Birnbach Communications Celebrates 18 Years with Highlights from 2019

Birnbach Communications celebrated its 18th anniversary in 2019, and we'd like to thank all our clients over the years. 

We love working for our clients. We enjoy getting their brief and figuring different ways to help our clients achieve their goals. There's a solving-the-puzzle aspect that sparks our creativity and passion as we develop and recommend strategic approaches. 

And we love generating positive results for our clients. We love the work of brainstorming angles, developing compelling pitches, and working with the media. Getting hits for our clients is something that never gets old for us. (We may want to score significant placements or to write strong content more than our clients.)

It's been a wild ride so far, and this year brought about a number of highlights, including: 

1. Securing placements in TechWeb and Politico for our newest client, a startup developing robots for lunar exploration.
2. Continuing to support our longest-term client, Seqens NA, a biotech we first started working for eight years ago. What we're particularly proud about Seqens is how our program continues to evolve as their needs change, helping them they stay relevant even as its business and the media world has dramatically changed over time.  
3. Writing and placing more than 15 bylined articles published in a range of publications including the Forbes Technology Council along with more than 150 blog articles on a range of topics for our clients. 
4. Having a successful ebook of our articles published by a client.
5. Writing continue to drive traffic to clients' websites, particularly because our content produced new subscribers to their blogs and newsletters. Many of those blog articles are repurposed and get published in credible industry publications. 
6. Securing dozens of media interviews that resulted in coverage and enhanced relationships for our clients.  
7. Winning new several clients in 2019 while keeping ongoing clients. 
8. Expanding our international reach with current clients based in the U.K., Germany, France and Canada.
9. Working across categories including LED lighting and clean tech, robotics, AI, space exploration, programmatic advertising, fintech, biotech and life sciences, STEM, as well as the travel and meetings industry.
10. Supporting clients at key trade shows including IMEX Frankfurt, IMEX America (in Las Vegas), Spacecom, International Astronautical Congress, LightFair and others.
11. Launching new products including a line of LED fixtures, clean tech roofing paints, and medical-alert tattoos as an alternative to medical ID jewelry.
12. Generating coverage in top-tier media including Politico, The Economist, NPR, TechCrunch and Forbes Technology Council. 
13. Helping clients win awards and recognition including being ranked as one of the largest CleanTech companies in Massachusetts and getting a client named "3 Trends at the International Roofing Expo" by Buildings magazine. 

Our work this year in media relations and thought leadership helped our clients raise awareness, supported their lead-gen program, and ensured they remain relevant and in front of current and prospective customers, investors and funders.

We can't wait to build on this year's success in 2020!

2016 TrendReport -- Celebrating 15 Years of Trends

As we have for 15 years, we've compiled a list of trends to help our clients navigate the complex and ever-changing communications landscape and engage more effectively with traditional and social media and other influencers.

Here are the first set of trends for 2016:

1. The media will have a good year. Some media outlets still haven’t figured out how to build a sustainable business model from paywalls, online ads, and native advertising (aka clickbait). But 2016 will be a good year financially with billions to be spent on political ads from the candidates and their Super PACs. Unfortunately, the good times won’t continue into 2017. Some interesting media startups, trying to bring back long-form, thoughtful coverage of news will get attention from other media sites, but will find it hard to build a sustainable business in an era that favors quick celebrity news.
2. Drug pricing will get a lot of attention. Concern about out-of-control drug pricing began in 2015, when Martin Shkreli’s Turing Pharmaceuticals increased the price of a 62-year-old drug from $13.50 a pill to $750. Drug pricing will continue generate outrage and ongoing media and political attention in 2016. The impact of more scrutiny and the possibility of new pricing regulations may make it more difficult for pharma companies, including virtual biotechs, to raise funds to invest in drug discovery. This may cause investors to sell, and may burst the biotech bubble that industry followers have been predicting.
3. Tech turns into Towers of Babel. The concept behind the Internet of Things is that all devices will be networked-enabled and be able to communicate with each other to provide us with more convenience and data to help us make better decisions. The reality is that competing vendors and proprietary platforms have set up a tech version of the Tower of Babel, and that may be a real problem for companies looking to take advantage of IoT.
4. The rise of Artificial Intelligence. Don’t worry – despite concerns from Elon Musk and other tech influencers as well as the plot points in various Hollywood movies in 2015 – self-aware AI robots aren’t going to take over humans in 2015. But the ways we can use AI and machine learning will increase in 2016, helping us make better business, personal and health decisions and helping to address security concerns.
5. Whither unicorns and their business models? Unicorns – startups valued at upwards of $1 billion – were big in 2015. Expect coverage in 2016 that questions whether the unicorn bubble will burst. This will be true not just of privately held startups but also of publicly held companies (that represent the next stage of unicorn development) that fail to fully monetize their businesses. Twitter and Yahoo! – that means you and other social media platforms that fail to live up to financial expectations.

Look for more trends over the next week. And please let us know if you feel we got things right or wrong. 

Instead of updating TrendWatch once a year, we plan to look at trends twice in 2016. To subscribe to our TrendWatch newsletter, please email us at TrendWatch [at] birnbachcom.com.

