SAS: Getting exposure in the financial press

The Task: How do you generate interest among the German financial media for a US software company that journalists hardly notice outside of general market overviews? The PR challenge: to find topics that make SAS interesting to editors and get them placed in the financial media.

The Implementation: Dr. Haffa & Partner and SAS worked out a list of issues that SAS customers use the software to address and related them to current political and economic topics. Against the backdrop of the ongoing discussion about healthcare and the doctors' strike in Germany, the topic we chose was "Hospitals: saving costs and ensuring quality through modern management systems." The Uniklinik Aachen (University Clinic of Aachen, or UKA) was the SAS customer selected to provide the real-world perspective.
The interviews with representatives of the UKA, most of which were conducted on-site at the clinic, were the most important asset. We contacted primarily those journalists who report on the healthcare industry, not IT journalists. An SAS expert who was positioned as an industry expert - not an IT representative - was present at all the interviews. In this way, we were able to convey both SAS's competence in the industry and the strategic relevance of the software.
In a second step, we involved SAS in the debate on the increasing cost of health insurance to the public by calculating based on ROI figures from the UKA how much the German healthcare system could save if all hospitals would use such innovative tools. We aggressively and provocatively communicated these results through a press release and interviews.

The Result: We positioned SAS in numerous key financial media outlets as an innovator for the healthcare industry. FAZ, Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Rundschau, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and numerous other daily publications published the arguments made by SAS. Furthermore, the two most important industry media and all the key IT media provided extensive coverage - SAS's core messages were repeated in unmodified form. In total, we received exposure in nearly 60 publications.