Bospar’s Sam Brancato Shares the Secret Sauce Behind Crafting Successful Surveys
Proprietary data is to top-tier media what honey is to bees. No one understands that better than Bospar Senior Account Director Sam Brancato.
Having crafted and executed high-level campaigns in healthcare and tech, including a particularly memorable one that leaned into Taylor Swift’s considerable economic impact, Sam has seen firsthand how proprietary data can become a story only one company can tell.
In this Expert Insights interview, Sam reveals how to design a survey that reporters will actually cover by surfacing unexpected and significant findings they can’t get anywhere else.
Why are surveys and proprietary data so valuable for clients in PR?
Proprietary data makes or breaks a client’s ability to get into tier-1 media. My top media hits are linked on my LinkedIn; around 90% of the tier-1 hits in the last two years have included proprietary data. That data helped to better tell the story of whatever the reporter was writing about that day.
Providing expert commentary via newsjacking can lead a reporter to cover your company or client. But a company needs commentary that’s unique; data can be the differentiator.
That’s what makes proprietary data a game changer: No other company can offer it to a reporter, which makes the reporter even more likely to include that company in a story.
This is especially valuable now, as tier-1 media is changing, with LLMs scraping publications. Getting a brand cited in AI-generated answers means they need to appear in tier-1 outlets as often as possible, with credible backlinks to their website. Data seems to be the best way to get through.
What separates a survey that generates headlines from one that gets ignored?
Pithy data, and findings that are large numbers and show something that’s contrary to what’s typically believed, tend to generate headlines. Not-safe-for-work data points can also catch a reporter’s eye. For example, we collaborated with a client on a survey about inappropriate things people have done during a Zoom call. PCMag was one of the media outlets that covered the news. Even if a reporter is not already working on a story, they may find a data point like that interesting enough to build a story around it. That’s our best-case scenario.
Delivering bigger numbers, making bolder statements and uncovering things that are contradictory to what’s typical? That’s the kind of data that reporters can sink their teeth into.
One trick to finding gold in mountains of survey results: splitting the data by generation, gender, location or political affiliation. This enables us to build narratives around, and reporters to create stories based on, how results compare or contrast for males vs. females or millennials vs. Gen Z. Even if the overall results for a survey question are closer to 50-50, when it’s split by Gen Z, it may be 75-25.
How do you identify a survey topic worth exploring?
This is contingent on which audience PR is going after. Whatever it ends up being, we have to work backward from where the client’s audience is. This takes a lot of client collaboration to hear what they want, where they want to end up and what would be a win for them.
Once we figure out the client’s target headlines and outlets, we can go from there.
We also think about what’s upcoming over the next six months. When putting a survey together, we may target a major holiday, as we did for this survey that Forbes covered, or an upcoming event that we want to tie data to.
One of our clients was hosting a big conference, and they wanted a state of customer experience report. For that survey, we asked questions on subtopics they planned to talk about at the conference.
We asked the general public for their opinions. We asked marketers very similar questions. Then we explored where they didn’t match up. We added value by providing recommendations on how those groups can better align, so that marketers can be better at their jobs. When crafting that survey, we looked at where we thought the most friction would be, then we expanded further.
Not all the survey data made it into the final report. But we used it in additional pitching efforts. No data went to waste.
How do you decide what questions to ask? What types of questions tend to produce the most media-friendly findings?
This requires a lot of negotiation. Clients have questions they want to ask for their own goals, whether that’s marketing materials or internal conversations. PR thinks about it from the standpoint of what will resonate from a media perspective. We have to find the middle ground.
Solidifying dream headlines before getting into the questions is a good strategy. Then PR can map it back and say, “This question will likely give us a strong data point connected to this headline, so this is why we should pursue it that way.”
For our own 10th anniversary survey, Bospar found that 48% of people 65 and older said a month-long unpaid vacation to Europe would make them work harder at their jobs. Here’s the question that produced that response: What unexpected perk would your office be able to give you so that you would work more diligently at your job? Potential answers included: a month-long unpaid vacation to Europe and an office dog. Because the answers were unexpected, they led to a strong data point that became the headline in a Newsweek story.
Once the results are in, how do you identify the story/angles reporters will care about?
The first step is to analyze the full completes and note which ones more than two-thirds of respondents answered a certain way, or which only 25% did. Anything closer to 50-50 won’t do much for PR.
Next, craft a narrative through that. I’ll go through the main results, then the different data splits, like generational, gender, income or political affiliation, to see where we’re sitting. Once sorted, I pull out the data points most strongly connected to the questions.
Identifying the larger story the data points to is also critical, especially if you’re publishing a report based on the survey findings.
What content can you create to maximize a survey’s value?
Survey data is viable for up to 12 months, so it can go everywhere.
Clients can run specific social media campaigns based on the data. We can also work it into a spokesperson’s talking points during a media interview. We’d select the appropriate data points depending on the story they’re being used as a source for. Data can even turn into a podcast episode where a client can invite a guest to discuss the findings.
You can also use it for a lot of owned content. A press release or a report is standard, but survey data can also be employed in blog posts or to support a byline’s argument.
Additionally, the PR team can go back and do year-over-year data comparisons. This lets us repurpose the previous year’s data if we ask some of the same questions the following year.
When should a client use their proprietary data vs. opting for a survey?
If a client has their own proprietary data, PR can do a lot with it as well. We had a client that helped set dynamic pricing for Airbnbs and similar short-term rentals. Any time we had a media opportunity related to that, they were able to quickly source a data point for us to use. The result was steady top-tier coverage in outlets including CNBC, USA Today, Travel + Leisure and Bloomberg.
If clients can source their own data consistently, we can bypass the survey. But the survey comes in handy when our partners can’t do that regularly or quickly.
What survey are you most proud of and why?
I’m most proud of our Bospar 10th anniversary campaign.
Anniversary campaigns don’t typically generate coverage unless they mark the anniversaries of Fortune 500 or Fortune 100 companies.
Ours generated a lot of media pickup with stories in such outlets as Forbes, Barron’s and Business Insider.
