At the 27th annual PRWeek Awards, Bospar won Best in Financial Communications for its campaign with fintech platform Smarty, “How Smarty Owned the Tariff Moment.” The campaign prevailed over finalists that included Citi and a major IPO communications campaign, showing how strategic storytelling can help emerging financial technology companies compete with some of the largest global institutions.
In this episode, Eric Chemi sits down with Bospar’s VP of Media Relations, Brent Shelton, to discuss how Bospar’s creative storytelling helped Smarty go toe-to-toe with some of the largest global institutions.
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I’m Eric Chemi, and this is Politely Pushy. Welcome to Politely Pushy, folks. I’m your host, Eric Chemi. My guest today, internal, Brent Shelton, here from
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Bospar to talk about a big award that you guys won for one of your premier clients. Tell me tell me all about what what happened with Smarty and how did you guys win this award and and you know, excited to hear about that today. >> Yeah. So, uh, Smarty, if you’re not
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familiar, um, they’re not they they’re in the affiliate environment. So, they host, uh, cash back and coupons, promo codes, that type of thing from about a thousand different, uh, retailers. Um, and global, I mean, you can access their website from anywhere. Uh, mostly
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concentrated in the US. And then they have a subscription um offering uh that like doubles that cash back and it provides a bunch of very exclusive uh want to call them rebates for all different kinds of things just depending on you know what your interests are.
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>> You used to work for like Ebates or Rakuten or similar to that kind of old business. >> Very similar. Yeah. Um the subscription side of it is was new and it’s something uh the places that I worked we talked about but yeah it never never really progressed because those companies
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became you know big giant companies and they didn’t need that subscription based uh money. Income. >> So who so who won the award? Bospar won the award? Smarty won the award? And what is it’s a PR week financial communications award. It just happened a
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couple weeks ago right? Yeah, it was just maybe a month ago. Um, it’s awards season, so Smarty actually won several awards. That was kind of the pinnacle of the moment, winning that one. It’s kind of a coveted award. You know, we got little Smarty coupon site here going up
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against like major credit cards and major fintech. So, uh, it was quite an accomplishment, you know, and so really this I’ll just talk about the campaign a little bit. So, this campaign was built on the overarching thing it was built on identifying macroeconomic shifts um before they
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fully materialize. That’s the best way to explain it. And in this case, it was tariffs. Um so late 2024 and December, you know, there was a lot of rhetoric. Trump administration was going to come in, enforce all these tariffs. I mean, it’s so that the signals were going off.
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if we recognize that and we’re like, “Hey, how can we position Smarty, you know, to kind of be on top of this thing” and, you know, and if it works, you know, we’ve created a way to really help consumers that um you know, we didn’t know what their behavior was going to
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be. We just assume that, you know, it’s never good when prices go up and and it hits your pocketbook. So, that was the assumption. Um and so we decided to uh field a survey of research, you know, ahead of that policy implementation, you know, to to
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capture sentiment rather than, you know, hindsight reactions. Whose original idea was that? Was that your idea, someone else on the team, someone from Smarty? Like how do you guys collaborate to because there’s a lot of ideas, right? A lot of ideas and how do you
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>> Well, I execute on one that people agree on. I want to take a 100% but being the senior uh you trust the media lead on the team uh I watch a lot more news I’m sure um and I you know very interested in always watching politics and how that affects
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especially consumers with my background um so way ahead of it brought it to the team uh we put together a plan then we brought it to the client and the client was all junked all over it um but you know really The the big key here was that we were, you know, the timing
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um really became the strategic unlock for this thing. You know, by the time tariffs were uh formerly announced, what was it? January 2025, they didn’t waste any time. I think it was a week into the administration. You know, so we were able to react.
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um you know it was already and we were already positioned as the leading voice because we came out with our news as soon as that happened. It got picked up by CNBC um really quickly within two weeks. Uh that we were part of a a big story. Jess, shout out to Jessica Dickler.
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Worked with her a lot uh at CNBC and she writes fabulous pieces and she’s just always interested in in that kind of interesting um data that looked, you know, natural and not super fabricated. Um, so yeah, there was just a perfect marriage and the thing just took off from there.
