Overview: FICO (formerly Fair Isaac Corporation) provides millions of scores per year to both consumers and lenders, making the FICO Score the most widely used score by banks. FICO’s company-wide imperative was to drive adoption of their new score – FICO 8 – among major lenders. To support this initiative, Access needed to secure positive coverage in both business and trade press to illustrate the critical need for banks to upgrade their analytics.

Challenge: In a tough economy, many banks neither had the funds nor the wherewithal to update their technology systems to assess risk. FICO’s job was to convince lenders that a technological upgrade was critical in order to stay competitive in a comeback economy. To do so, Access needed to drive the FICO B2B conversation “out of the trenches,” engaging business media with a business story to reach the C-Suite (i.e. the decision makers) at major lending institutions.

The Plan: Access created a refined, all-in-one forum (a media dinner) to engage stakeholders with cohesive corporate narrative, communicating FICO’s game-changing business value as it provided its customers with state of the art tools to pinpoint risk. The dinner provided all the necessary ingredients (spokesperson, analyst and backup research), essentially hand-delivering a great story to key media targets. In addition to giving the FICO point of view to a room full of press, FICO also delivered results to a FICO study as well as the announcement of a new product, delivering a menu of options for coverage depending on the journalist’s beat.

Success Metrics: Coverage from a few key journalists was syndicated widely, garnering 154 million media impressions with more than 100 articles in publications such as the Associated Press, Time, American Banker, Bloomberg and The New York Times. Top tier coverage penetrated down to the blogs and the trades, who offered commentary or follow up posts on the FICO survey and product news.