relevance? These things are a nice to have, but the opportunity to excel is in giving people something they want, could find useful, and will remember your brand for.

We’re delighted to learn today that Dynamo UK has been picked as one of Europe’s top creative PR consultancies by the venerable Holmes Report. The judges state:

“Dynamo emerged last year to take third spot in the Holmes Report’s Global Creative Index ranking, thanks to an impressive awards haul for such clients as M3D and 3Doodler. Much of that is down to the agency’s sophisticated understanding of crowdfunding.”

We’re delighted to be recognised again for our creativity, something that’s been showing through yet again for our campaigns with clients such as Nvidia and Attraction Tix.

We’re looking forward to the awards ceremony on May 25th where we’ll find out whether we’ve picked up gold!

It’s been an incredible and fun year at Dynamo PR.

Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve been up to over the last 12 months…

We hosted the world’s first micro-pig picnic this summer for Yelp

The #londonpignic has been filled with pigs education, pig games and piggybacks. It’s quite the Saturday night. pic.twitter.com/gDtChCqRmz

— YelpLondon! (@yelplondon) June 20, 2015

On the theme of animals, Bathrooms.com launched a nationwide search for a duckling bath tester:

We raised more than $20 million for 40 crowdfunding projects, including Neeo’s smart remote smashing $1.5m on Kickstarter earlier this year:

AttractionTix.co.uk answered the question for you CanIBringMySelfiestick.com:

We took to the red carpet to launch the Electric Jukebox at BAFTA with Alesha:

And to top it off, we climbed Everest with NVIDA showcasing their GeForce technology at an intimate virtual reality event:

Fancy being in our round up next year? Just drop us a line and who knows what could happen.

We’re delighted to announce our latest client, Canonical. We’ll be working with them to bring Ubuntu, one of the biggest names in open source software, to a wider audience.

The leading OS for PC, tablet, phone and cloud, Ubuntu’s open source software platform is used in consumer and B2B areas. Often used as an alternative operating system to Windows or Mac, Ubuntu is the world’s most popular open source OS for both development and deployment, from the data centre to the cloud.

Dynamo will advise on events and opportunities that highlight Ubuntu’s many use cases to a consumer audience and focus on expanding awareness of the number of different platforms it runs on.

Caroline Tarbett, PR and AR Manager at Canonical, said:
“We picked Dynamo because they nailed our brief, understood our challenges and most closely match us in terms of culture and outlook. We have a huge opportunity to bring the Ubuntu brand to a broader community of consumers and Dynamo is the agency best suited to help us achieve this.”

Adding to our growing list of audio clients, Dynamo have been  appointed by Chicago based audio company Gramovox, to handle the launch of the their Floating Record™ vertical turntable.

The Gramovox Floating Record™ is a high-performance turntable that plays records vertically through built-in, dynamic full-range speakers. Prior to their vertical turntable, last year Gramovox launched a Bluetooth Gramophone, dubbed the ‘modern gramophone’, which they also launched on Kickstarter.

Peter Bowles, co-CEO and co-founder at Dynamo PR, comments:

“Working with products that are innovative and have the wow factor get us excited, and who doesn’t secretly want a floating vinyl player in their home. Pavan is a real entrepreneur and his creative spirit resonates with everything we do at Dynamo, and we’re looking forward to working closely with him.”

Bapu, co-founder and CEO of Gramovox added:

“Our first Kickstarter campaign raised a quarter of a million dollars and we wanted to raise more. Dynamo’s track record is brilliant and with their support we’ve already achieved far beyond what we had ever hoped and love their creativity and passion for our project.”

Other recent Dynamo audio clients include Native Union, AUMEO and HTC, launching the Gramohorn II.

From digital marketing meet-ups and conferences to PR events, the term ‘PR SEO’ is increasingly a topic I hear people talking about.

Only a few years ago there used to be a budget scrum between the various elements of the marketing mix. With drastic changes happening to the Google Algorithm over the last few years the nature of how SEO needs to be executed has shaken up both the practice of and the type of the agencies that provide these services. Hybrid consultancies are on the rise and the consensus seems to be that it is necessary to blend PR with SEO in order to safely optimize on Google in 2015 and beyond.

Having worked in house in a digital marketing role and now agency side at Dynamo I can see from both perspectives why PR and SEO go hand in hand.

To put it simply, PR builds, crafts and helps to give brands more exposure to the public. For sometime SEOs have understood that Google gives preference to brands which are popular, as can be seen below.

If you take a look at the key ranking factors Google uses to order who’s hot and who’s not, you can see that six out of the nine major factors can be influenced by what we would think of as traditional PR activity. With a little tweaking of the ‘old fashioned’ PR processes, the combination of PR and search marketing can be further enhanced. For example prioritising press lists not just on the publications circulation and target audience but also considering the SEO value the client will receive from the publication.

Reporting in the PR industry has until recently revolved around AVEs, but the online metrics that Google Analytics and reporting tools like Majestic offer have a much wider reach in understanding RIO. Pulling data and figures is all well and good, but it is only of use if you can tie this into measurable KPIs. Knowing that an article from E-consultancy drove 100 visitors, 20 of which then bought your product, is something that circulation alone just can’t do. Equally, understanding that a specific PR campaign moved rankings for key search terms from page two to page 1 is highly valuable and impacts the spend clients allocate to PPC, which is directly quantifiable in monetary terms.

PR campaigns like bathroom sweets where we created the world’s first bathroom made entirely from chocolate for Bathrooms.com is an example of how traditional PR can have outstanding results by utilising SEO tactics.

The campaign built over 50 links of DA 40 and above in sectors spanning from food, interiors, lifestyle and design; capturing the attention of audiences across the UK , Europe and in the even the USA.

Google algorithm updates, like Panda and Penguin mean a squeaky-clean link building strategy is the only way to ensure the hard work and investment you are putting into your PR and SEO now really goes the distance and provides long-term ROI.

This multidiscipline knowledge base can also help inform PR strategies too, determining what type of articles, publications and activities your key audiences are most receptive too.