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>> How did you stand out though because there’s so many companies in terms of clients, so many agencies, so many media outlets, so many datadriven survey driven stories, you know, all of these kinds of things. What what made this special that it stood out versus
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all the other noise out there? >> Well, I think, so a couple things really made it stand out. you know, at its core, it’s proprietary data set. Um, so that’s coming from Smarty. Smarty owns it. Uh, we did have a partner uh with Propeller Insights. Um they they always do a great job
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uh help helping us especially with the programming, but there the foresight was okay if tariffs are going to happen and they they’re going to come out um knowing this administration you know this is going to be an ongoing thing. Um, and as the year goes on, pocketbooks
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get tighter, really as we understand, you know, how how these tariffs are going to affect our daily lives because right away we’re not going to see it until it hits supply chain and things like that. Um, so we actually built the survey that way as you know, we thought
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about how can we ask questions and kind of build this up. So, by by the end of the survey, if you’re a consumer taking it, you’re you’re just getting more anxiety because, you know, we were asking questions like um we actually did a second survey to
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keep the campaign going. We were asking questions like, you know, do you think the administration is going to do this? Uh how, you know, how does this uh how do you feel about what’s happening right now? We were able to the first time through just really kind of see what
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their behavior was going to be financially if it happened. It did. So the second time through was really the key of the survey where you know we could get them to react to policy uh as it was happening and that’s that’s what really made it stand out like no one
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else was doing thinking about it that way. And then you mentioned the CNBC article. There must have been many more placements than that. How what was the roll out and the cadence of how many other placements you were getting? >> Well, so it’s kind of the way we built
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the survey. Um, you know, we were really wanted to measure generic economic sentiment of consumers and and really wanted to kind of do it as it happened, you know, like that behavior under pressure. So, you know, we asked things like, you know, what are they going to buy
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ahead of the tariffs if they happen? What would they delay on? And that, you know, the things that they were willing to delay on, you know, could gave us, you know, some legs for the survey. And then, you know, how that spending would adapt, you know, in real time. Um, so,
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for example, we got findings like, uh, half of Americans, 49% I think, uh, were planning to buy less. So that’s half that’s a pretty big number. Um and that was out of the gate. You know, uh another four and 10, you know, are switching to cheaper brands. And you
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know, if you’re a retail reporter who talks about the Amazons of the world most of the time, you know, now all of a sudden, what they’re they’re switching away to cheaper brands. I guess you could throw Amazon in that in that lump on some things, but you know, for some
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of the more luxury brands, you know, they’re they were in trouble. So, there’s a story idea right there just based on on data. Um, another one that really took off was like half of Americans said that they were going to consider secondhand options. So, now all
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of a sudden, yeah, buying used is a thing again, right? Right. Um so yeah it just really it gave media I mean from a media perspective I think it gave them a a clear you know like human centric narrative about tariffs like as more like kitchen table stakes uh that they
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they weren’t able to just get I guess they could go out and interview folks uh but the I mean this data also served really well for broadcast I want to say at the end of the day you know we had about a thousand pieces of coverage. Um, in the first three months, we had 65
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pieces of top tier coverage. So, the numbers came out as well as you could expect when you do a survey. And when you planned for a long hall like this, you know, rather than a single moment like Earth Day, not to pick on that, but you know, we’ve done surveys for Earth
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Day and it happens, you know, April 22nd, >> you get about 12 hours of news coverage there and that’s it. >> Yeah, exactly. just say those numbers again because they were so powerful. Talk about the number of placements in top tier coverage you got. >> Yeah. So it was 65 plus um
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>> in top tier. Mhm. >> Um, and so one of the cool things about that was because it was a survey and we one of the things that we do in a campaign, especially when we’re doing it with Smarty is they’re low budget basically because they’re small, you know, so they can’t
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do like a business wire release over and over. But what we can do is we can do press releases every time we put out a small data set. And that was one of the things that really charged the campaign. we would post the the uh press release on their site. So that gave us some
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credibility. Uh we weren’t just saying this. Um and then all of a sudden we became a thing where that you know it’s like the perfect sales job in the world isn’t uh making cold calls, right? It’s someone calling you saying, “Hey, what’s next?” And that’s that’s kind of what
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happened. That was that was the moment where I was like, “All right, I’m I’m back in my old business again.” Then how much of new media, social media, all the new things that you know are are not part of the traditional kind of 20 years ago PR playbook were you taking advantage of
