Launching SIBOS 2018
Sibos is an annual conference, exhibition and networking event organised by SWIFT, the global provider of financial messaging services. As the financial industry’s cooperative, SWIFT aims to bring the financial community together to work collaboratively to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest. In 2018, Sydney was chosen as the host for Sibos, returning to Australia after 12 years in conjunction with its 40th anniversary.
SWIFT was looking to make a bigger impact than usual – increasing the visibility of Sibos 2018 across Asia Pacific, Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), as well as using communications as a tool to attract delegates made up of executives, decision makers and thought leaders.
Planning & Execution
To address these objectives, LEWIS developed a content strategy that was focused on elevating the fintech conversation. It was essential to showcase why Sibos was important to Australia and its economy, given Australia’s payments and securities market infrastructures were being revamped to meet the needs of a 24/7 digital economy. At the same time, there was also a surge of local accelerators increasing their support to make Australia one of the world’s top markets for FinTech innovation and investment.
LEWIS rolled out the strategy using a targeted two-prong approach, focusing only on media interviews and partnerships to generate high impact conversations within specific time frames.
Media partnerships: Two months leading up to the event, LEWIS secured four strategic partnerships to increase the number of registrations whilst ensuring comprehensive and consistent coverage of all Sibos discussions. The partnerships were selected based on the publication’s readership and a close alignment to Sibos’ target audience. Contra-partnerships were secured with Asian Banking and Finance, Financial Standard, iTnews and The Mandarin in Australia, which consisted of eDM blasts to their database, digital advertising (banner, mrec and skyscraper ads), and print ads.
Media interviews: Six weeks leading up to the event, LEWIS focused on securing media interviews for high profile speakers and SWIFT executives on their topics of discussion (this mapped back to our content strategy) to generate a stream of high impact stories. 30% of media interviews took place in the event lead up, while the remaining 70% took place at the event with a comprehensive coverage of high-level discussions, key takeaways and economic impact.
Effectiveness / Results
LEWIS managed a total of 128 media globally, and:
- Secured 4 media partners for Sibos with 5 eDM blasts at an average of 1% click through rate
- Secured 5 interviews with national publications pre-event, and 25 interviews with ANZ and APAC media over one-week at the event
- Secured two TV interviews on-ground which featured the New South Wales Premier
- Garnered more than 220 pieces of media coverage in one week with a potential audience reach of 13,975,000 across prominent national publications including The Australian Financial Review (32 articles), The Australian (7 articles), AB+F (13 articles), The Sydney Morning Herald (3 articles), Xinhua News Agency (4 articles)
- Helped support the sign up of 8,000 delegates for the event - the highest number of delegates ever received by Sibos