Wall St. Journal & Boston Globe Validate Biotech Bubble Trend

The validation is coming in fast and furious regarding our biotech bubble prediction. We said:

Stock market and the biotech bubble. 2014 will be marked by concerns about the health of the stock market. Of the different sectors, rising biotech shares will generate growing concern of a biotech bubble. That concern will affect all parts of the industry, especially startups as VCs start getting nervous about their portfolios. Implications: There’s not much publicly held companies can do – except, as a Forbes reporter once told us, have you company “do better…and boost its share price.” We just think it’s important to understand how editors allocate their resources (reporters’ time and the outlets’ news hole).

The Wall St. Journal validated that with an article, "Hot New Biotech Knows Roller-Coaster Feeling" and the Boston Globe validated it with "After boom, 2014 repeat for biotech is uncertain."

We know that talking about bubbles can take on a certain air on inevitability, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. We hope we're wrong in this case.

Birnbach Communications' Top Predictions for 2014, Part VI: General News Stories

Here's our list of general news stories we expect to see in 2014.

1. More interest in workplace diversity. Spurred by SNL's hiring of two black women comedians (at press time SNL had not hired any black comic/actress this season but we expect they will hire two black actresses), we think there will more attention paid to diversity in TV shows and movies, and that this could lead to a larger discussion about diversity in the non-celebrity-filled workplace. 
2. Growing Hispanic influence. This is a demographics story, one that will get mentioned a lot in the run up to the midterm elections, especially if immigration reform gets discussed. 
3. Real estate market. Along with the retail sector, the media likes to look at real estate to determine how the economy is really going.  Expect a look at renters v. owners, and the impact of housing prices across the country. We also expect more interest in urban real estate as companies will say goodbye to the 'burbs to attract qualified employees. 
4. The new Thanksgiving tradition is shopping on Thanksgiving.  As much as we don't like it, from here on in, the Christmas shopping season will probably start Thanksgiving Day. Implications: This changes retail stories told in Q3. 
5. Stock market and the biotech bubble. 2014 will be marked by concerns about the health of the stock market. Of the different sectors, rising biotech shares will generate growing concern of a biotech bubble. That concern will affect all parts of the industry, especially startups as VCs start getting nervous about their portfolios. Implications: There’s not much publicly held companies can do – except, as a Forbes reporter once told us, have you company “do better…and boost its share price.” We just think it’s important to understand how editors allocate their resources (reporters’ time and the outlets’ news hole).

Tomorrow we'll issue our list of ongoing (continuing from 2013) news stories we expect to see.

Let us know if you agree or disagree. Click here for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV or Part V.

Track Record for Predictions for 2013, Part III

Here's Part III of our report card:

• The three most important aspects of the future of tech in 2013: mobile, mobile, mobile.  We may have overstated things when we said to look for the rise of a new CMO – not chief marketing officer but chief mobility officers – but mobile continues to be important. Grade: A-.
• Forecast: cloud is everywhere. From predicting that more companies will rely on the cloud for access to proprietary information in 2013 (a notion that would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier) to expecting a few outages this year but that they won't have much impact on the cloud's momentum, we nailed this one. Grade: A.
• Bring Your Own Device to the office (BYOD) will be go mainstream. Our main prediction was that BOYD would be so mainstream that that “the media will be able to refer to it without having to spell it out.” And that turned true. Grade: A.
• Mobile search: Still important but we probably overstated it in terms of media coverage, particularly about mobile search firms competing with Google. Grade: B.
• Jobs, unemployment, and recruiting and the need for specially-trained employees for specific industries will be a big story. The Boston Globe validated this with a story in April "Demand rockets for visas to bring in foreign workers." There were other articles, too. Grade: B+.
• STEM will continue to be a push by businesses. Coverage about STEM continued in 2013, including recent editorials in the New York Times about the need to attract more girls into STEM. Grade: A.
• App burnout: This continues to generate some coverage but mostly in the form of concerns about being over-connected. Grade: C+.
• Robotics will generate buzz. We said to expect that advances in robotics will generate coverage in even the more staid business publications (beyond Wired and Fast Company).  We saw some coverage in the New York Times. Grade: B+.
• Biotech consolidation. Mostly there was concern about a possible bubble among publicly held biotechs but that’s not the same thing as consolidation (even though that could be the side effects of a bursting bubble). Grade: C-. 
• Regulatory changes will continue to impact financial services firms. We said this would be an important story that might not get a lot of attention because “the work involved is so technical.”  We were right about that.  Grade: B.

We'll post Part IV tomorrow. Also check out Part I and Part II.

Birnbach Communications' Top Predictions for 2013, Part VI

Here are more trends to consider:

·         Biotech consolidation. The biotech sector is undergoing significant change from a variety of pressures that include the continued high cost of drug development and structural pressures from ObamaCare. We've seen a lot of consolidation among Big Pharma (which should be known as Bigger Pharma) and the rise of virtual biotechs, shifts in research funding from Big Pharma to VCs. Increased regulation and scrutiny will make drug development more complex (i.e., expensive) but the FDA is also focused on spurring development of more cost-effective alternatives. Either way, expect that the biotech is evolving, and will continue to evolve over the next two years.

·         Regulatory changes will continue to impact financial services firms. The challenge will be staying ahead of the changes. New banking and financial regulations will generate coverage, as does articles that examine the potential implications. But the daily work of how to meet those regulations rarely ever get the media's attention because the work involved is so technical. The lack of media coverage doesn't mean that how companies deal with regulatory change isn't a compelling trend.

Let us know if you agree or disagree. Check back tomorrow for additional predictions or click here for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, or Part V.