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here as opposed to just you know what we’re normally familiar with the hey we’ve got some good stories we pitch it out we work with a reporter we get it in a traditional publication we know that what about but what the rest of it did you need to do that did you do it social
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media podcasts etc >> yeah so uh this particular particular account um isn’t connected with our social team. Uh they they do it in-house, but they, you know, and I I don’t want to speak for the exact numbers, but they just said all across the board, you know, the the signups,
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the engagement, and everything that was happening, it was hard for them to keep up with. Um what what I do know is from the media results, uh which was pretty amazing. I think I have it here. So, we saw a 35% year-over-year increase in Q1 just in signups. So, 35% increase
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in signups um year-over-year for them is that could be, you know, 100,000 brand new customers. >> Right. Right. >> Very short period of time or they at least they signed up, right? Um, and we saw a 19% spike in signups just from March 1st to April 1st. Um, and that’s
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that’s when the tariffs, like the news of the tariffs, like the media and all the traction was really starting to hit. We were starting to understand, okay, what does this mean? Well, you’ve got uh 20% tariffs for everyone in the world. Um and you know some uh countries that
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supply a lot of goods to the US like China um they were threatened with like what 50, 60% tariffs, which is unimaginable. >> Uh but that you know it created a scare um so right around the time that that was happening um it was it was amazing like the data that we had was almost
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kind of growing with the news cycle as as we all learned about it. Um, another really cool thing that happened and really important now and one of the reasons why, you know, we do a lot of press releases because in in our new in our old SEO world, press releases didn’t
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matter that much, but in the new geo world, you know, for AI search um, and that kind of authority, they matter a lot. So, I want to say we put out right around eight press releases for this, just one a month really. um as >> but on a real like businesswire kind of
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thing. You said they don’t have the budget for that or just press release on their website. Where’s this press release going? >> We it’s on their website but we call it a press release. So as we’re getting these back links back to the press release then that’s that’s when you know
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the chat bots notice that and give it a higher authority. I think out of those 65 uh top tier placements that we got, we had we had more than 50 backlinks. Um and uh we would send all the backlinks instead of sending them to the Smarty homepage as
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much as we could, we would send them to the press release. So that was part of the >> So that’s a tweak that maybe we wouldn’t have done five years ago. Maybe we would go to the homepage instead of the press release link. >> Yeah, the I mean the old way of doing
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things you know for SEOs press releases are crap for SEO so you don’t you don’t send anyone to the press release unless oh well obviously sometimes you need that uh credibility so if you you’re putting on business wire that helps but in this case you know the numbers had
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already taken off we Smarty was getting known to the media of being a provider for this certain instance. Um, the other great thing was because we got this huge head start, you know, we were able to sit down, do intake with the CEO, get his take as soon as we got the results back,
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we went over it all and we got quotes, we had ready made quotes, we were ready to newsjack at any moment. as soon as some new tariff was out, you know, we had we had a statement and um he wasn’t luckily u his name is Bippin Porwall, very smart man, uh wasn’t wasn’t afraid
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to talk about uh at least how the admin, why the administration’s doing this and how it’s, you know, uh affecting consumers. And then I know you gave the the measurements in terms of here’s how they had the 35% increase in signups and all that, but can you say that that was
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because of the PR push or would it have happened anyway? Right. >> Well, it’s a it’s kind of a you know, retail sales and things like that are fairly cyclical and the big events, Memorial Day, and you could say President’s Day, I guess, is like one of the first big sales events, but other
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than that, there’s not a whole lot going on in the beginning of the year. We just got past the holidays, >> right? Christmas is done. Yeah. >> people tend, you know, they’ve blew their their money on Christmas, you know, created created debt. Uh so they’re
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they’re not out there usually buying at the first part of the year, at least uh in in Smarty’s world and what they represent. So, I mean, we can never say 100% Smarty could be doing search advertising, too. you know, they’ve got a little bit of a budget there and they
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do they do their own uh SEO tactics and things like that. So, I can tell you from past years though, these numbers, you know, crushed it. Uh they were they were records for the company, >> right? Like the one difference was this number sticking out compared to the past
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matching up with this big PR opportunity that that seems to be correlated. >> Yeah. I mean I Well, they loved it so much that they allowed the spend for a second survey, >> right? And and how did that work? Did that see similar success? >> Yeah. Um it actually
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>> it actually worked really well. That’s when we knew we had a real campaign and not just a short moment, right? Able to carry this thing. >> I’m I’m still sharing tariffs data as it, you know, as it is relevant to the news cycle. Yeah, it’s still sort of
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trickling along here in a way like it’s tariffs, it’s not. We’re off, we’re on, the Supreme Court, it’s like like I assume there’s still some value, but probably not as much as a year ago. >> Well, and that’s, you know, so that kind of the way that our administration does
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stuff. I think they were calling it taco. Uh when he would kind of make the threat and then pull back and make the threat and then pull back. uh those actually created huge moments for us to insert the data because every time there’d be a big scare our data would be
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important to the media to you know really support those kind of stories I want to say and you know the stories weren’t about scaring people as much as at at the end of the day where we came out of it really well is we were >> we were teaching people not only what
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Smarty does but you know we were giving good advice on on how people could navigate the tariffs, you know, and still save money. >> Now, how did you beat all these giant companies to win industry awards? What what is the award-winning process now in this case when you’ve got huge budget
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agencies, huge budget clients trying to get these same awards? >> Yeah. So, I think really it was our execution was probably pretty impressive, right? We uh if I broke it down to like four things, I would say, you know, we anticipated a major economic shift uh
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before it hit. Uh so right away, that’s how we’re we’re introducing how this campaign happened to, you know, people that are looking at awards. And if I’m reviewing awards, I’m like, “Okay, this sounds really interesting. I want to read. You anticipated a major economic
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shift. That’s amazing.” Well, it happened to be tariffs. So I guess you would nod and say okay. But then you know we operate I I want to say we operated data into this sustained storytelling engine. Um and it kept going and usually when you see an award for a survey it’s
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pretty quick hit you know like we were talking about before and we’ve done tons of surveys like for Smarty on Prime Day and Black Friday. >> That’s a single day kind of thing. Yeah. >> For a period of time. Yeah. Yeah, I mean obviously there’s a little buildup to
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it. Um and then you know we evolved with the news cycle uh that we just talked about you know you know through second phase activation of that second survey but you know most of all I think then we delivered those tang tangible uh business results uh that really you know
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finalize a really uh successful campaign. A lot of times in PR, as you know, those numbers are hard to really reflect. We can say, “Hey, we got 65 pieces of top tier coverage.” Well, yeah, what did it do? You know, just like you asked the question, was was
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that the only influencer on on the growth that we saw? No. Um, but it was a a big part of it that um allowed us to continue because you know our client really really loved the result out of the gate and we wanted to keep it going. >> And just name for us who do you consider
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as top tier like what are the outlets that that made up these 65 plus? >> Yeah. So I mentioned CNBC. Yeah. I don’t I don’t have it in front of me, but uh it’s a good question. Uh it it was like Market Watch, uh Fox News, uh I think even CNN mentioned our our data. So just
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to give you an example, and it was all over the place. Sometimes it was on broadcast. Um sometimes it was in print. Um, >> so this 65 is including TV broadcasts, digital websites, printed newspapers at all these top national levels >> in US, USA Today that syndicated nationally. Yeah.
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>> Okay. >> Uh, AP picked it up. Um, I want to say Reuters uh, covered it. >> I see. I see. So all the really big household names for that. >> Yeah. and things that syndicated too, which uh and the the reason the CNBC one was kind of, you know, the the breakout
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moment is because that hit uh CNBC Chicago, you know, that hit all the major markets. >> Right. Right. >> And normally, you know, if you’re just in digital on in CNBC, which a lot of uh Jessica’s stories are, they they don’t have legs where they hit the, you know,
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the national news stream. So that’s probably why helped it take off so much. And then on top of that, you know, anytime things are syndicating, you know, it hits a lot of eyeballs and you you never know who’s going to who’s going to see it. >> Brent, thank you so much.
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Congratulations on the award. So So what do you get? You get like a trophy or does the Smarty keep the trophy or we get a medal? What does it look like a plaque? >> Uh if you’ve ever uh done a Zoom call with Curtis, uh it’s behind him. So >> Oh, he’s Oh, he keeps it at his spot.
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Okay. I’ll have to ask him which which one of those many awards is this particular one. >> Yeah, I think every once in a while though we do we do let um uh certain staff have have the award. >> It’s like the Stanley Cup where they each player gets to keep it for a little
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bit and they rotate it around. >> Yeah. I mean, you know, I’m a senior here and been doing this a long time. So, I’m just happy that happy that uh we won an award for a smaller company against like finance giants that part is super cool. Who did you beat just so we
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know like the level of giants you beat? >> Uh the exact names I’m not sure. There was a major credit card. There was a major bank uh in the in the mix. So I maybe it’s better I don’t name that. >> Maybe it’s better. Okay. I just I just figured I figured I’d poke a little bit.
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Brent, thank you so much. Congratulations on the award. Thanks for kind of breaking down how you did that going back to, you know, two calendar years ago at this point. So uh great work. >> Yeah, still paying off. So all right. Thanks a lot, Eric. Thank you to my guest and thanks for
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listening. Subscribe to get the latest episodes each week and we’ll see you next time.